Live review: core. Festival 2025

“Is this singer wearing some sort of red nun’s habit?” asks one bemused punter as core. 2025 gets underway with self-styled local ‘noisey basterts’ OMO cranking the volume in Glasgow’s 100-year-old Woodside Hall. Yes, indeed. A gleefully heavy, unapologetically odd new project born from big name acts Mogwai, The Twilight Sad, Aereogramme, Desalvo and Stretchheads, they feel like perfect bannermen for a festival on the outer reaches of alternative. Clashing sounds as ostensibly disparate as hardcore, doom and avant-garde electro out in the Scottish city’s lesser-rocked West End, and jumping around the calendar for the last three years (there will be ‘new dates’ again in 2026), core. might be an event that’s hard to get a handle on, but it’s a mind-bendingly good time.

Seattle heavyweights Helms Alee are in Scotland for a first-ever visit and make up for lost time mightily, with Dana James and Ben Verellen trading off each other on the cataclysmic Tripping Up The Stairs and Lay Waste, Child as night falls. First-night headliners Torche are Friday’s big draw, though, playing just their third show since ostensibly calling it a day in 2022, after tonight’s promoters managed to tempt them out of ‘retirement’. A fleeting dose of Black Sabbath’s melodic Breakout quickly shapeshifts into the all-out attack of From Here, and there’s no letting up as they rip on through a feast of rapid-fire nuggets like Warship and In Return. Amusing confusion sees a decent chunk of the crowd actually leave before parting encore Annihilation Affair, but having clocked in at under an hour tonight this tantalising comeback will ensure those leaving will be hungry for more.

Nominally showcasing rising Scot stars, Friday’s aftershow actually offers up two of the best bands of the weekend. Taking the stage on the stroke of midnight at the 180-cap Nice N Sleazy basement, Cwfen continue to conjure black magic with vocalist Agnes Alder drawing the roomful of bodies closer and driving them into the sublime darkness of Rite, Penance and Embers. Coffin Mulch are at the other end of Scottish alternative – unashamedly grimy death metal – but they’re every bit as formidable. Proceedings threaten to get lairy when Now Comes The Night and Onward To Death see rowdy punters knocked from the pit up onto the stage. But by the time they finally drop curtain with a 2am cover of Entombed’s Out Of Hand, even bloody noses can’t kill the vibe.

Technically those last two bands played on Saturday, but day two gets properly underway as London-based queer punks Shooting Daggers hit the Woodside Hall’s brightly-lit upstairs second stage with a refreshing blast of righteousness. “Cis men, take a step back,” Sal Pellegrin commands. “Everyone else, take two steps forward!” Cue absolute chaos. Next up, reunited Ayrshire math-rockers Bellow Below steer hard into leftfield: their knotty compositions probably the most intellectually invigorating of the weekend. After that, Glasgow antifascist hardcore mob Resist are drafted in on short notice to plug a gap left by the absence of OVERSIZE. They knock it out of the park with a performance that’s one part political outrage to two of sheer fist-flinging chaos.

Then it’s back down to the main hall for Roman Candle. According to vocalist Piper Ferrari this isn’t just the first time the Las Vegas hardcore quartet have performed overseas, it’s the first time any of them have even left the United States. There are no nerves, mind, with the raw feeling, captivating sincerity and armour-piercing machine-gun energy of Can We Watch Something Happy? and new single Fire In The Night Sky confirming that they burn just as bright as their name suggests.

Ramping up the energy, Leeds crossover crew Pest Control are heavy favourites in this neck of the woods already and their main stage sub-headline goes down like free pizza at a skate party. Massachusetts melodic hardcore icons Defeater are less focused on unadulterated fun, but anything they lack in Saturday night party spirit they more than make up for in the deep-felt poignancy of The Worst Of Fates, Dear Father and Blessed Burden. Derek Archambault isn’t the angry young frontman he once was, but with age has come even more gravitas, and by the time he steers through pounding closer The Red, White And Blues he’s tugging on every heart in the room.

Brilliantly, there’s still more to come, with a jam-packed late show from oi-inflected London punks The Chisel over at 120-cap sweatbox The Hug And Pint. The audience are slick with perspiration and spilled beer even before singer Callum Graham wedges himself between the barricade and the ceiling to rampage through Sit And Say Nothing, Those Days and Class Oppression. There’s an extra serving of acid here for the 100,000 idiots who followed Tommy Robinson through the English capital this afternoon, but also enough joy to send everyone off grinning exhaustedly into the night.

Hangovers are hitting hard on Sunday morning but after everyone has topped up on Irn-Bru and tattie scones it’s back into the shadows at The Hug And Pint to come face to face with fast-rising industrial wife-and-wife duo Mrs Frighthouse. Plumbing the unsettling depths of DIY EXORCISM, Our Culture Without Autonomy and Let My Spirit Be Poison, it’s almost too much for those in the crowd feeling fragile, but everyone of a sturdier disposition can’t get enough of one of the most exciting new acts from North Of The Wall. And although cataclysmic closer Solitude Over Control ends with a technical mishap – their moody video production crashing to a bland desktop display – the abrupt snap back to reality is visceral proof of how far under their spell this room had fallen.

Another of Glasgow’s avant-garde current crop, Ashenspire rampage on to Woodside Hall’s main stage with the squalling saxophone and angular guitars of Tragic Heroin and The Law Of Asbestos: cold, unflinching reflections of so many cities’ post-industrial decline. It’s particularly interesting to see them up alongside Los Angeles black metal experimentalists Agriculture (both bands lurking around to watch each other’s sets) and how thematic and cultural differences, perhaps even more than the sax, can make ostensibly similar sounds feel so wildly different. The Americans’ massive new single Bodhidarma – named after the monk who popularised Zen Buddhism – is a masterwork of dynamic contrast that proves they’re already among heavy music’s most intriguing acts.

Having already levelled festival fields in 2025 at 2000trees and ArcTanGent, there’s something fascinating about seeing Frontierer demolish this grand old redstone place instead. There is something a little less unruly about the Scots-Americans’ set on Sunday night, but rather than dialling-down the unrelenting harshness of their music, they streamline it into a rail-gun attack that decimates every single person in a big audience. Going from that to Jo Quail alone with her cello in the upstairs room might just be the bumpiest change of pace all weekend, but as the London virtuoso builds relentlessly through her instrument and pedal array, we’re slowly brought back to a comparable swell of emotional intensity. Beautiful and timeless as the flourishes of classical grandeur in Butterfly Dance and White Salt Stag are, it’s those compositions’ white-knuckle tension and distorted unease that mark Jo as perhaps UK alternative’s most singular performer.

All that’s left is for Cave In to take us to the stars. Celebrating 25 years of their millennial masterpiece Jupiter with a full-album playthrough, the American prog-post-hardcore standard bearers have lost little of their complex intensity over the last quarter-century. From the almost playful first steps of the title-track and In The Stream Of Commerce via the heavier, more internalised Innuendo And Out The Other, Brain Candle and Requiem to the jazzy Decay Delay and tonight’s slow-swelling closer New Moon, it’s a magnificent outing. Even more so, it is an opportunity to unpick both how they influenced a whole generation of bands that followed in their wake and to be reminded how none of said bands ever managed to truly emulate the boldness and unshackled ambition of what they were doing here. Proof that heavy greatness is evergreen.

It’s the perfect place to leave off with a festival with obvious ambitions to mix it with the big dogs of the truly alternative heavy circuit – Roadburn, Dunk!, ArcTanGent – but which offers up plenty of unique, and uniquely Glaswegian, pleasures on its own outsider terms. Details for next year’s edition are still to be released. But fans with a taste for something really different would do well to catch us down the front.

core. Festival returns to Glasgow in 2026.

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