On this blood-lit eve of Easter Sunday, the holiest and most radiant night of the Christian calendar — the altar slick with the memory of resurrection and ruin — there is an almost sacramental reverence as a dark ocean of black-clad disciples clusters ominously, murmuring and waiting, awaiting the second coming of their long-loved saints of sonic warfare: Front Line Assembly.
Above the O2 Islington, the air crackles like a cathedral’s high dome under storm clouds, as the faithful gather, soaked in memory and hope. Tonight’s performance is a sacrament of renewal, a pilgrimage of shadowed souls draped in leather and lace, come to kneel before a blasphemous altar built of bass, blood, and broken beats.
Before the promised transfiguration, Tension Control, the Electronic Body Music project birthed and baptised by composer, producer, and vocalist Michael Schrader, storms the pulpit. His sound is a minimalist gospel of war drums and synth screams, an industrial catechism pounding through the O2’s metal bones.
Schrader delivers the first sermon of the night in pure volts and decibels"
Michael’s husky, hoarse vocals are spat like prayers into a poisoned sky, cutting through the electric gloom like shards from a shattered cathedral window. Behind him, black-and-white imagery of riot, decay, and despair flickers like the fevered visions of a dying prophet. Schrader delivers the first sermon of the night in pure volts and decibels, his relentless rhythm a heartbeat for the gathered, a binding litany written in sweat and steel.
Then the veil is torn wide open by Dead Lights — two high priests of the dark arts, conjuring a theatre of the damned. Their performance tonight is pure Luciferian spectacle: Saul’s drums strike with the ferocity of exiled seraphim, while the masked and glitter-shrouded Richard slithers onto the smoke-drenched stage like a fallen archangel crowned in strobe-light halos. The interplay of blinding lights, shifting smoke, and savage sound forms a gothic oratorio of exquisite torment.
Saul’s drumming is balletic, surgical — a mechanical cherubim hammering the gates of heaven — while Richard, in towering platforms, commands with operatic might, a dark apostle wielding a glittering scythe. Their set, a journey through five years of creation and destruction, is a testament to their devotion to the dark glamour of gothic ecstasy. Dead Lights leave the congregation gasping, adrift in a delicious, narcotic rapture.
The Kyrie Eleison, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei — sung in static and light — have passed. Now it is time for the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath. Front Line Assembly ascend the pulpit to deliver the final mass.
Opening with Anthropod, they seize the crowd in iron fists, dragging them into a hypnotic inferno. This is an ecstatic possession. The basslines buzz and crackle like the final trumpets, synths clash like serrated swords, and Bill Leeb stands at the centre like a cybernetic John the Baptist, snarling benedictions into the fevered dark.
Clutching his microphone like Moses wielding a serpent staff, he lunges and commands, a preacher rousing the faithful to rebellion. Tracks like Plasticity and Mindphaser bludgeon and uplift, smashing against the walls of the O2 like battering rams against a temple of ice.
This performance — this profane eucharist — we hath survived: a black mass of ritual chaos where atmosphere and agony twisted together like serpents in the mouth of a dying god. Every pulse of noise was a thunderclap in the crumbling nave of our senses — consumed, ripped into the soul like communion bread laced with ash and fire, burning holes through the heart.
When Killing Grounds emerged from the wreckage, it was a baptism of ice in an industrial furnace world, a blade of cold slicing through fevered flesh. The melody hovered like war-torn incense above a battlefield, tender yet shivering with the scars of everything that had come before — a ghostly balm after the exquisite violence.
The congregation, fevered and half-ruined, raised their arms in trembling devotion — a cathedral of blood, bone, and bassline, fused into a single mass of sacred, electric defiance.
Tonight was a resurrection, a reckoning, and it will be carved into our haunted hearts forevermore… forevermore.
FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY plated O2 Islington on 19th April 2025
Support from Tension Control and Dead Lights