The Hotel Europa in Belfast has the dubious honour of being the world’s most bombed hotel, courtesy of some unruly republicans during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As I’m climbing up a flight of rusty metal stairs to get to its rooftop, I’m wondering for a second what damage all the bombings have done to its internal structure. Then Killtribe brush past, physically pushing the thought out of my head – they have a photo shooting to do, after all.

We arrived in the capital of Northern Ireland after a (at least for me) short night celebrating into St. Patrick’s Day in a Dublin pub. The first thing on our schedule was to watch the parade in front of City Hall, which concluded with a bagpipe band impressing the German visitors. The next stop was dedicated to the intake of food in form of chili, coffee and cookies, after which we finally met up with local metal scene legend and photographer Carrie Davenport, who showed us around the city while taking pictures of Killtribe on and in front of famous Belfast landmarks, such as the aforementioned Europa Hotel, the Peace Wall between Shankhill and Falls and in front of the famous Harland & Wolff cranes Samson & Goliath down at the docks.

After that, it was almost showtime for the Killtribe for the first time ever in Ireland. After some warm-up beers in the venue, Auntie Annies on the Dublin Road and some Chinese food it seemed the gentlemen from Germany were ready, stoked by the sight of the St. Patrick’s day shenanigans going on around them. First band on the bill were Death of Salesman, warming the crowd with their extremely aggressive death core, followed by the impressive By Any Means, whose super tight Hardcore really got the crowd of about 100 people going at the time and really made my worry about Kiltribe’s position at the end of the running order. Next up were our hosts and Metalcore talents Gacy’s Threads, whose show was as expected: energetic, engaging and blowing my brains off. Not only did they take no prisoners with their sound, they were so kind to shorten their set to give more time to the Killtribe who were on stage shortly after 12. And Belfast ate out of their hands. We had some alcohol-induced losses in crowd headcount, but the 40 people who stayed made noise for 200. We had crowdsurfing, moshing, and two encores while the bar staff was already cleaning up the place. Some unnamed band members even were invited to a female-only party after the show, but due to the overall tiredness of the driver a.k.a yours truly we followed the Gacy’s Threads guys to our overnight accommodation, we 5 out of 7 Killtribe-tour-tross members crashed immediately on the beds/floors/mattresses, while the remaining two hellraisers joined Gacy’s Threads and a bottle of Buckfast on a house party. Reports are just coming in that they were last seen dancing to Britney Spears.