Review & Photos by Nathan Vestal for MPM
Milwaukee got a strange kind of memory on May 15—one delivered through blast beats, Viking steel, cartoon apocalypse, and enough artificial smoke to bring the night to a very real end. The Amonklok co-headlining tour pulled into one of the city’s newer venues, the Landmark Credit Union Live. The space was still wearing that faintly unfamiliar sheen of a place learning how to hold chaos, and for most of the night it felt like the room was being initiated properly. Not gently. Not elegantly. Properly.
Outside, the mood had the rough patience of a crowd that knew exactly what it came for. Black shirts, battle jackets, band patches, denim, leather, boots planted like declarations. Inside, the venue carried that new-room contradiction: polished surfaces and fresh infrastructure meeting a crowd determined to test both. Landmark Credit Union Live may still feel new, but on this night, it had the atmosphere heavy shows require: concrete, pressure, anticipation, and that familiar pre-set electricity that hangs in the air before the first note hits and nobody quite stands still again.
This was always going to be a night built on spectacle. Amon Amarth and Dethklok share more than a demographic overlap; they share a taste for excess, for scale, for turning metal into theater without draining it of muscle. One band arrives like a historical raid mythologized in real time. The other comes wrapped in animated ultraviolence, satire, and an absurd body count that has somehow become part of actual heavy music history. Put them on the same bill and subtlety is no longer invited. What matters is command – who owns the room, who reshapes it, and who pushes the crowd from movement into collective surrender.
And from the first set onward, the whole evening moved with that feeling: less like a standard package tour and more like a sequence of escalating rituals.
Castle Rat Lit the First Torch
Castle Rat opened the night with the kind of set that doesn’t so much ask for attention as seize a pocket of darkness and make it its own. Support slots can be thankless work, especially on a bill this top-heavy, where much of the room is still filing in, still hitting the bar, still scanning merch, still waiting for the names on the poster in larger font. But Castle Rat brought the right energy for that uphill battle: theatrical without becoming silly, heavy without just bludgeoning, and committed enough to make people stop mid-conversation and turn toward the stage.
Their presence worked because it understood something essential about opening a night like this: atmosphere matters as much as volume. They didn’t need to overpower the room immediately; they needed to stain it. They needed to make the air feel different than it had five minutes before, and they did. The set cast a shadow across the venue and drew people closer, creating that first shift in the crowd’s body language: heads lifting, drinks paused, phones lowered, eyes forward.
Led by Riley Pinkerton as The Rat Queen, Castle Rat leaned into its medieval fantasy doom identity with full commitment: sword-and-sorcery visuals, heavy-lidded grooves, and the kind of stagecraft that made the opening set feel less like a warm-up and more like the first chamber of the night’s dungeon crawl. Franco Vittore’s lead guitar gave the songs their gleaming, dangerous edge, cutting through the haze while Charley Ruddell’s bass kept the low end crawling beneath the floorboards.
Joshua Strmic’s drums moved the set forward with ritual patience, letting the songs breathe, swell, and then strike. Rather than coming out as one flat block of doom, the set had a progressive shape to it, building from shadowy atmosphere into heavier theatrical force, with each movement feeling like another door opening deeper into the Realm. The band’s costumes and fantasy staging never felt pasted on. They worked because the playing supported the myth, and the myth gave the songs somewhere to live.
Without overreaching, Castle Rat set the table for what followed. They gave the room a pulse. They established that this would not be a passive night, not one of those multi-band bills where the opener disappears into the memory fog by the time the headliner arrives. Their role was to strike the match, and they did it well.
Amon Amarth Built a Brotherhood in the Pit and Rowed It Into War
By the time Amon Amarth took the stage, the room had crossed over from anticipation into commitment. This was one of those sets where the floor seemed to lock into a single collective instinct. Bodies leaned forward. Voices got louder. The space between stage and crowd stopped feeling like a boundary and started feeling like a channel.
Amon Amarth’s great trick has always been their ability to make something enormous feel direct. Their music runs on scale: myth, battle, history, endurance. But live, it lands in the gut first. The force comes from the precision of it. Riffs hit with weight, but also with motion. The drums don’t merely keep time. They drive the room forward like a machine built for conquest. The low end gives everything a spine. Over it all, the vocals cut through not as decoration, but as command.
That command mattered here. On a co-headlining bill, every band has to answer a silent question: who is going to bend this room most completely to its will? Amon Amarth answered by making the venue feel larger and more intimate at the same time. They turned a newer Milwaukee room into something older, rougher, almost elemental. Less like a modern concert space and more like a hall built to amplify impact. Their set had the feel of a tide coming in. Not frantic. Not chaotic. Just unstoppable.
The set moved like a raid with a map already burned behind it. “Raven’s Flight” gave the night one of its first hard lifts, all wingspan and forward motion, the kind of song that doesn’t ease a crowd in so much as kick the door off the hinges. “Shield Wall” followed with that unmistakable Amon Amarth sense of massed bodies and locked shoulders, turning the floor into a single armored organism. By the time “Live for the Kill” and “Cry of the Black Birds” cut through the room, the band had found that lethal middle ground between melody and punishment, the guitars carving wide arcs while the rhythm section kept everything moving with war-engine certainty.
“Death in Fire” landed like one of the night’s old-soul detonations, the kind of song that reminds you how long Amon Amarth has been turning mythology into muscle. “Asator” pushed that momentum into something more primal, a hammer-swinging charge that made the newer venue feel ancient for a few minutes, all concrete, sweat, and raised fists. Then came the communal absurd majesty of “Put Your Back Into the Oar,” where the audience didn’t just sing along. It physically entered the song’s mythology. That spirit carried straight into “We Rule the Waves,” when the entire mosh pit dropped to the floor and rowed in unison, transforming Landmark Credit Union Live into a longboat with a PA system and a drinking problem. By the time “War of the Gods” and “Raise Your Horns” arrived, the set had already done what it came to do: turn spectacle into fellowship, and fellowship into noise big enough to rattle the rafters.
Amon Amarth’s strength onstage comes from the way each member claims his piece of the battlefield without breaking the formation. Johan Hegg stood at the center of it all, less frontman than war chief, using his voice like a blade dragged across iron. He did not need constant motion to dominate the room. A raised arm, a grim nod, a few words between songs, and the crowd snapped into place. When he spoke, it carried. When he roared, the room answered.
Olavi Mikkonen gave the set its sharpened edge, his lead guitar work cutting through the churn with clean, lethal authority. He played with the focus of someone who knows exactly where the song’s pressure points are, stepping forward when the melody needed to rise above the wreckage, then folding back into the machine when the riffs demanded weight over flash. Across from him, Johan Söderberg brought the rhythm guitar down like masonry, thick and relentless, locking the songs into that unmistakable Amon Amarth march. Together, the two guitars did not just fill the room. They built walls inside it.
Ted Lundström’s bass gave the whole set its undercurrent, the kind of low-end force you feel before you fully hear it. He moved with a grounded, no-wasted-motion presence, anchoring the spectacle while the room surged around him. Beneath all of it, Jocke Wallgren drove the band with brutal precision, his drumming giving the songs both their engine and their violence. He did not just keep the raid moving. He made it feel inevitable. Every kick hit like a boot through a door, every fill pushed the crowd another few feet into the storm.
Together, they commanded the stage with the confidence of a band that has long since learned the difference between theatrics and power. Amon Amarth brought plenty of spectacle, but the real authority came from how tightly they played, how naturally they occupied the room, and how completely they made the crowd believe in the world they were building. For that stretch of the night, Landmark Credit Union Live didn’t feel like a newer venue finding its footing. It felt claimed.
The crowd responded in the way crowds do when a band has earned that kind of loyalty over years. Not with polite enthusiasm, but with full-body participation. The audience didn’t simply watch Amon Amarth. It joined them. Every shouted refrain, every surge near the barricade, every cluster of raised fists contributed to the sense that this was not just a performance, but a temporary takeover.
There’s also something fitting about Amon Amarth in a venue like Landmark Credit Union Live. New rooms often need a night that breaks them in psychologically, that proves they can contain not just sound, but mass emotion. Amon Amarth helped do that. Their set gave the building weight. It made the place feel tested. For a few minutes, Landmark Credit Union Live wasn’t a venue anymore. It was a longboat with a bar tab.
Dethklok: Murder, Machinery, and a Perfectly Ridiculous Ending
Then came Dethklok, and with them the final transformation of the night: from metal show to beautifully deranged event.
Dethklok occupies a singular place in heavy music because their entire existence began as an exaggerated joke about metal excess and then somehow became an actual force within it. Their lore is built on destruction, collateral damage, improbable violence, bureaucratic panic, and the idea that a band can be so catastrophically heavy that reality itself starts malfunctioning around it. Most acts would crumble under that premise. Dethklok thrives on it. The joke works because the music has the muscle to back it up. What could have stayed parody long ago mutated into something stranger and more durable: a live experience where the absurdity and the legitimacy feed each other.
That tension gave their set its pulse. The room already felt primed after Amon Amarth, but Dethklok brought a different kind of pressure – more mechanical, more irrational, more knowingly apocalyptic. Where the previous set felt like a campaign, this one felt like a systems failure with a backbeat. The energy tightened. The crowd moved differently. There was more whip in the motion, more volatility in the response, more of that wonderful sense that everyone in the room understood they were participating in something at once deeply silly and undeniably crushing.
For about eight songs, the set delivered exactly what it needed to: impact, momentum, and that peculiar Dethklok alchemy of gleeful brutality. The performance had the feeling of a machine operating exactly as designed: loud, precise, excessive, a little dangerous in spirit if not in fact. Then reality stepped in.
The smoke machines set off the fire alarms.
And just like that, the whole thing tipped from spectacle into perfect absurdism.
Not panic. Not disaster. Just confusion, interruption, and the kind of ending that felt so on-brand for Dethklok it almost seemed scripted by the band’s own mythology. Of course a Dethklok set would get cut short by an external system buckling under theatrical excess. Of course the final act of the night would involve a real-world mechanism objecting to a fake-world apocalypse. If there’s a more fitting ending for a band whose history is drenched in exaggerated catastrophe, it’s hard to imagine it.
What made the moment memorable wasn’t fear – there really wasn’t any of that in the room – but the baffled, collective processing of it. The audience stood in that strange space between expectation and interruption, trying to read what was happening in real time. People looked around. They checked the stage. They checked each other. The energy didn’t collapse so much as hang there, suspended, unsure whether this was part of the show, an inconvenience, or some cursed hybrid of both.
To the credit of Landmark Credit Union Live, the staff handled the situation professionally. Everyone remained safe. There was no sense of panic in the room, no dangerous rush, no visible disorder. Mostly, there was confusion – a crowd trying to reconcile a hard stop with the momentum that had been building all evening. In another setting, that kind of interruption might have felt purely frustrating. Here, frustrating as it was, it also felt weirdly inevitable, as if the night had simply obeyed the internal logic of the band currently onstage. Dethklok did not end the evening with a clean bow. Dethklok ended it by accidentally summoning the building’s safety protocols. That is not a failure of lore. That is the lore.
It also said something useful about the nature of live music: no matter how much production, planning, branding, and precision goes into a tour this large, a show still belongs partly to chance. A room is a living organism. A crowd is a weather pattern. A performance can build toward transcendence and still get sideswiped by the practical world; by wiring, timing, smoke density, systems designed to keep people safe. On paper, that sounds anticlimactic. In the moment, it instantly became part of the story.
There was something almost poetic in watching the night end not with finality, but with interruption. Dethklok’s set was cut short, yes. The audience didn’t get the full closing arc it came for. What remained in the room was still powerful: that feeling of having seen a night twist into something unrepeatable.
And maybe that’s the real victory of a show like this. Not perfection. Not neatness. Not a complete run of every planned moment. The real victory is that people walked out with a story, one that fit the bands, the bill, and the general spirit of heavy music better than a frictionless ending ever could have. Castle Rat opened the portal. Amon Amarth turned the room into a battlefield. Dethklok brought the beautiful stupidity of apocalypse and then got shut down by the fire alarm, which is such a perfectly Dethklok sentence it deserves to be framed.
Milwaukee came for the Amonklok co-headlining tour and got exactly the kind of night a package like this promises: loud, theatrical, communal, and just unpredictable enough to become legend by the time people reached the parking lot. In a newer venue still writing its own identity, the night left a mark. Not the clean kind. The real kind. The kind live music is supposed to leave behind.
