Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
Remember, remember the fifth of November – and in Nottingham this year it wasn’t the gunpowder people will be talking about. While half the city spent Thursday evening stood in cold parks watching rockets fizz overhead, a few hundred of us squeezed into the Rescue Rooms for a slower, more hypnotic kind of combustion. Messa’s first-ever UK headline run had landed in the East Midlands, and the Italians had brought Essen’s The Night Eternal along to light the fuse.
It’s been a long time coming. Since The Spin landed via Metal Blade in April 2025, Messa have barely paused for breath – Roadburn, Damnation, a run of dates opening for Paradise Lost in autumn 2025 that won over plenty of gothic diehards, and a North American run opening for Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats this September. This fall tour, which began in Marseille at the tail end of October and swung through Glasgow and Manchester before reaching us, marks the first time they have topped the bill on these shores. For a band who have spent the best part of a decade quietly rewriting what doom is allowed to be, that feels overdue.
First, though, a German history lesson. The Night Eternal came together in Essen at the end of 2018, and in the years since they’ve built a reputation on the continent as one of the more intriguing names in the classic heavy metal revival – the kind of outfit that clearly worships at the altar of the NWOBHM but has the good sense to drape it in something darker. Third album Cold Velvet arrived in August as their Metal Blade debut, produced by Secrets Of The Moon guitarist Michael Zech, and it’s a record steeped in sorrow – brooding post-punk shading, a heavy gothic undertow and choruses that simply refuse to leave you alone.
It is also a clear step on from what came before. 2021’s Moonlit Cross was an occult-flavoured heavy metal opening salvo, 2023’s Fatale edged further into gothic territory, and Cold Velvet pushes on again – slower to show its hand and happier to linger in the gloom – which, frankly, makes them an ideal fit for this bill. Pairing a twin-guitar heavy metal band with a doom act on paper looks like an odd match; in practice the two share a love of atmosphere, theatre and a good old-fashioned sense of the occult, and the crossover in the room was obvious long before either band played a note.
Tonight’s set leaned heavily on it too. Taking to the stage around eight [confirm stage time], vocalist Ricardo Baum, guitarists Robert Richter and Henry Käseberg and drummer Aleister Präkelt opened with “The Veins Of Time”, and within a couple of minutes the twin-guitar interplay had done its job. Those harmonies are the band’s calling card – never flashy for the sake of it but woven tightly enough that you find yourself tracking both lines at once. Baum, meanwhile, has a voice that sits somewhere between classic metal theatre and gothic croon, and he wields it with real restraint. There is no shrieking for effect here; he lets the melodies carry the drama.
“Eurydice (Don’t Look Back)” – the first song the band wrote for Cold Velvet, and the one that set the template for the rest of the album – came next, and it’s here the band’s identity really snapped into focus. The Orpheus myth is well-trodden ground, but The Night Eternal give it a genuine sense of dread, the riff circling like someone fighting every instinct not to turn around. “Prince Of Darkness”, from Fatale, gave the early arrivals something to throw the horns at, before “The Watcher Of The Burning Veil” pulled things back into the new record’s moodier corners.
If there was a moment that won the room over, it was the run of “Where This World Ends” and “Elysion (Take Me Over)”. The former was Cold Velvet’s lead single and it’s easy to hear why – it is the band at their most direct, a brooding charge with a hook that lodges itself somewhere behind your eyes. The latter, lifted from their debut and their most-played live song by a distance, drew the biggest reaction of the set [confirm crowd response]. “Caught In A Spell” kept the momentum rolling before “Moonlit Cross” – the closing title track of a debut album released five years ago to the day – wrapped things up with a proper fist-in-the-air finale.
Eight songs, no filler. Worth noting that Manchester the previous night got an extra track – “Cold” – bolted onto the front of the set, so Nottingham received the leaner, tightened-up version. Either way, this is a band who have clearly done their homework on how to win over a crowd that didn’t necessarily come for them. If the grimmer end of early Ghost or Mercyful Fate’s theatrics have ever done it for you, Cold Velvet should be on your radar immediately.
The changeover gave everyone time to refuel, and by the time the lights dropped just after nine the room had filled out considerably Messa – vocalist Sara Bianchin, guitarist Alberto Piccolo, guitarist, bassist and synth wrangler Marco Zanin, and drummer Rocco Toaldo – are not a band who rush anything, and they weren’t about to start now.
Some context is worth a moment here. No two Messa records sound alike, and The Spin was the sharpest turn of the lot. The band pointed to Killing Joke as a touchstone for “At Races”, and you can hear that eighties goth and post-punk DNA right across the album – chorus-drenched guitars, synths sitting alongside the riffs, and songs that get to the point far quicker than their older epics ever did. The question hanging over this tour was how that sharper, sleeker material would sit alongside the sprawling older songs in a live setting.
The answer began with a surprise. Rather than leading with The Spin, the record that has carried them into bigger rooms and bigger conversations, they opened with “Babalon” from 2016 debut Belfry. It is a brave call – a slow, smouldering crawl of a song that demands patience – but it worked beautifully as a statement of intent. Whatever the synths and the eighties sheen of the new material might suggest, this is still the band who crawled out of doom’s drone-soaked corners. Bianchin’s voice, which on record can sound as though it’s drifting in from another room, was front and centre from the very first line – rich, controlled and utterly commanding.
Then came the gear change. “At Races”, “The Dress” and “Thicker Blood” arrived as a three-song block from The Spin, and the shift in energy was immediate. This is where the current incarnation of Messa lives: a band who have absorbed goth rock, post-punk, and the shadowy end of eighties songwriting without ever surrendering the weight that makes them a metal band. “At Races” swaggered. “The Dress”, with its slow-burn build, was the moment the room fell properly silent, every eye locked on the stage. “Thicker Blood”, the closing track on the album, felt enormous here, Toaldo’s drumming lending it a heft the studio version only hints at.
Next, the curveball: a drone and guitar solo interlude that let Piccolo off the leash. On paper, a solo spot in a seventy-five-minute headline set reads like indulgence. In practice it was one of the highlights of the night. Piccolo has always played with a smoky, improvisational looseness that few of Messa’s doom peers can match, and given room to stretch, he conjured something halfway between a séance and a late-night club set. It also served as the perfect bridge into “Pilgrim”, the sole representative from 2022’s Close, which rolled out of that drone like smoke – a reminder of the wider, more far-flung palette that record explored.
“Reveal” nudged the pace back up and then came an inspired piece of sequencing: “Void Meridian”, the opening track on The Spin, placed deep into the set where it landed like a second wind. That trademark Messa trick of letting a song breathe before snapping it into focus has rarely sounded better – synth textures hovering above the riff, Bianchin riding the crest of it all with total authority.
“Snakeskin Drape”, from 2018’s Feast For Water, closed the main set and was, for me, the peak of the night. It’s a song built on tension – a hushed, eerie opening that suddenly bolts into a full-tilt charge – and live it felt positively cinematic, the room hanging on every note before being swept along. When the band returned for the encore, it was back to Belfry for “Hour Of The Wolf”, which begins in slow, brooding fashion before kicking into a driving, fuzz-soaked surge – a fittingly raucous send-off. Signing off with a song from a decade ago felt fitting; a full circle for a band who have never once stood still.
Credit, too, to the venue. The Rescue Rooms remains one of the city’s best spots for this kind of show – intimate enough that you feel every kick drum in your ribcage, yet with enough space for a band of Messa’s dynamic range to breathe between the crescendos.
Messa’s first UK headline tour was always going to be a test of whether the acclaim surrounding The Spin would translate to the stage. On this evidence it did – and then some. They are a band who refuse to sit in any one box, and tonight they proved they can make every corner of their catalogue – drone, doom, jazz, goth – sound like chapters of the same story. With The Night Eternal delivering a support set that will have sent plenty of people straight to the merch desk, this was a Bonfire Night that burned far longer than any firework.
Links:
Messa: https://www.facebook.com/MESSAproject
The Night Eternal: https://www.facebook.com/thenighteternal/
Rescue Rooms: https://www.rescuerooms.com
Catharine Films https://www.instagram.com/catharinefilms/
Photos by Catharine Farnill
