The tour below that Edinburgh heavy progressive metallers DVNE are currently dug into began on Feb. 5. Does that make this old news? Yeah, it does. Think we can live with that? Good.

I’ll note that the live set for the rippers’ new release, Live at Hellfest — no need to call it anything else — was captured in 2023, and so their 2024 album, Voidkind (review here), doesn’t feature at all. No complaints with the instead-featuring 2021 outing, Etemen Ænka (review here), however, and if you’re dying to hear some of the Voidkind stuff, I’ll direct you to the band’s Bandcamp linked below, where 2025’s Live at the Biscuit Factory (discussed here) awaits with four tracks from the latest offering.

Both, arguably, are stopgaps, but unlike the more complainy wing of the internet, I happen to dig it when more things I like show up. Both are also streaming at the bottom of this post, along with the full video of the Hellfest ’23 set.

So yeah, DVNE are on tour now with Igorrr, and the run goes through the end of the month. Dates and info on the live outing follow, courtesy of the PR wire:

DVNE Announces Live At Hellfest Release Ahead Of Igorrr Support Tour

Scottish progressive metal band DVNE announces the release of their powerful performance at Hellfest Open Air 2023. Live At Hellfest features a selection of songs exclusively from DVNE’s acclaimed album Etemen Ænka, showcasing the band’s crushing heaviness, atmospheric depth, and commanding live presence. Recorded in front of a massive festival audience, the release captures the raw energy and immersive sound that has made DVNE one of the most compelling acts in modern progressive metal.

Live At Hellfest arrives as DVNE prepares to hit the road as support for Igorrr, marking an exciting new chapter for the band and offering fans a raw snapshot of their live presence.

Download it HERE: https://songs-of-arrakis.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-hellfest

Formed in Edinburgh in 2013 by displaced Frenchman Victor Vicart and native Scot Dudley Tait, post-metal prog-sludge artisans DVNE have been building a powerful head of steam since their second album, 2021’s kaleidoscopically mesmerizing Etemen Ænka. Their first release for the legendary Metal Blade Records label, the LP was a concerted hike up the greasy pole for this enigmatic outfit, enabling DVNE to embark on UK and European headline tours and win spots at such discerning festivals as Hellfest, ArcTanGent, Desertfest, Damnation, and Resurrection. Then the stunning third album Voidkind in 2024 propelled this expanded five-piece lineup (welcoming Maxime Keller on keyboards) to the top of their game.

Certainly, Voidkind succeeds in finding new modes of expression for DVNE. The songs are more pointed, direct and memorable, but the soundscape still has a radiant, evolving, hypnotic flow, the effect achieved with fewer layers of sonic ornamentation, consciously urging closer to DVNE’s incendiary live sound.

DVNE w/ Igorrr, Thoughtcrimes:
2/10/2026 Kino Siska – Ljubljana, SI
2/11/2026 Gasometer – Vienna, AT
2/12/2026 Roxy – Prague, CZ
2/13/2026 Barba Negra – Budapest, HU
2/14/2026 Progresia – Warsaw, PL
2/16/2026 Loftas – Vilnius, LT
2/17/2026 Helitehas – Tallinn, EE
2/18/2026 Kulttuuritalo – Helsinki, FI
2/20/2026 Fryshuset – Stockholm, SE
2/21/2026 Rockefeller – Oslo, NO
2/22/2026 Amager Bio – Copenhagen, DK
2/24/2026 Metropol – Berlin, DE
2/25/2026 FZW – Dortmund, DE
2/26/2026 Tivoli – Utrecht, NL
2/27/2026 L’Aeronef – Lille, FR
2/28/2026 Le 106 – Rouen, FR

DVNE:
Victor Vicart – guitars, vocals
Daniel Barter – guitars, vocals
Dudley Tait – drums
Alexandros Keros – bass
Maxime Keller – keys

https://songs-of-arrakis.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/dvne_uk
https://www.facebook.com/DvneUK

https://www.metalblade.com
https://www.instagram.com/metalbladerecords
https://www.facebook.com/metalbladerecords

DVNE, Live at Hellfest full set video

DVNE, Live at Hellfest (2026)

DVNE, Live at The Biscuit Factory (2025)

This Friday, Heavy Psych Sounds will issue two of four concurrent live albums, gathering sets recorded in 2022 from Austin, Texas, bashers Duel and New Jersey-based headspinners The Atomic Bitchwax as both bands undertook European tours. Next week, the label will have two more from Ecstatic Vision and The Lords of Altamont, and those won’t be streamed here (nothing personal, just logistics), sad to say, but in addition to giving these bands something new for the merch table on their respective upcoming tours, these releases also capture and celebrate the return of live music post-pandemic, the sense of deliverance that came as a result of acts being able to hit the road again. Shows were different, life was/is different, but if you’ve got a group nailing it on stage as part of a righteous festival lineup, then there’s still beauty in the world to appreciate. So let’s do that.

—

The Atomic Bitchwax, Live at Freak Valley Fest

Preorder link: https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/shop.htm#HPS251

Full throttle full-throttlism. Band on fire. For over a quarter century, and increasingly so over their most recent three studio records, New Jersey’s The Atomic Bitchwax have made themselves an institution of heavy shred. Led by bassist/vocalist Chris Kosnik, with Bob Pantella on drums and Garrett Sweeny on guitar vocals, the trio hit Freak Valley Festival 2022 with all-go force, and as someone who was there, their presence on the bill as outright rippers did not go unappreciated. You can hear some of that in the quick turns and forward sprints of “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Hang Me in My Home” or “Ninja” or the by-now-classic “Shitkicker,” which are only some among the 15 songs the Bitchwax squeezed into their 48-minute set, bookended on either side by sections of Edgar Winter‘s “Frankenstein,” also duly kicked in the pants.

Not that they never slow it down. The Core cover “Kiss the Sun” and “So Come On,” “Liv a Little” late in the set are at about warp three (out of a Constitution-class seven), but on Live at Freak Valley Fest, even “Hope You Die” and “Forty-Five” feel faster, and the Evel Knievel aspect is part of what makes it fun. Kosnik, Sweeny and Pantella, up on stage, tearing ass to run circles around the riffs of “Houndstooth,” playing with heads-down tenacity that offsets what might otherwise be the seriousness of the physical effort required by such speeds with a palpable sense of just how much they’re enjoying themselves. It’s like watching a race. You know they probably won’t crash and you’re drawn in by the adrenaline in the atmosphere, but especially in the case of The Atomic Bitchwax, it’s all done in the name of a good time.

From the stage banter — two songs about ninjas, “Kiss the Sun” out to the ladies in the crowd, lots of “you guys ready?” before the next burst, etc. — to the way “Coming in Hot” takes off from its own teaser slow intro, The Atomic Bitchwax are every bit a blast, and as the closest thing they’ve come to a proper live album in their time was the 2005 set from Seattle included in the 2006 Jack Endino-produced Boxriff EP, they’re well due for this kind of showcase. Live at Freak Valley Fest brings to life the ‘t-t-t-total freedom’ heralded in the lyrics to “Hope You Die” and is a twisty speed rock gauntlet being thrown down.

Can you keep up? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it’s a thrill to try, and the energy they bring to their material, new and old alike, is infectious. They play and smile, you listen and smile, and this communion and shared experience is the point of the whole thing. I don’t know when they might follow-up 2020’s Scorpio (review here) — wouldn’t mind this year, but I haven’t heard more than a murmur about new stuff — but Live at Freak Valley Fest captures them at their best on stage, and considering who we’re talking about, that means something.

The Atomic Bitchwax on Facebook

The Atomic Bitchwax on Instagram

The Atomic Bitchwax website

—

Duel, Live at Hellfest

Preorder link: https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/shop.htm#HPS258

Duel are a proven argument in my mind. They lay waste, exclusively. Their 2021 fourth album, In Carne Persona (review here), highlighted the underlying metallic current of their songwriting, and that LP’s “Wave of Your Hand” from opens the set at Live at Hellfest with due charge. It might sound strange until you see them or maybe really dig in here, but the Austin-based four-piece — who also appeared at Freak Valley (review here) as part of this tour — are most of all about love. Their Hellfest 2022 set? It’s half an hour long; 30:20 on the record. Not taking up your day, and whether you were there or not, the sheer sense of relief of the band playing on stage comes through unabated. This is a band who sat on their collective ass for two years waiting to break out, and Live at Hellfest is their breakout. It is something you want to hear.

This is the second live record Duel have done behind 2018’s Live at the Electric Church (review here), and they meet the occasion in furious form. Through “Devil” from 2017’s Witchbanger (review here) and into “Electricity” from their 2016 debut, Fears of the Dead (review here) — the title-track of which also closes — the band draw a from older material to newer, with the delightfully metal “Strike and Disappear” representing 2019’s Valley of Shadows (review here) before they turn to “Children of the Fire,” the opener of the latest LP. That song emphasizes a lot of what works best about Duel on stage; it is tight in structure, swinging and grooving with enough tonal presence behind it to feel thick, catchy as anything you want to sit next to it, and delivered with propulsive authority, the gruff voice of guitarist Tom Frank — backed by bassist Sean Avants and guitarist Jeff Henson — a commanding presence that nonetheless sounds sincere amid the cacophony at the end of “Children of the Fire” when he says “We love you so much.”

And really, that’s the story here. That love. The love of the band for their audience, for their material itself, for the performance itself, the passion of their delivery that comes through even the raw audio. For that, they don’t need more than the half-hour Live at Hellfest runs, and as brash as their songs can be — “Electricity” and “Strike and Disappear” both build into righteously noisy solos — the spirit that drives Duel remains the same. They’re an act who believe in what they do and are going to get on stage and put as much into it as they can. I’ve been fortunate enough to see them a few times over the last half-decade, and they’ve only ever been a joy to behold, throwing elbows as they gallop through, riding riffs like “Fears of the Dead” as they coalesce around the next hook, dirt-fuzz and an overlaid element of danger the calling card left imprinted on the memory of the crowd standing before them. On Live at Hellfest it’s easy to imagine slackened jaws and wide eyes, but you can also hear the roar of the crowd when they’re done, and yeah, that tent was on board for where Duel were headed. Rightly so.

Duel on Facebook

Duel on Instagram

Duel on Bandcamp

—

Heavy Psych Sounds on Facebook

Heavy Psych Sounds on Instagram

Heavy Psych Sounds website

Heavy Psych Sounds on Bandcamp