The lights die and the Gasometer goes back to being what it was built for: a brick tank full of something volatile. Then the spotlights behind the stage flare up, and the turbine fans planted in front of them chop every beam into slices, a slow mechanical strobe sweeping through the haze. For a few seconds it feels less like a metal show and more like the opening of a film where the crew wakes up from hypersleep and somebody is about to make a very bad decision.
When the smoke thins, the stage is pure H.R. Giger: turbine fans as tall as the guitarists, stamped with the band’s logo, ribbed coils stacked like vertebrae and capped with amber lamps, a drum riser built from what look like engine grilles, and a golden biomechanical beast glaring from the backdrop. The band’s upcoming fourth album, “Fear the Beast”, wears its “Alien” obsession on its sleeve, and Anton Kabanen comes by it honestly: he keeps having a nightmare in which the Xenomorph hunts him down. “Nightmares are inspirational anyway,” he shrugged when I sat down with him on the day of the show. Halloween night, and the best costume in the building was the stage.
You half expect something with a second set of jaws to crawl out from behind the kit. Instead, the band runs out, fronted by Yannis Papadopoulos: shaved head, aviators indoors, a black leather coat with more spikes, straps and buckles than a torture museum. He looks like the villain from an ’80s action flick, the guy who owns the nightclub, the cops and half the city. Then he opens his mouth and belts like the hero who walks away from the explosion and wins the day.
I should have seen this coming. The last time Beast In Black played Vienna was a Sunday evening slot at Donauinselfest 2025, scheduled against Rag’n’Bone Man on the festival’s final day. On paper, that’s how you tell a band to play for the sound guys. In reality, the Rock Stage was packed and every chorus came back louder than it went out. If a free festival crowd that half came for someone else could sing like that, a headline show in a closed room was going to be one for the books.
A lot has happened since. Kasperi Heikkinen left during last autumn’s Helloween tour, Markus Venehsalo took over lead guitar this summer, and Anton skipped the band’s North American run to finish the new record. The release date? “I’m not giving any dates or any promises, to be honest,” he told me. A band touring an album you can’t buy yet is either very sure of itself or very reckless. On this night, it looked like the first one.
But let’s rewind to 19:15.
Frozen Crown opened, and they did it the Italian way. Italy has a long-standing penchant for power metal that’s a little naive and completely heartwarming, the swords-and-glory school the country has been exporting since the ’90s, and Frozen Crown carry that torch without a hint of irony. With their sixth album, “The Legend of the Six Kings”, barely a month old, Federico Mondelli and company played like a band that knew exactly how few minutes it had and refused to waste one. Giada “Jade” Etro held the center, flanked by three guitarists, which sounds like overkill until the harmonies hit.
Alexandra Lioness, my countrywoman, stole the spotlight with her string prowess, shredding with a grin like the fretboard owed her money. I know how hard it is to make it when you’re born where we were born. Her road was even harder than mine: a self-taught player from Belgrade who finished medical school and then picked the guitar anyway, in a country where metal lives in basements and a corrupt government spent fourteen years teaching young people that the only way up is out. Six days before this show, that government lost the election. Let’s hope the kids picking up guitars in Belgrade today won’t have to make the sacrifices we made to end up on a stage like this one.
Sonata Arctica were a special treat of the night for me, which is funny, because I was never a huge fan, not even when they were a power metal household name. What I liked even less was how their own fanbase turned on them when they went looking for themselves in their progressive years. Metal fans love fanatically and hate just as hard, and no band owes us the same album five times. Luckily, the band has found its sweet spot, and a 30th-anniversary setlist that put old and new side by side reflected exactly that.
One thing that gets overlooked is how versatile and strong Tony Kakko’s voice is when he isn’t leaning on that trademark falsetto. He proved it before the band played a note, opening the show with an a cappella “I Have a Right”. One man, no instruments, a gas tank full of people. That’s how you earn a room.
Back to the beast. The headline set was measured: all three albums got their due, plus a handful from “Fear the Beast”, with “Mighty Dragon”, the title track and the ballad “Lost Children” among them. The new songs sit comfortably next to the old ones. Still, I’d be lying if I said they were why I came.
The moments that got me came from “Berserker” and “From Hell With Love”: “Born Again”, “Zodd the Immortal”, “Die by the Blade”, “Cry Out for a Hero”, and an encore with now iconic “Blind and Frozen.” I love those two records because of when they showed up. Back then, gimmicks and mid-tempo stomping were being sold as power metal, and these guys came out with an old-school blend of shredding guitars and Yannis’s absurd range, plus songwriting that covered everything I love about the whole spectrum of the genre, from Priest-worthy riffs to synth choruses that belong on a 1986 movie soundtrack. Call it power metal, call it heavy metal, it’s all rock and roll to me.
The “Dark Connection” material and the new songs are glossier and more synth-forward. They work, the crowd ate them up, they just don’t hit me where the first two records do. That’s a me problem, and I’m keeping it.
No chestbursters in the end. Just a man dressed like an ’80s villain, singing like the hero, in a gas tank full of people who’ll be hoarse until Tuesday, when we refill the tank for Amon Amarth.
For the books.
