Nordic Giants bring their new album, Under Celestial Alignments, to the live arena with the kind of emotional heft you expect from the talented duo.

Live photography courtesy of Izzy Sheldon. You can see more of her work, here.

INDEPENDENT TRUCKING

Crowded Music’s first show of the year was shaping up to be something worth arriving early for. By the time doors open, it is clear the room would fill — and fill it did.

There is something fitting about a Leicester band opening a Leicester show. Independent Trucking make the most of the home advantage. The instrumental three-piece operate at the heavier end of the post-rock spectrum, drawing in equal measure from post-metal’s slow-burning density, post-punk’s angular restlessness, and the thick low-end weight of stoner and doom.

It is a lot of ground to cover for a trio without a vocalist. Yet the absence of a front person never feels like a lack. If anything, it sharpens every riff, every shift in dynamics, every moment of space has to carry the communicative weight that a singer would otherwise provide.

Across the duration of their set, the band move through passages of crushing weight and relative calm with a fluency that only comes from playing together often and listening to each other closely. The stoner and doom influences surface in the unhurried patience of their heavier passages — riffs that do not rush, that trust the listener to stay with them. The crowd really leaned into their aesthetic and collectively enjoyed this performance

COLOSSLOTH

One Man, armed with a wonky table Colossloth make music that resists easy description — dense, atmospheric, that sits somewhere between ritual and sound art. The set carried the unmistakable quality of a ceremony rather than a performance. This was not music played at an audience so much as something channelled through the room itself, the crowd cast as unwitting participants in a transmission they couldn’t quite locate.

Entirely instrumental — ambient and drifting on the surface, but with a genuine undertow of unease running beneath it. Where Independent Trucking had dealt in the physical grammar of heavy riffs, Colossloth worked on something harder to name. The music seemed to arrive from somewhere rather than be played at you — diffuse, sourceless, deeply strange. Remarkably, the crowd leaned in rather than drifted, even in a venue still filling up.

By the time their set concludes, The Big Difference is transformed — quieter in spirit, heavier in atmosphere, and perfectly primed. Whatever Colossloth had done to the room, it held.

NORDIC GIANTS

Nordic Giant’s latest release, Under Celestial Alignments, provides the spine of the headline set. It is performed in full and in sequence — nine tracks, each paired with a hand-picked short film projected behind the duo. This is Nordic Giants’ signature: the music and the moving image are inseparable, and the curation here is extraordinary. The films range from Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation to multi-award-winning CGI, from a WWII dogfight allegory to a darkly comic love story told in free fall. Together they formed something closer to a curated cinema programme than a conventional gig.

The pairing of Undertow with Mark Osborne’s 1998 stop-motion short More — a bleak, wordless fable about a factory worker in a joyless world who invents his own means of escape — was the kind of match that feels inevitable in retrospect. Reaper hit differently still, set against Damian Nenow’s animated film Paths of Hate, a Polish production depicting a WWII dogfight that spirals into something mythic and savage. The music made the images heavier; the images made the music darker. That is the Nordic Giants effect at its most potent.

QUIETLY DEVASTATING

The set closes with Seren. It’s accompanied by the Neymarc Brothers’ CGI short Happy Valentine’s Day — a single slow-motion, reverse-told shot following love, loss and fate through a New York intersection. As a closing statement, it was quietly devastating, the kind of ending that leaves a room unwilling to move.

Visually, the duo remain committed to full-body immersion — the films don’t merely accompany the music, they complete it. Nordic Giants have always understood that post-rock is as much about negative space as it is about the walls of sound that fill it. Their live performance brings that understanding into sharp relief. Silences land as hard as the crescendos, and in the dark of The Big Difference, with these films on the screen behind them, that effect was total.

A tremendous start to the Crowded Music calendar. Three acts, three entirely distinct approaches to wordless music — local post-metal, Midlands psychogeographic electronics, and cinematic post-rock on a grand scale — and a room that was enthusiastic throughout. If this evening is the benchmark, the rest of the year has its work cut out.

Nordic Giants: Bandcamp

Collossloth: Bandcamp

Independent Trucking: Bandcamp

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