BURNER
SUBURBIA, SOUTHAMPTON
From the day they emerged, Burner felt like a band with vision. Their 2021 debut single, Ingsoc, darted between death metal chug-a-thons and two-stepping hardcore, while the lyrics invoked Nineteen Eighty-Four to paint a dystopian picture of 21stcentury politics. Since then, the Londoners have only broadened their scope, adding post-metal, grindcore and black metal to their palette on their album It All Returns To Nothing. Tonight’s set is barely 40 minutes, yet in that time they show every element of their expanded sound. EF5 is a metallic hardcore rager about tornadoes killing racists. At the other end of the spectrum, An Affirming Flame is all about tension and release, the ambient bits making the extreme metal payoffs hit even harder. The four-piece tear through each track without missing a note, and their audience is fully engaged, moshing throughout the lightspeed Siege Fire before breaking their own necks to City 17. Burner are still underground in the grand scheme of things, but if they carry on with this much precision and power, it should only be a matter of time before someone thrusts them onto bigger stages.