MUNT / THE AMENTA / ULCERATE-LIVE REVIEW.This is what extreme music is supposed to do. Not assault you into submission but genuinely alter the conditions under which you're operating.

  MUNT / THE AMENTA / ULCERATE-LIVE REVIEW.

This is what extreme music is supposed to do. Not assault you into submission but genuinely alter the conditions under which you're operating. 
MUNT / THE AMENTA / ULCERATE
Max Watts, Melbourne — Friday, May 8, 2026.

WORDS-MARK J. PICS-DAN MCKAY.

There's a particular smell to a room before a show like this. Anticipation mixed with something older — beer soaked into carpet, years of accumulated noise baked into the walls. Max Watts fills slowly but with intention on a Friday night; by the time Munt takes the stage, the floor is maybe a 3/4's full, but the people there have made a deliberate choice to be early. That matters.

Munt is blunt force made articulate. Their tense and overwhelming approach has never concerned itself with nuance — what they traffic in is compression and rot, a blackened grind-adjacent death metal unit that doesn't so much build as it accumulates weight until something gives. Live, the grim efficiency of it is almost confronting. 

No preamble, no acknowledgement of the room, just the sudden onset of something that feels physically uncomfortable in the best possible way. The bass sits where your sternum is. The savage riffs slice through your ears. The vocals are buried and wet and wrong in all the right ways.

It would be easy to dismiss this as blunt, but that would miss what's actually happening — there's intentionality in the ugliness, a refusal to make it easier on the listener that reads, in a room this size, as a kind of respect. They finish and leave without ceremony. Exactly right. And without a doubt, one of the country's finest components of extreme music.

The Amenta arrive carrying a different kind of weight. They've been at this a long time — long enough to have a history in this scene that some of the younger heads in the room don't fully reckon with, and long enough that they've got nothing to prove and everything to excavate. 

This is their first tour where the original line-up has played together since 2006. Their set was evil incarnate with Occasus, their 2004 debut played in full, and the industrial-black hybridism that's always defined them comes across with a clarity that studio recordings sometimes flatten. What's striking live is the negative space — the Amenta are not a band that fills every gap, and those gaps, in a room with this PA, become almost architectural. The whole band moves like someone working through something rather than performing, which is the kind of distinction that matters in extreme music. 

This is easily the best set I have ever seen from this band, the savage death metal beasts fighting the demons of industrial metal. The crowd is tighter now, drawn forward. Nobody is talking. A few people have their eyes closed. 

The light rig is doing work — cold blues, angsty reds and hard whites that feel at odds with the warmth of the room, which is the point. 

By the time they close out, the room feels fundamentally different from the way it did forty minutes ago.

Then Ulcerate.

There's no adequate shorthand for what Ulcerate do that doesn't sound like hyperbole, which is part of the problem with writing about them. You say "the most significant death metal band of the last two decades," and it reads like hype. It isn't. It's just accurate. The New Zealand three-piece have spent the better part of fifteen years constructing an approach to the form that is simultaneously the most brutal and the most sophisticated thing operating within it — Stare Into Death and Be Still remains one of the defining records of this century's extreme music, and the more recent masterpiece that was Cutting the Throat of God showed a band capable of continuing to push without calcifying into self-parody. Live, the material from both sits alongside older brutalities in a set that doesn't feel curated so much as inevitable.

Jamie Saint Merat is the gravitational centre of the room. Watching him play in this context — mid-sized venue, good sightlines, close enough to hear the sticks and the breath — is an education in what the instrument can do when its possibilities are taken seriously. He doesn't play around the music; he generates it, an engine of continuous asymmetric propulsion that somehow maintains coherence even as it refuses to give you a foothold. 

Hoggard's guitar sits in a register that is technically extreme but emotionally closer to drone — individual notes dissolve into each other, chords become weather rather than harmony. 

Kelland's bass is what holds the bottom together, and his vocals add a dimension that on record can be easy to take for granted; live, in the room, they register as genuinely disturbing in a way that few vocalists in extreme music manage. All in all, these wizards produce a sheer atmospheric, yet apocalyptic performance that is hard to fathom if not witnessed.

The set climaxes — though that word implies a resolution that Ulcerate don't really offer — with material that leaves the room suspended in something between exhaustion and clarity. People mill around after the house music kicks back in, slower than normal, like they need a minute to re-establish where they are. A few are visibly shaken. Most are grinning.

This is what extreme music is supposed to do. Not assault you into submission but genuinely alter the conditions under which you're operating. All three bands understood that tonight, each in their own register. Max Watts isn't a large room, but it was exactly the right size for what happened in it.

Check all bands out at any chance and buy their music!.

https://muntgrind.com/

https://linktr.ee/theamenta

https://www.ulcerate-official.com/