Archspire prove technical death metal doesn’t have to be serious, grinning through a jaw-dropping Electric Bristol set in full Spice Girls get-up…
Words & photos by James Crisp (@james_taking_pictures) | Nov 08, 2026
I first came across Archspire after getting completely addicted to guitarist Dean Lamb’s YouTube channel a few years back. I’d put on one video, get curious about how he’d played a particular part, and, several videos later, realise I’d spent most of my evening watching somebody else practise guitar. So, when I got the chance to photograph Archspire at Electric Bristol, I was always going to have one eye on Dean and Tobi’s fretboard. I hadn’t, though, factored in the Spice Girls. More on them in a minute.
First up, though, we have Portugal’s Analepsy, who gave us a deeply unpleasant (in the best way) noise at a very civilised hour indeed. The faster passages had plenty of bite, but I particularly enjoyed the way they’d let a riff slow to a crawl. You could feel the gap between each hit and had just enough time to lean into the next one. There’s a lot to be said for a band who can get that much mileage out of a handful of low notes, especially on a bill where we were about to hear several million of the things.
The Zenith Passage made headbanging a slightly riskier business. I’d just about settle into a rhythm when the guitars would cut out half a beat before I expected them to, leaving my head to carry on without me. When those phrases came back around, though, you could hear how neatly the drums fitted the gaps.
Crown Magnetar followed with the evening’s nastiest dose of deathcore. Those guttural vocals and bursts of double kick were heavy enough, but when all that activity gave way to one big breakdown chord, holy shit, you felt it in your gut.
Three supports, and each gave Bristol a different way to mess its neck up.
Then the mighty Archspire took the stage dressed as British royalty. Yes, oh yes, the Spice Girls. All five of them, complete with skin-tight dresses and wigs, launched into Drone Corpse Aviator and followed it with Remote Tumour Seeker. After all the time I’d spent watching Dean Lamb play guitar on YouTube, I’d built up a fairly clear picture of what seeing him do it in person might be like, but I’d got the wardrobe wrong.
What I loved most about photographing them, though, was catching their faces. Consider the insane speed they were playing at, and honestly it was INSANE! Add in the gruesome subject matter of the lyrics, and you might expect the occasional look of grim concentration. Instead, they were smiling and laughing throughout the whole set. It’s a wonderful thing to see through a viewfinder. You’re lining up a shot of someone playing a passage that would have you swearing at your fingers for a month, and there’s this great big grin beneath the wig.
Having spent so much time watching Dean, my instinct was to follow his hands. Live, though, you realise just how much you miss by concentrating on one player. A guitar phrase would catch my ear, then I’d pick out the bass moving like a jet underneath it, and only then would I realise Oliver Rae Aleron was matching those accents syllable for syllable. His crazy delivery gives the songs a bounce that’s surprisingly easy to follow, even when you’ve got absolutely no chance of getting the words out yourself. And the little detour into Nirvana’s Come As You Are (they played the first few bars and stopped on the word “come”) between A.U.M. and Human Murmuration did at least give the guitarists among us a brief confidence boost.
About halfway through the set, proceedings paused for a cheeky fancy dress contest. Both the winner and the runner-up ended up drinking a concoction of beer, Red Bull, and God knows what else out of their own shoe before one of them won a custom T-shirt made by guitarist Tobi. I can’t actually tell you what it said, as we may get complaints, but the packed-out Bristol crowd and I couldn’t stop laughing. Imagine putting together a winning Halloween costume and discovering your prize is a wet sock for the rest of the evening. From behind the camera, this was fantastic.
At another point, Archspire split the crowd in two for a wall of death. Circumcised people on one side, uncircumcised people on the other. I’ve heard plenty of frontmen ask Bristol to pick a side over the years, but that’s the first time anyone’s needed their medical history to make an informed decision. Then the two halves charged at each other, as the Spice Girls instructed.
For all the silliness, Bleed the Future and Golden Mouth of Ruin back-to-back made for one hell of a stretch of music. I loved the sweep of the guitar melodies in the former and the way those short, vicious phrases kept snapping back into place in the latter. Involuntary Doppelgänger, a crowd favourite and mine, was a late highlight, too. By then I’d mostly given up trying to work out how the band were doing any of it, which is probably for the best. I can always lose another evening to Dean’s YouTube channel for that.
This was quite possibly the most fun I’ve ever had photographing a gig. The shoe drinking and the Spice Girls outfits will take some explaining when people see the pictures, but the shots I’ll look for first are the ones of the band laughing. After all that silliness, that’s the image that stays with me. And for anyone wondering how much fun it’s possible to have playing technical death metal on a Saturday night in Bristol, it was written all over their faces.
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