Fuck Photos
Updated: 4 days ago
Good Bands, Bad Vibes and the Trouble With Going Back
“Fuck photos.”
And with that, welcome to my account of Thursday night’s Amenra concert in Hanover.
I went into this evening with every intention of writing another embarrassingly enthusiastic piece about a band whose music I dearly love, playing at a venue I have become very fond of.
But guess what—this won’t be a live report.
Because, as it turns out, music is only part of a concert experience.
I spent several hours last night trying to work out how to turn the evening into a neat little piece of journalism.
Then I woke up this morning and thought: Fuck that.
There are a few things I want to talk about.
I considered not doing it.
For the sake of professionalism.
For the sake of ever getting accredited at this venue again.
For the sake of avoiding angry comments and the inevitable person deciding this is simply an overdramatic woman making a fuss over nothing.
If that is already where your brain has gone, feel free to leave.
I won’t miss you.
This is an angry woman making a fuss.
Some things deserve one.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Prologue
The last time I saw Amenra, in Bremen in November 2025, they created something I have been carrying around ever since like a small, private beacon of holiness.
Yes. I know how that sounds.
Unfortunately, it is accurate.
That night was immersive. Cathartic. Reverent. I wrote about the whole emotional collapse here, and even told people they should travel up to 500 kilometres to see Amenra if they ever got the chance.
Strong words.
Especially considering I then nearly missed the date closest to me on their current tour.
When I finally found out Amenra were playing Hannover, I was ridiculously pleased.
Because they were playing at Café Glocksee.
Wedged neatly between Brutal Assault the day before and Alcatraz the day after.
Which felt almost absurdly fortunate.
Because I do not want Amenra under daylight, drifting across a field between food stalls and people discussing which band they are seeing next. I do not want their music escaping into the open air.
I want walls.
I want darkness.
I want the sound trapped in a small room with nowhere to go except directly through me.
Café Glocksee can do that.
I already know.
Earlier this year, I spent Valentine’s Day there with 40 Watt Sun and Stygian Bough. I walked into that room wondering whether funeral doom could work live and left with my internal organs gently rearranged by Dylan Desmond’s seven-string bass.
He plucked the first note. And I went under.
The sound hit like a wave of pressure. Through the floor. Through my chest. Through every sensible thought I had brought into the room with me.
Café Glocksee did not merely accommodate doom that night.
It contained it.
Held it inside those walls until the whole room seemed to disappear beneath the weight.
So, essentially, two previous doom-related miracles were being asked to coexist under one roof.
My expectations were therefore not merely high.
They were catastrophically unreasonable.
Surely, this would be totally fine.
Of course it wasn’t fine. Don’t be ridiculous.
Nothing spectacularly terrible happened. It was a collection of small things. The sort you are apparently meant to shrug off individually until they pile up high enough to ruin an evening you had been looking forward to.
The first thing was waiting for me at the door.
The Guest List. Again.
When I found out about the Amenra show a couple of weeks beforehand, I did what I always do: contacted the venue, asked for press accreditation including photography, and got confirmation within 24 hours. Guest list. Camera. Sorted. I was also told to bring the email just in case, which, unfortunately, is a sentence I have learned to take very seriously.
Because this keeps happening. Not just at Café Glocksee. Everywhere. Big venues, small venues, different promoters, different systems—same little moment at the door where you have done everything correctly and still end up standing there with your phone out, proving that yes, somebody really did invite you.
And I am tired of it. Most music journalists are doing this in their free time, unpaid, because they care enough about music to drive two hours after work, take the photos, write the report and give bands and venues coverage they did not have to pay for. I do not expect a red carpet. I would just quite like to stop feeling as though I have turned up asking for spare change.
And yes, I know how these things happen. Venues are busy, people are juggling twelve jobs and three million side quests, communication gets lost somewhere between promoter, venue, security, tour management and whoever handled the advance. Life is messy. We are all doing our best. Fine. But there does come a point where "sorry, you’re not on the list" stops feeling like a charming little administrative quirk.
Yesterday, we added a bonus round: apparently photography was not allowed either.
Excellent.
The very apologetic security person—who clearly wished himself anywhere else by this point, bless him—took me upstairs to find someone who knew what to do with me and my camera. There I learned that my accreditation apparently should never have been issued, because the person who confirmed it was not actually involved in the advance.
Right. Useful information. Slightly late.
And, at that point, it should not really be my problem.
I was already there, after a two-hour drive, with the camera, to do the job I had specifically been told I could do.
To their credit, everyone handled the situation calmly and politely. They checked with Amenra’s tour manager, established that nobody actually cared about photography that night, and let me in.
So yes, I am grateful they sorted it. I am still annoyed that I had to spend fifteen minutes backstage sorting out something I had already been told was sorted.
A Brief Failure of Basic Decency
While all of this was being sorted out, I realised I had packed the wrong gear.
Because I had assumed Amenra would be playing on the same stage Stygian Bough had played earlier this year.
Clearly, I had not done my homework properly.
Amenra were upstairs at Indiego Glocksee.
Different room. Different stage. Different dimensions.
Different bloody vibes.
By the time the camera issue was finally sorted, I was already thoroughly irritated with myself.
Only to emerge from backstage and discover that the front row was full.
Now, venues without photo pits are great for the audience. You can stand right against the stage. You are close. Intimate. Practically in the band’s personal space if everyone is feeling adventurous.
Lovely.
For photographers, particularly five-foot-two ones, it is slightly less idyllic.
The first few times I photographed small club shows, I was terrible at this part. I never dared to push forward because I did not want to shove people out of places they had arrived early to claim. Eventually, though, I learned that most people are perfectly decent about it. You show them the camera, explain that you need ten minutes at the front, promise to disappear again afterwards, and they make a little room.
So that is what I did.
I went up to the three guys standing front and centre, smiled, gave them my usual slightly apologetic little speech and explained that once the band started, I would need to squeeze in for a few minutes to take some photographs.
“Absolutely not. Fuck photos.”
I think I laughed.
Because surely they were joking.
They were not.
When Machukha started, I made my way forward again. They saw me coming, turned around, crossed their arms and closed the gap between them.
Three men.
All significantly taller than me.
All significantly broader than me.
Making very sure that I would not get through.
And I still do not quite have the words for how pathetic I found that.
Not intimidating.
Not impressive.
Pathetic.
Because there was nothing I could do. And they knew it.
Had I been a large guy, I could perhaps have forced my way through.
I am not.
I was standing there with a camera, politely asking for enough space to do my job for ten minutes.
That was it. And somehow even that was too much.
This is where the word respect starts becoming difficult to avoid.
It is respect to put somebody’s name on the guest list after issuing an accreditation.
And yes, it is also respect to let someone who is clearly working squeeze into the front row for a few minutes when you can quite literally see over her head.
You lose nothing.
I get the photographs I came for.
The article gets images.
The band gets coverage.
The venue gets coverage.
Everyone moves on with their lives.
Instead, apparently we needed a territorial stand-off.
Congratulations, gentlemen.
You won the front row.
I hope it was everything you dreamed of.
The Belgian Counteroffensive
Luckily, humanity had not entirely packed up and gone home.
Just as I was getting dangerously close to rage-quitting the whole evening and mentally telling everyone to get fucked, I moved over to the left side of the stage.
A woman caught my eye and shifted slightly.
I gave her the same little speech.
Ten minutes. Camera. Then I’m gone.
"Of course. Stand here. There’s enough room."
That was it.
No debate. No territorial negotiations. No need to defend the sacred border of the front row.
Just basic human decency.
I stayed there, we got talking, and it turned out she had travelled all the way from Belgium. It also turned out this was far from her first Amenra show. She was just as devoted to the band as plenty of people in that room. The only difference was that she had somehow managed to remain a functioning member of society about it.
She probably has no idea how much that mattered.
Because yes, she gave me enough space to take a few photographs.
But more importantly, she reminded me that people being complete arseholes are, thankfully, still counterbalanced by people who simply are not.
Shortly before Amenra started, another woman joined us. She looked vaguely familiar.
Then it clicked.
She was the same woman I had stood next to at the Amenra show in Bremen last year. The one I had talked to about Youniss. The one with whom I had shared that brief, beautifully honest moment of: "Jesus Christ, I did not get this either."
Small world.
And I loved that.
So thank you, both of you.
For talking to me.
For making room.
For making me feel safe enough to stop bracing and get back to why I had come in the first place.
The music.
Machukha – Well. That Felt Relevant.
Support act Machukha are officially labelled as post-black metal from Berlin.
That is technically correct but not particularly helpful.
I had listened to their only full-length album so far beforehand, so I knew roughly what I was walking into. I am not entirely sure the rest of the room did. There was a definite amount of surprise. A little "what the fuck". A little "huh". Fair enough.
Vocalist Natalya and bassist Mykola are Ukrainian, and the lyrics are in Ukrainian as well. I do not speak the language, and I deliberately did not read translations beforehand. I wanted to see what the music could communicate on its own.
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
From the first barked lines, it was obvious this was not going to be an easy listen. Machukha are raw by choice. Aggressive. Uncomfortable. Not remotely interested in smoothing anything down for you.
Natalya’s vocals are the obvious dividing line. I already knew them from the album: that particular hoarse, hardcore-inflected shouting, pushed hard and with very little variation. It is deliberately unpleasant. If that vocal style gets under your skin in the wrong way, you are going to struggle.
I do, sometimes.
But if you can get past that—or perhaps through it—there is much more happening underneath.
The music shifts between frantic blast beats, dissonant tremolo riffing and Natalya sounding as though she is trying to force every last bit of air out of her body, and stretches where everything opens up. The guitars become more melodic. The drumming relaxes. There was a saxophone. Space appears. That is where the post-metal side really comes through, and those were the moments that pulled me in most.
Sometimes the music retreats even further.
A single guitar picking into the dark. Brushed cymbals. Individual bass notes. Low frequencies doing almost all of the emotional work while everything else hangs back.
Minimalism, but not calm.
More like the silence before something breaks again.
There were moments when words were repeated over and over, each repetition sounding more desperate than the last.
Other moments barely felt like songs at all.
The stage darkened. Natalya knelt on the floor. The instrumentation fell away until there was almost nothing left.
The lyrics were recited more than sung.
Grounded. Bare. Human.
Like somebody trying to sing at a grave and doing the best they can while grief is pulling them apart.
When the set ended after a little more than half an hour, the room erupted. Proper applause. Warm, heartfelt, immediate. And then guitarist Bláthin gave a short, breathless speech about living through miserable times, being kind to each other, treating people with respect.
Well.
Subtle timing from the universe there.
After the start I had had to the evening, that landed considerably harder than it normally would have.
So thank you, Machukha.
For the set. For making music that is willing to be raw, difficult and deeply uncomfortable.
And for reminding a room full of people that being decent to each other still matters.
Small scale.
Big scale.
All of it.
Please keep going.
Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Machukha performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover
Amenra – Some Things Stay the Same
Then it was time for Amenra. The stage was prepared with the same calm efficiency I remembered from Bremen. Everything had its place. Colin’s rug came out, was positioned and taped carefully to the floor. And after the evening so far, there was something deeply reassuring about watching a process in which everybody apparently knew exactly what they were doing.
From there, Amenra were simply Amenra. Unhurried. Precise. Reliable in the best possible way. There is remarkably little room for error in what they do, and if there was any that night, I did not notice it.
Every note landed where it needed to. Every movement felt measured. Nothing rushed. Nothing wasted. The first time I saw Amenra, so much of that surprised me. Seeing them a second time simply confirmed that none of it had been a fluke. They really are that good live.
What did not repeat was the experience around it.
In Bremen, the lighting, projections and sheer space of the Kesselhalle had swallowed everything whole. The room disappeared. Indiego Glocksee could not quite do the same. It is smaller, tighter, more crowded, and there were lights around the room that kept dragging my attention back to where I actually was when I would rather have forgotten completely.
The music was there. The performance was there. But that sense of total immersion never quite arrived in the same way. The crowd, however, was completely locked in. That part had not changed. Bodies rolled with waves of deep, low frequencies and swayed as the melodies rose out of them. Heads were bowed. Eyes were closed. Hearts were open. That peculiar near-trance I had noticed in Bremen was here too: hundreds of people standing together, somehow managing to disappear into something entirely private at the same time.
For a little over an hour, Amenra did what Amenra do. And when it was over, I watched Colin disappear into the fog before the final note had fully left the room.
Some things, thankfully, remain wonderfully predictable.
Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover Amenra performing at Café Glocksee in Hannover
I made my way back to the car and realised I was not carrying the same feeling with me that I had after Bremen. Last year, I had been ecstatic. Properly gone. Like I had witnessed some sort of ascension and then been rudely deposited back into normal life afterwards.
This time, I was not.
Not because Amenra had failed to deliver. They had not. The concert itself was excellent.
But concerts are never only the concert.
They are the room. The sound. The light. The people standing around you. The mood you walked in with and everything that happened before the first note was played. Bremen had been one of those rare evenings where all of it aligned perfectly.
And maybe that was what I had forgotten when I walked in with my catastrophically unreasonable expectations. You can see the same band again. You can put them into another venue you already love. You can assemble all the ingredients that look perfect on paper. But you cannot order the same miracle twice.
Some nights become holy precisely because everything happened to fall into place once.
Lightning rarely strikes twice.
And perhaps some holy things are better left exactly where they happened.