Zilch head up a varied bill of bands in Nottingham that head through grunge, post-rock, shoe gaze and post-punk.

DUSKER

Tonight’s opener, Leicester’s Dusker, performed as a different iteration of the band due to a band member’s injury. This was my first time seeing them, so for now I’ve had to put a pin on seeing them in their original form, but it’s absolutely something I intend to do in the near future

Vocals ping between the drummer and the guitarist throughout a six-song set, the shift in voice keeping you permanently off-balance in the best possible way — one moment abrasive and declaratory, the next fractured and exposed there is a low level intensity that permeates throughout which had a real Rollins Vibe and execution to it – that same coiled, sermon-like intensity, the sense that the performance itself is a physical act of will. It doesn’t so much end as it stops, abruptly, like a fist unclenching.

Throughout the six tracks, there are pockets — genuine pockets of underlying intensity — where the room seems to compress, where time does something odd, where you forget to breathe. That’s the trick Dusker seem to pull off best.

WILDERNESSES

Up next & taking their cues from post-rock, shoegaze and dream pop, Wildernesses combine emotive heaviness with ambient textures to score lyrics about the surreal realities of everyday life. Tonight, they are here in the midst of their debut album tour, Growth set for release on 27 March via Floodlit Recordings, and the material lands with the quiet urgency of a band who have been waiting a long time for this moment (our review here).

Track likes Terrible Bloom is certainly a statement of intent; it blooms as metaphor, as slow emergence, as something that unfolds at its own pace rather than yours. What follows is a set that rewards patience. Maintenance arrives like a ritual — a quietly unsettling meditation on routine, survival, and the strange everyday rituals we adopt to keep ourselves upright in a fractured world.

Four Hour Drive is a tender reflection on family, lineage and inherited memory and is the kind of song that takes the unbearable specificity of one person’s grief and makes it feel universal. The room at this point is very still, reflective and appreciative

They close with Summertime, 1917 – and it earns its place there. Growth spans nine tracks charting insomnia, solitary escapism, forbidden desire, family heritage and hidden histories unearthed from the past, and this final song carries the weight of all of it. A long exhale. They leave the stage, and I have goosebumps seeing the material live in such an intimate setting knowing that this band’s trajectory is clearly going to be huge.

ZILCH

Worcester alt-rockers Zilch. know their grunge and alt-rock lineage inside out, and they close the night by leaning all the way into it. Where Dusker were angular, and Wildernesses were oceanic, Zilch. They are simply heavy — thick riffs, the kind of hooks that stick in the jaw. They carry themselves with the easy confidence of a band that knows exactly what kind of room they’re walking into.

Tracks such as All My Heroes Are Dead lands as both an elegy and a rallying cry, which is the only way that kind of song should ever land. It acknowledges the weight of influence without being crushed by it. The crowd feel it. The room fills with the kind of silence that follows something that has done its job.

The whole event has done exactly what a well-curated DIY bill is supposed to do: left you with three bands worth arguing about on the drive home. Three acts at different stages of the same journey — Dusker road-hardened and restless, Wildernesses on the verge of something, Zilch. arriving with both hands on the wheel. A proper night.

Zilch: Bandcamp

Wildernesses: Bandcamp

Dusker: Bandcamp

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