Analogue Trash – 15th August 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s been a busy spell for The Royal Ritual. You might say that David Lawrie is making up for lost time. With real-world activity off the cards during the pandemic, he assembled The Royal Ritual’s debut album, Martyrs, and followed up swiftly with the more sophisticated Pleasure Hides Your Needs last year, as well as an EP and some proper touring, which saw that sophistication taken to the stage in such a way that created a spellbinding live show and immense sound. Despite there only being two bodies on stage, two live guitars, a combination of programmed and live drumming, looped, not to mention ambitious visuals makes for a compelling performance. There’s no question that this this was a show that would be perfectly suited to a bigger stage, and landing a slot at Infest provided the opportunity for the band to truly come into their own. The live footage they’ve shared online confirms this, and the quality of the performance very much justifies this live album’s release, capturing as it does the full set with first-rate fidelity.
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It’s a masterfully structured set, which draws equally on the two albums, and begins with atmospheric organ leading into the slow-building ‘Vantage Point’, slow, brooding synths and a pulsating kick drum giving way to a barrage of beats and crunching, metallic industrial guitar. There’s no dead space between the songs: a tapering drone and snippets of samples maintain the atmosphere before ‘(nothing) On the Other Side’ thunders in on a thunderous percussive assault, and things only turn darker, heavier, more intense and more percussion-led on the claustrophobically intense ‘Pews in the Pandemic’. Lawrie gives it some guts in the vocal department, switching between menacing and wracked with anguish, and peaking at epic, emotive.
The processed-sounding guitars and synths have that KMFDM / Pig vibe and would be perfectly at home on a Wax Trax! release from the early 90s, but the colossal drumming sets it quite some way apart. Moreover, where The Royal Ritual really succeed here is in the way they preserve the sound – and the detail, and, importantly, the mechanical tightness – of the studio recordings, while the use of so many live instruments and, for wont of a better term, ‘moving parts’ means that this has the full energy and dynamics of the live setting, that edge, that bite. Naturally, this is felt more strongly when you’re actually in the room, in the moment, with the electricity of the proximity to the band, and in a room full of people, but this does a top-notch job of capturing it all through the medium of sound alone.
‘Martys’ is a full-blooded industrial-strength dark glam-tinged stomper, and ‘Modes of Violence’ takes things up a notch, combining solid hooks and gritty, hard-as-nails industrial guitars. It’s fitting, then, that ‘Coma’ closes the set with a more reflective feel, with expansive almost trance-like passages intersecting with electronic-led progressive segments. Lawrie’s soaring vocals are rich with emotion that’s almost spiritual as they ascend to the skies, before the set concludes with a glitching stutter, somewhere between a Morse Code SOS and teetering on a flatline, amidst a mutter of sampled dialogue and siren wails. It’s a bleak, almost apocalyptic, Bladerunner-esque finish. There is high theatre here, but there is also real human spirit, and an emotional range not always found in the sphere of electronic / industrial music, which can, at times, feel cold, clinical, detached.
The quality of the songs was already evident in their studio releases, but Live at Infest demonstrates that not only do the songs have further dimensions which only become apparent in a live setting, but that The Royal Ritual are a killer live act.
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Aural Aggravation 