It’s amazing just how much Lorna Shore can achieve in just seven songs. Sonic Temple have pulled off something of a coup for deathcore fans in booking both Slaughter To Prevail and Lorna Shore in headline positions on the dual Citadel and Sanctuary stages. If this is a dry run for future festival headline appearances, LS have smashed the brief.
The crowd is packed in tight for the band’s arrival, and their hour-long slot feels genuinely momentous. Dazzling as the patterns flashing up on screens around the stage are – casting the boys in hellfire, sparks and cosmic backdrops throughout the set, nothing stands out more than the sheer gravitational pull of Will Ramos. Strutting across a walkway at the front of the stage, Ramos’s utterly inhuman vocal range is put through its paces across a set that kicks off with a sense of grand, annihilating extremity on Oblivion.
The next hour is all about showing off the grandeur of their sound, somehow managing to strike a balance between the sweaty, pummelling foundations of the genre and the more cinematic flourishes they’ve pushed that same genre to embrace. But while they’re helping elevate deathcore, they aren’t distancing themselves from the scene either. A guest appearance from Chelsea Grin’s Tom Barber during Sun//Eater offers a chance for Ramos to trade feral snarls and howls, while an appearance from Beautiful Child Of God’s Nick Chance on War Machine shows Lorna Shore are helping to spotlight emerging bands too.
It all contributes to a sense that this Sonic Temple performance is something special for Lorna Shore, proof positive they’re ready to take on bigger stages and events. The main melody and guitar leads of Unbreakable taps into stadium metal grandeur against a flesh-flaying wall of blastbeats, while the sweeping riffs and symphonic underpinnings of Sun//Eater feel like they come from the school of Gothenburg melodeath with added nitro in their veins.
For all the brimstone and bluster of their set, there are hints that Lorna Shore have their sights set on the big leagues too. Glenwood is an absolutely colossal tune, possibly deathcore’s first arena-sized anthem with chest-beating dramatic moments that lend themselves perfectly to the set.
“That was some sad shit,” Ramos decides. “So in my opinion it only makes sense to have some absolute ass beaters.” Closing out on a vicious one-two of Prison Of Flesh and To The Hellfire – the song that introduced Ramos to the world at large – Lorna Shore emerge victorious. Biggest band in deathcore? Maybe. But why stop there?
