Live Review: Dragged Into Sunlight – Club Academy, Manchester
30th April 2026
Support: Vacuous, Plague Pit
Words: Dan Barnes
Photos: Rich Price
It’s a lovely spring evening in Manchester tonight, the perfect end to a warm, sunny day. However, those heading into the bowels of the Academy complex are walking into a world of sonic misanthropy and musical chaos. Liverpool’s most nihilist sons, Dragged Into Sunlight, is beginning this short series of UK dates with a Thursday in town, before trekking of the Birmingham, London’s Incineration Festival and ending in Glasgow.
It’s a rare opportunity to see this homegrown band, and the first since their Damnation headlining slot in 2024 and, as with that performance, the anticipation is matched only by the length of the queue for DIS merchandise.
It’s up to west country pessimists, Plague Pit to open the show, with a sound that rattles the foundations of the venue; fat drums and tortured rasps fill the room with the kind of echo usually heard in ancient stone corridors. There’s no killing-with-speed from this Bristol collective, instead theirs is an oozing, morbid melancholy, sketched out against rumbling bass and filth chugs. Riffs hypnotise as much as they blister, with every note seemingly intended to shake the very ground upon which this building stands. There’s moment during Plague Pit’s set when the tempo rises and it offers something thrashy, merely a respite from the unflinching vision of the heart of human suffering. That said, I loved every minute of their set, it was the perfect way to get the ball rolling on such an evening.
London’s Vacuous take a different approach to their set; the same nihilistic attitude is accompanied by an up tempo, deathier vibe, taking the uncompromising nature of the music and running it through with a dose of blackened grind. Ghostly vocals come and go, as do dissonant, punchy riffs and the occasional groove, but Vacuous seem to thrive in the delivery of angular lines, twisted out of shape and forced through distortion.
Both support bands fit the headliner’s aesthetic perfectly, and both play under blood red lights, burning constantly and unblinking, giving a hellish appearance and being a nightmare to photograph (apparently). Nor is there much audience interaction from any band on this bill, it would spoil the overall atmosphere of the show, leaving each person present to digest the music in whatever they chose.
I’ve seen some big bands in this venue: Obituary, Suffocation, Enslaved – heck, I’ve even seen Gorjira in this room – admittedly that was back in 2006 – but I don’t think I’ve seen a queue for merchandise in this room even close to the line waiting to buy Dragged Into Sunlight goodies tonight. From the very beginning, before Plague Pit have taken the stage, there’s line at the merch stand, and it remains so for a couple of hours until DIS themselves take the stage.
Where the stage lighting had previously been a stable red wash, for the headliner it’s a series of retina-searing white lights, as harsh visually as the band’s music is sonically. More of ritual than a run-of-the-mill concert, a Dragged Into Sunlight show is to be experienced as much as anything. Existing in the similar area as Portal, Primitive Man, Anaal Nathrakh and Gnaw Their Tongues, where the human condition is to be sneered at, these scousers have their 2009 debut full-length, Hatred for Mankind, locked and loaded, just like the last time they played in town.
Widely considered one of Damnation’s best ever sets, this is a chance for those absent to witness such a shocking live experience, or for those of us who were there that night, to confirm that we did actually see this happen.
Beginning with the kind of droning intro usually heard at a Sunn O))) show, the set opens with a series of foreboding frequencies, stirring the most primitive parts of the ancient brain with a sense of huge cosmic forces coming together.
Between harsh flashes of light, candles flicker, softening the image but not the sound as the opening bars of Boiled Angel / Buried with Leeches take flight. The soundbites of serial killers punctuate the performance, but you’re never really sure which is more unsettling: the words of some of history’s most infamous monsters, or the crazed creatives who conjured this hellish soundscape into existence. It’s a close call.
Every one of the musical aspects is pushed to the absolute limit on Hatred… and Dragged… seem to relish applying a little more pressure when playing the likes of Lashed to the Grinder and Stoned to Death and I, Aurora to a crowd, filling each with even more anguished hatred and undisguised loathing.
Evil guitar tones bleed dirty riffs into the PA, the blackest of doom loops through the speakers to cast its repugnance across the room. No respite is offered as the band ooze their way through Volcanic Birth and the brief To Hieron. There’s is the ruthless efficiency of Inquisitors, showing much the same disregard for human life. By the time Totem of Skulls draws to a close all present know that they have just witnesses something special.
By the time we exit the Academy building the warmth of the day has given way to a chill night, and the dark now seems a little more ominous than it might otherwise have done.
Photo Credits: Rich Price Photography
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