Brixton gets a baptism in fire as Kreator summon forty years of fury and remind the world exactly why they never stopped mattering.

Words & photos by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc) | April 02, 2026

---

There is a question that hangs over any heritage act, spoken or not, the moment they walk onstage: are you here to relive something, or to live something? It is the same question that haunts Brixton tonight, where a sold-out crowd of grizzled veterans in battle jackets and excitable kids who weren’t yet born when “Pleasure to Kill” came out press together in the dark, waiting for Kreator to answer it. By the time the wicker men are on fire, the answer is emphatically, spectacularly clear.

But first, the undercard. With barely twenty years on the clock, Nails arrive as something of a provocation. The Oxnard trio deal in powerviolence of the most uncompromising variety, and their opening half-hour is a controlled detonation. Thirteen songs disappear in the time it takes most bands to tune up, each one a compressed block of fury with nowhere to hide and nothing to decorate it. Even with Brixton’s notoriously tight approach to the pit, the floor opens up anyway. Singer and guitarist Todd Jones has the look of a man who would find this funny if he weren’t so busy being terrifying. Nails are as much punk as they are metal, righteous anger and nihilistic noise in equal measure, and they are the best possible match being struck before this particular powder keg.

Exodus carry the weight of history differently. Formed in the late seventies in the Bay Area, they were there at the very beginning, their early demos a blueprint for an entire genre that would go on to make other people considerably more famous. Tonight they arrive bearing new album “Goliath” and the returned presence of vocalist Rob Dukes, whose baritone growl gives even the familiar material a deeper, earthier charge. “Bonded By Blood” lands in the set like a returning soldier and the room reacts accordingly. When Dukes leads the crowd through some Freddie Mercury-style audience participation and then pivots straight into “The Toxic Waltz”, it is the kind of gear-change that earns its cheers. The cuts from “Goliath” momentarily soften the impact, but “Strike of the Beast” seals things with a thunderous exclamation point. Exodus were never given enough credit for what they started. They seem entirely at peace with that now, content to simply be excellent.

Then there is the small matter of Carcass. To call them influential feels embarrassing, like calling Beethoven talented. The Liverpool four-piece are responsible for kick-starting the evolution of metal not once but on three distinct occasions, and the reverberations are still being felt. Tonight they perform without their usual drummer, Daniel Wilding, with Opeth’s Waltteri Väyrynen stepping in at what Jeff Walker cheerfully announces was essentially zero notice and with no rehearsal. It beggars belief. The set moves with the force and precision of a machine that has never considered stopping. Bill Steer’s guitar playing occupies its own rarefied atmosphere, melodic and monstrous in the same breath, and the songs from “Heartwork” in particular land with the weight of things that have had thirty years to become mythological. “Buried Dreams”, “No Love Lost”, the title track itself. The crowd does not so much sing along as collectively exhale, giving back something that was once given to them. Carcass do not just headline-quality sets. They play sets that make you reassess what a headline should mean.

By the time Kreator actually take the stage, anticipation has crossed into something almost devotional. Queen’s “We Are The Champions” unites Brixton in a communal singalong while a curtain hangs across the stage, obscuring what lies behind it. Then it drops. A gigantic severed demon’s head, glowing-eyed, looms above the four-piece. Two inflatable gargoyles flank them. Seventeen human heads are scattered across the stage. Bursts of flame erupt skyward. It is, as someone nearby observes with absolute accuracy, what Hieronymus Bosch might have painted if he’d had a production budget.

What follows is 85 minutes of Kreator demonstrating exactly what they have been building towards across four decades. The setlist draws from their initial eighties emergence and their twenty-first century rehabilitation, treating the nineties as a decade largely best left unaddressed, and it is a masterclass in pacing. “Seven Serpents” opens with the crowd already at full roar, “Enemy of God” rains confetti, “Hate Uber Alles” briefly loses guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö to a technical issue and the remaining trio simply plough through without blinking. This is a band that has earned its composure.

But the staging is never mere decoration. Every escalation is earned. Two robed figures wielding flaming torches appear between songs, vanishing without explanation. The entire front of the stage erupts during “Satan Is Real”. And then, before “Phantom Antichrist”, two nine-foot-tall wicker men are wheeled out. When the beat drops, they are set alight. The crowd, to a person, loses its mind.

Mille Petrozza is the engine of all of it, a frontman who still carries the same kinetic belief he had as a teenager recording “Endless Pain” in 1985. He speaks about it in a moment of rare reflection mid-set, the journey from Essen to here, and you believe every word because the way he plays suggests he has never once stopped believing it himself. That faith is contagious. It is what separates Kreator from the other veterans who fill rooms of this size; they are not revisiting something. They are living it, right now, louder than ever.

“666 – World Divided” sends three thousand voices back at the stage in unison. “Violent Revolution” and “Pleasure to Kill” bring the fire down one final time. There is no encore. They do not need one. Kreator simply leave, having made their argument without a word wasted. They are not a nostalgia act. They are, at this precise moment, one of the finest live bands on the planet. Whether the big leagues are ready for them is almost beside the point. Tonight, in Brixton, they already arrived.