ESSENCE FESTIVAL 2025: A CELEBRATION OF UNDERGROUND METAL AND COMMUNITY PART ONE: THE FESTIVAL OVERVIEW & FRIDAY NIGHT BRUTALITY
ESSENCE FESTIVAL 2025: A CELEBRATION OF UNDERGROUND METAL AND COMMUNITY
PART ONE: THE FESTIVAL OVERVIEW & FRIDAY NIGHT BRUTALITY.
WORD/PHOTOS-MARK JENKINS.
The Vision Behind Essence
Essence Festival represents something increasingly rare in the modern festival landscape: a genuine community-driven celebration of underground metal. Looking at the lineup spanning three days (October 3-5, 2025), it's clear this wasn't just another cookie-cutter metal event. The organisers curated a diverse roster of extreme metal and adjacent acts across two stages - the Main Stage and the Abyss Stage - creating an intimate yet expansive experience for both performers and attendees.
What immediately sets Essence apart is its holistic approach. As you mentioned, this wasn't merely about the bands. The festival incorporated art, merch stands, vinyl and tape vendors, creating a multifaceted experience that celebrated the entire underground metal culture rather than just the music. This approach fosters genuine community connection, transforming what could be a simple concert series into a cultural gathering.
The Man Behind the Madness: Dan Nahum
Essence is described by Dan as his "love letter to Canberra, in the form of a destination festival presenting confronting, awe-inspiring, ever-evolving art." His motivation stemmed from recognising a gap in the capital's music scene. While Sydney and Melbourne have thriving metal communities and regular festivals, Canberra has been underserved since Metal for the Brain ended in 2006.
What makes Dan's approach particularly admirable is the ethos behind the festival. Essence was run as a non-profit exercise, with every cent after production and promotion costs going back to the bands. In an era of increasingly corporate festival culture, this artist-first mentality is refreshing and speaks to Dan's genuine commitment to supporting the community rather than profiting from it.
Dan found his way into the metal world seeking something transgressive and perhaps dangerous, but where he also felt a sense of home region - a sentiment echoed by countless fans and musicians. His goal with Essence was not only to support alternative music in Canberra but to create a destination event that would attract listeners from across the country with a super-diverse lineup that defied easy categorisation.
Here is the official festival spiel, but note that it is legit and heartfelt and authentic (like everyone involved in organising this):
The second Essence Festival represents the resilience and triumph of underground art in Australia's capital city - after 2024's success, the decision to proceed with an even larger second event was straightforward. The fest will be held at one of Australia's best live music venues, The Baso, and tickets are on sale from Oztix now. In the traditions of Canberra's Metal for the Brain and SoundOut, as well as Dark Mofo, Essence is a diverse underground music festival, taking in various metal subgenres (death, black, doom, sludge, and more) as well as other genres: noise, post-punk and post-rock, experimental, industrial, ambient, improvised, and even dark and contemporary takes on traditional music.
This year Essence is co-presented by NSW/Qld label Gutter
Prince Cabal, and has also added an explicitly visual element in the form of NSW visual artist Greallach. Dan Nahum, Managing Director: "Essence 2024 showed that Canberra has a real appetite for fascinating and challenging art. We've always punched above our weight here for transgressive, inventive, and sometimes
provocative musical and other works. Essence is a shared resource for audiences and artists from Canberra and elsewhere to convene for an entire long weekend of mutual inspiration, connection and enjoyment."
Essence is run on a non-profit basis. All monies after production and promotion costs will be paid to the performers. Essence is grateful for the kind support of numerous Canberran and Australian businesses who make the event possible.
Also, as a performer(my band, KNIFE, played the third day of this glorious event), I have never experienced such kind, hospitable, and
supportive communication from the very moment we were asked to play. Dan, Jess and the whole team are astonishing people who are not only brilliant at what they do, but they are also approachable and actually inspire your craft. And the curation is wild and spot-on, I have never attended a festival with so much diversity, flavour, and it just works so well, more focus on artistic craft than trends or meathead cliques.
Friday Night: The Pre-Show (October 3rd)
Friday served as a focused, intense opening night - a pre-show that set the tone for the weekend. With doors at 7:00 PM and only five acts split between stages, this was clearly designed as a more concentrated experience, perfect for hardcore fans wanting to dive deep rather than bounce between too many options.
The Main Stage featured three acts:
Leaker (7:30-8:15 PM) opened the festival
Hebephrenique (9:00-9:45 PM) delivered the middle slot
Destruktor (10:30 PM-CLOSE) closed out the main stage
The Abyss Stage offered two contrasting sets:
Grotesque Bliss (8:15-9:00 PM)
AGLO (9:45-10:30 PM)
The scheduling shows intelligent programming - the staggered times allowed attendees to catch most or all acts if they chose, with minimal overlap conflicts. This Friday night lineup leaned into the extreme end of the spectrum, setting an uncompromising tone that said: this festival isn't here to ease you in gently. And it was the Gutter Prince Cabal event, so you knew it would be intense and abrasive.
LEAKER (Main Stage, 7:30-8:15 PM)
Kicking off Essence Festival, Leaker immediately proved that appearances can be deceiving. Many in the crowd, seeing the band's aesthetic, might have expected a nu-metal affair - but Leaker defies such lazy categorisation. This is a band that refuses to be pigeonholed, drawing from an expansive palette of alternative /extreme subgenres and crushing any preconceptions within the first few riffs.
What makes Leaker special is their genre-fluid approach. They seamlessly weave between hardcore aggression, noise rock eccentricity, post-hardcore/DC Emo atmosphere, and even moments of sludgy groove, all while maintaining a cohesive sonic identity. The band's performance was tight and professional, demonstrating that their eclecticism isn't chaos but controlled versatility. Each member brought technical proficiency to the stage, but more importantly, they conveyed genuine conviction to every transition and tempo shift.
The setlist showcased their ability to keep audiences engaged through constant evolution. Just when you thought you had them figured out, they'd pivot into unexpected territory. This made their domineering opening slot feel like a journey through multiple bands' worth of ideas, compressed into one ferocious statement of intent.
For those who came in with preconceptions based on the band's look, Leaker's opening set was a masterclass in not judging a book by its cover. Please support them and check out their debut Happy Hour; it's fucking brilliant.
GROTESQUE BLISS (Abyss Stage, 8:15-9:00 PM)
If Leaker defied expectations, Grotesque Bliss confirmed every dark promise their name suggested. The Queensland trio, featuring members with pedigrees in Grave Upheaval, Temple Nightside, and Paramæcium, deliver doom death metal rooted firmly in the early 1990s tradition - and their live performance was gloriously uncompromising.
Grotesque Bliss sounds like they could have been plucked straight from the early Earache Records roster, channelling the caustic brutality of Paradise Lost's "Lost Paradise" and the funeral crawl of early Cathedral. Their sound balances slow, bitter tempos with caustic instrumental lines and extremely low-tuned growling vocals, creating an oppressive atmosphere that felt genuinely suffocating in The Baso's intimate confines.
What sets Grotesque Bliss apart from mere nostalgia acts is their commitment to authenticity. They focus on stripped-down death/doom with huge riffs and exceptional rhythm guitar tone, avoiding the melodic embellishments that would define or destroy the genre later. As a performance, this translated to pure, unadorned heaviness - no keyboards, no violins, no concessions to accessibility. Just three musicians conjuring a wall of morbid sound that felt as hectic and raw as anything Bolt Thrower or early Anathema ever produced, yet with the glacial pace and crushing weight of doom at its most despairing.
Their dominating and memorable set was perfectly paced, demonstrating that even in extreme slowness, there's room for dynamic variation and emotional impact. The performance felt less like a concert and more like a ritual descent into some ancient, desecrated crypt - exactly as doom death metal should feel.
TBH, they blew my mind, as no one does this style properly IMHO.
HEBEPHRENIQUE (Main Stage, 9:00-9:45 PM)
After Grotesque Bliss's funeral march, Hebephrenique delivered blackened death metal filth of the highest order. The Brisbane duo's sound sits somewhere between Gorguts' dissonant technical assault, Dodecahedron's grim atmospheric malevolence, and Portal or Ulcerate's chaotic brutality - a description that only begins to capture their maddening intensity.
Hebephrenique's music explores themes of mental disorders and psychological disintegration, and this thematic focus bleeds into every aspect of their sound. This gripping audio exhibition felt genuinely unhinged. The oppressive vocals alternated between rabid roaring, arrhythmic shouting, and tortured gasping, while the instrumentation created a disorienting maelstrom of jagged, discordant riffs and punishing blast beats. Their intense style features driving dissonant riffs accompanied by anguished vocals and pummeling drums, with occasional grinding assaults and haunted chaos.
What made Hebephrenique's set particularly compelling was the precision beneath the chaos. Guest drummer Leo Graae provided incredible precision and dexterity, offering a solid foundation for the off-the-rails sonic explorations/punishment. This wasn't random noise - it was meticulously crafted insanity, each seemingly chaotic moment actually part of a larger, disturbing design.
The band's intimidating set felt like being trapped inside someone's psychological breakdown, complete with moments of eerie calm before the next wave of violence crashed down. For fans of brutal yet avant-garde extreme metal, this was essential viewing - challenging, confronting, and utterly uncompromising.
AGLO (Abyss Stage, 9:45-10:30 PM)
AGLO's set was "usual AGLO" - and when you've perfected a formula, why mess with it? Their sound blends the crushing heaviness of Crowbar, the oppressive death metal of Incantation, and the sludgy grooves of Eyehategod, all filtered through a distinctly sci-fi conceptual lens. Live, this translated beautifully. The down-tuned guitars felt genuinely crushing, each riff slow enough to feel the weight behind it, while the sludgy grooves provided just enough momentum to keep heads nodding even at funeral tempos. Aaron keeps the Sci-Fi commentary from start to end, pure comedic and sarcastic brilliance.
AGLO's ability to blend death doom and sludge into a unified sound is a major strength, making the influences inseparable. Each track demonstrated this perfectly - you couldn't pick apart where the death metal ended, and the sludge began. It was all one massive, monolithic sound, enhanced by pummeling drums that hit with the force of laser barrages.
Their bludgeoning set was amazing as always, showcasing why AGLO has earned such respect in the underground. The sci-fi themes didn't feel gimmicky but rather added an extra dimension to the crushing heaviness. When you're being sonically hammered by riffs that heavy, imagining yourself in some dystopian space station somehow makes perfect sense. Buy everything they release!!!
DESTRUKTOR (Main Stage, 10:30 PM-CLOSE)
Closing out Friday night, the three-piece Destruktor proved why they're considered legends of Australian extreme metal. Led by vocalist/guitarist Glenn Destruktor since 1997, the band crafts a sound between the blasting blackened death of Abominator and the blistering blackened thrash of Sadistic Intent, but what truly sets them apart is their songwriting prowess.
This three-piece absolutely dominated the stage. Their blend of 1980s German thrash metal riffing thrown headlong into blackened death metal carnage creates a strong, unholy yet classic feeling, and live, this combination was absolutely devastating. The raw, aggressive energy was palpable from the first note - Destruktor wasted no time launching into a visceral attack that never let up.
What made their performance particularly impressive was how flawlessly everything was executed. Despite the raw, primal nature of their music, there wasn't a single moment of sloppiness. Destruktor knows how to make things memorable, with clear hooks, distinct riffs, and accessible verse-chorus structures - and every single track was catchy as fuck. This wasn't just brutal noise; these were actual songs that lodged themselves in your brain even as they pummeled you into submission.
The band combines a raw assault with strong production values, with the primal nature of the music cleverly executed to keep audiences hungry for more without getting obnoxious or fancy. Destruktor gives the punters pure satanic might delivered with surgical precision. Glenn's vocals were hellish and commanding, the guitar work serpentined between thrash precision and blackened chaos, and the rhythm section was rock-solid throughout.
As a closing act for Friday night, Destruktor was perfect. They brought the evening to a triumphant, violent conclusion, leaving the crowd energised and ready for the marathon weekend ahead. Old school thrash, raw black metal fury, death metal brutality - all fused together and performed with absolute conviction. This was Australian extreme metal at its finest, and the packed venue responded accordingly. All praise these evil bastards!!!
Part 2 coming soon!!!!!
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Blacksound Records is a record store, gallery and community space located in Melbourne, Australia. We specialise in radical outsider music, and dedicate significant space to new and archival recordings on vinyl, CD and tape formats from notable extreme, experimental and noisy outsider music labels releasing metal, punk, harsh noise, weird jazz, avant-garde, electronic, ambient, hardcore, free improv, minimal, maximal, modern classical and other off-kilter music.
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