Nordic Giants, This Will Destroy You at Islington Assembly Hall, London 17.03.2025

One of the people in front of me at Islington Assembly Hall referred to Nordic Giants as having ‘a main act energy’ – and this is undeniable. Islington Assembly Hall is an incredibly picturesque setting for the mid-March Monday evening of glorious post rock.

If you’re not yet familiar, Nordic Giants are the eve-enigmatic duo consisting of Loki and Rôka, and I have never seen them without their elaborate feather head-dresses and masks. Each behind their respective instrument (electronic piano and drums), they curate an experience to which their music is a soundtrack. Each track is accompanied by a short film (often animation or mixed media) and each of the films is as thought provoking as the next, with themes of man vs machine, our impact on the planet and the precariousness of the human condition being at the forefront.

The effect is visually spellbinding and emotionally and intellectually charged – you could hear a pin drop. It’s also incredible to witness people discovering Nordic Giants for the first time – I have been an avid follower, with a camera or otherwise, for the best part of the last decade, so for me they offer a warm blanket of comfort. But overhearing people who just saw them for the first time and sharing in their bewilderment is truly special.

Opening the proceedings was ‘Philosophy of Mind’, the opening piece to their 2022 album Symbiosis and accompanied by the film ‘In Shadow’ by Lubomir Arsov, followed by one of one of the absolute crowd favourites – ‘Mechanical Minds’, with the masterfully sampled final speech from Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’. The film accompanying it – ‘The Gift’ by Carl E. Rinsch, features a robot delivering a parcel to unsuspecting recipients, and the film with the speech and the track create a poignant reflection. The following ‘Taxonomy Of Illusions’, a piece set to a speech given by Terence McKenna at UC Berkeley in 1993, continues the theme:

It isn’t that the world is tired and played out and that all frontiers have been explored. Every culture could support that viewpoint within certain classes and in certain situations. But in fact it has never been true and it isn’t true now. We are monkeys, and monkeys love a hell of a good fight, and we have a hell of a fight bearing down on us because we have to clean up the mess. We’re not going to go silently into the gentle night of extinction. It’s just not going to happen that way. Creativity is going to be unleashed. Struggle is going to be an unavoidable part of trying to steer this battleship away from the cataracts of history in which we are now caught.

Terrence McKenna, The Taxonomy Of Illusion

Nordic Giants do post rock exceptionally well. As a self-proclaimed post rock fangirl, I have gone to post rock gigs (or festivals!) many a time in my long life, and Nordic Giants avoid the main danger that comes with the genre – you can never call them ‘samey’ – you will always come away from a Nordic Giants performance moved, prompted for meditation on your impact on the world and society, and you will experience true audiovisual performance. If you see them listed on a bill – I highly recommend experiencing them at least once.

Soon it was time for the headlining This Will Destroy You to perform their 2008’s seminal self titled LP in full. The post rock stalwarts have recently announced a split into two bands, with each co-founding guitarist leading one, after two decades together. Performing live on the European leg of the tour are Jeremy Galindo, Johnnie McBryde, Nicholas Huft and Ethan Billips.

I have long joked that This Will Destroy You genuinely destroys me. I have been a long standing fan (see the paragraph above about being a big post rock fangirl), to the point of seeing them on a Monday fresh from seeing them perform at ArcTanGent 2 days before back in 2014, when they were touring Tunnel Blanket. And this to me was their return to form, and the band that I know truly grips my heart and doesn’t let go. The slow pace and the quiet, meditative nature of the music are just the tonic. In contrast to Nordic Giants’ elaborate stage design and visuals, the set up for TWDY was austere, with Jeremy Galindo sat to the left of the stage, setting the tone and pace for his band.

Following the Self-Titled album’s track listing, they opened with the mighty powerful ‘A Three Legged Workhorse’ just to quiet down at ‘Villa Del Refugio’ and pick up gain with euphoric, soaring crescendos of ‘Threads’, proving how masterfully paced that album is and just why it fully deserves its place among the post-rock classics.

One of my personal all time favourites, ‘The Mighty Rio Grande’, was an absolute treat – with the quiet, slow tempo of the intro with the steady, muffled kick drum gradually building up, keeping you on the edge of your internal, emotional seat, energy spiralling upwards as the percussion gets more and more elaborate and it culminates in this glorious ambient soundscape. It’s a sunburst in a song, followed by a a gentle summer’s wind against your face. It’s a song you could bathe in for a whole 11 minutes and 17 seconds.

The album cadence stopped after ‘They Move On The Tracks Of Never-Ending Light’ and we were treated to ‘The World Is Our’ from another classic post rock album ‘Young Mountain’ (Jeremy and the band will perform ‘Young Mountain’ in full on another tour later this year) and the soaring guitar crescendo in the middle of that song never fails to leave me grinning from ear to ear.

As part o the tour, the band is also playing songs from Jeremy’s new project you, infinite, and at Islington Assembly Hall we got to hear ‘Throughlines’ and ‘Shine Eternal’ from their first self-titled LP (2025, Pelagic Records)). Jeremy Galindo’s guitar sound is inimitable and the inclusion of those tracks makes perfect sense among TWDY discography. They are continuing the S/T tour across Europe and there is the ‘Young Mountain’ tour to look forward to later in the year if you’re in the US.