reviewed by Sam Doucet
Before we go any further in this piece, here’s a fun little guessing game for you. On three different occasions during night one of 2026’s Manitoba Metalfest, a band announced they were going to play a cover — and all three times, the band they cited made me go “huh, wow, okay.” Here are six options to choose from. Can you correctly guess the three? They will be revealed throughout the article!
Slipknot – Alice in Chains – Beastie Boys – Static-X – Rob Zombie – Mudvayne
Place your bets! But, tongue-in-cheek covers aside, another edition of the Park Theatre and Ninjacat Productions’ crown jewel has come and gone, with the twentieth running of the bulls that is Manitoba Metalfest having taken place on the second weekend of May. I’ve done a fair few of these recaps now, so I’m running out of ways to set the scene without talking about long hair, black t-shirts, and questionable smells. The traditional gift for a twentieth anniversary is porcelain, so I’m sure there are some toilet jokes we can make if we’re so inclined.
Metalfest wasn’t the only twentieth anniversary celebrant that weekend. By a happy coincidence, night one headliners Cancer Bats were also marking the porcelain anniversary of the release of their debut album Birthing the Giant. An uncharacteristically punk-scented headliner at this typically orthodox festival may have ruffled a few feathers among the crowd, but undeterred, the masses arrived punctually for the Friday night openers. Perhaps factoring in Cancer Bats’ hardcore energy, promoter Cory Thomas booked two local bands to open the night that shared that sound.
Low Fuel, they of the suspiciously legible logo variety, kicked off the weekend with a rapid-fire set of thrashy hardcore that packed a ton of crowd-pleasing elements into a set that barely eclipsed twenty minutes. Some melodic flourishes, anguished and aggressive vocals, energetic d-beats, precise palm-muted chug-a-lugs, and a heaping helping of breakdowns made theirs a welcome opening salvo.
The second local act was the also-not-especially-metal Skullnectar, taking a more straight-ahead hardcore approach with punchy riffs, short songs, and shouted vocals levying callout after callout at unnamed antagonists.
The out-of-town carousel was next to take the stage, with Vancouver’s Misyrion offering thirty minutes of off-kilter blackened death. Though their work had escaped my radar before this weekend, I consider myself a big fan of Crown of Madness, a project made up of two thirds of Misyrion. A study in theatrical contrasts, their set featured frantic blasting, intricate and dissonant melodies, a jarring a cappella passage leading into their second song, and disarmingly earnest stage banter from their only facepainted member, singer/guitarist Gorgoth. And, imagine my surprise when they suddenly handed out a dozen pool noodles to the crowd while the Mortal Kombat theme played in the background, leading into their penultimate number. And the final song? Why, none other than a cover of the evil disco industrial nu-metal stylings of Static-X, of course!
Ask someone from Edmonton or Calgary what Red Deer is known for, and you’re unlikely to hear anything but the Donut Mill and a few snide insults. Well, the list can now grow ever so slightly with the addition of Art of Attrition, who brought a white-hot brand of technical deathcore to the Park Theatre’s stage, complete with a drummer slamming gravity blasts nearly non-stop, and a singer who looked like a high school history teacher from the early 90’s. And with the help of two guest vocalists, they treated the crowd to a lovely rendition of Slipknot’s classic “People=Shit.” There’s our second mystery cover!
The holy trinity of New Orleans sludge metal is quite conclusively made up of Eyehategod, Down, and Crowbar, though their order of importance and influence is not the subject of much consensus. Purely by vibes, I would hazard to say that Crowbar gets the least amount of hype of those three, but not through any relative lack of quality. And that’s who the Manitoba faithful got to experience for the penultimate set of the evening. Doing without the bluesy, southern overtones of Down and the over-the-top misanthropy of Eyehategod, Crowbar delivered an hour of raw and raucous sludge spanning their 35-year-long career, punctuated by sole remaining founding member Kirk Windstein’s breathless howls.
In just about any universe where Crowbar is playing Manitoba Metalfest, they’re the headliner. In this universe, however, Toronto’s Cancer Bats happened to be touring to celebrate the 20 years since the release of their debut record, and that’s the kind of tie-in that earns you top billing, even (gasp!) without a Metal-Archives page to your name. Despite the purist grumblings, the thrashy hardcore stalwarts blasted through the 11 songs and 40 minutes of Birthing the Giant in order and with ease, with just enough thrash snottiness and sludge beatdowns to appease even the haughtiest metalhead. After playing through the record, a few more crowd-pleasers including “Hail Destroyer” were offered, along with … a cover of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which was predictably a hit — rounding out our hat trick of unexpected, but not unwelcome, covers for the evening.
Night one, done!
I was greeted on the Saturday with the unfortunate news that Sabbatory had been forced to cancel their appearance due to a pesky gall bladder procedure recently undergone by Winnipeg’s most beloved death metal drummer/quantum physicist Dan Ryckman, so thoughts of healing were headed his way as local black metal esotericists Nocturnal Departure kicked things off, mere hours removed from the release of their new record Spiritual Cessation. A lesson in Scandinavian black metal orthodoxy and precision was to set the tone for an evening significantly less adorned with the punky energy of the night before.
The next-closest thing to a local band was Fargo’s Maul, a sextet who have made a name for themselves in recent years as one of the premier purveyors of hardcore-tinged death metal much in the same vein as the night’s headliners. As I have written in the past, the worst most death metal bands can do in a live setting is be just a little bit boring, which I fear Maul are somewhat guilty of. They did, however, keep my curiosity piqued as I spent a good deal of time wondering why a third guitar player was necessary for their fairly straightforward riffing. Snark aside, I was banging my head quite a bit.
After perhaps the disappointment of the weekend came without a doubt the most welcome surprise. If judging a book by its cover is a crime, cart me off to jail. Arizona’s Eternal have a boring name, a boring logo, and by virtue of their spot on tour with their statemates Gatecreeper, I had them pegged as a paint-by-numbers Swedeath clone. I was thankfully disabused of that notion within moments of the start of their set. What I saw before me was a surgically precise and starkly aggressive set of early ’90s-style death with a technical edge, with obvious tips of the cap to Death and Morbid Angel. Only one album into their hopefully fruitful career, Eternal gained several fans over the course of their set.
A duo of Montréal bands came next, with Prowl coming closest to mirroring the moshy madness of the previous night. Their no-holds-barred Power Trip worship interspersed with breakdowns well-suited to the very lively crowd on hand were a welcome burst of energy, even though it was a bit of a mismatch between the high-minded death of Eternal and the cataclysmic black metal hammerblow that was just around the corner.
Black metal in a festival context can be a funny old beast. In what is often a jovial celebration of outsiderdom, especially enigmatic and arcane black metal bands can cut a puzzling figure. And Spectral Wound are a band that have forged a path in contemporary black metal as a somewhat satanic, maybe? somewhat leftist, maybe? somewhat tongue-in-cheek, maybe? quintet that resists pigeonholing within the often narrow subgenre parameters of black metal. Well, not so much as a word of stage banter was pronounced, and for about an hour, south Osborne was awash with a terrifying cacophony of cuts mostly from their latest record, Songs of Blood and Mire. On record, what is a well-rounded black metal confection of old school and new, with acoustic passages, atmosphere, and forlorn leads, gave way to a tangibly more aggressive and hypnotic aural assault. Who needs a hundred variations on “what the fuck is up, Winnipeg” when you’ve got that kind of bloodcurdling aggression?
And finally, there was Gatecreeper. And if you’ve heard Gatecreeper, well, yeah, it was Gatecreeper.
Here’s to 20 more Metalfests! As always, the logistics and delivery of the weekend were second to none, with no band kicking off more than five minutes later than their slated start time. Promoter and mastermind Cory Thomas of Ninjacat Productions and the whole team at the Park Theatre continue to knock it out of the park. And next year, we’ll get Mitochondrion and Krallice, right?
