These Chicagoan blackened-death-grinders are setting out for a trip across the northeastern USA throughout the rest of this week — see more details below, as well as a brief overview of the band’s latest releases over the past couple of years!
Migration Fest is officially here! For more information, you can check out this feature we did several months ago, but instead we highly recommend this hugely informative guide to the festival AND the city of Pittsburgh in general that was assembled by our esteemed colleagues at Meat Mead Metal.
Whether you’re coming to Pittsburgh, are already here, or you aren’t able to make the trip but you are interested in good music, today we’d like to call your attention to Spirit Adrift who will be performing Saturday evening (28th July) as part of their nationwide headlining tour!
Recently I was reminiscing about the last Winter’s Wake festival in Pittsburgh, partly because we’ve been reporting the news about this summer’s Migration Fest which will also be taking place in this area, but also because we’ve just (well, a little over a month ago) hit the five year anniversary of Winter’s Wake. This also had me thinking about Black Anvil.
They’d been around for a few years by that time and had already released a pair of albums, so I’m sure I had heard a song or two at some point, or at least was vaguely aware of their existence within the realm of domestic black metal bands. But that show — which was immediately preceded by a series of “getting to know you”-style interviews I’d conducted with nearly all of the performing bands (I’d missed a couple, due to timing issues or communication breakdowns, but as I recall, Black Anvil were the only ones who had outright declined to participate in the interview process) — was the first real exposure I’d had.
I can just vaguely remember that night — this was Friday, the first of two days full of music, and they were the second-to-last band to play, after we all had been standing for hours in this cramped loft-sized space breathing in the toxic fumes rising from the nail salon down at ground level. That was the atmosphere through which the band members pushed and shoved their way, each dripping with blood, to ascend to a stage hazy and thick with fog machine discharge — and instantly exploded into a maelstrom of blackened death fury.
Back in December we told you that this year Gilead Media + 20 Buck Spin‘s extravaganza Migration Fest would be coming to Pittsburgh in July. At that time the majority of the line-up had been announced. Well, within the past week, the remaining holes in the schedule have been filled in, and tickets have gone on sale! There are some names here we’ve written about before, and several more that we plan to sometime in the near future. Stay tuned for that. But in the meantime, check out the complete updated list down below, and then grab your tickets before they all sell out!
Following the success of Wisconsin’s Gilead Fest in 2012 and 2014, the organizers (Gilead Media) hooked up with west-coast label 20 Buck Spin to continue the biennial tradition, kicking off the new Migration Fest in Washington state in 2016. Naturally, the next edition of this festival would be slated for 2018, and the labels have jointly announced that it will be held at the highly-esteemed Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, PA — immediately adjacent to Pittsburgh.
This is, of course, huge news for us at Valley of Steel, and anyone else who lives in the general vicinity. And the first wave of bands has recently been released, which can be found listed below; we’ll continue to bring you more news about this festival as information becomes available. There are many more announcements forthcoming, including the headliners (although just the part of the line-up we know about so far is more than enough to get pretty excited about!)
Valley of Steel 