LIVE FROM THE PIT: Fit For a King, Memphis May Fire, Acres and 156/Silence
- Isaac Laing
- Mar 25
- 3 min read
The Lonely God tour marks the culmination of a gradual return to form for FIT FOR A KING. After releasing the front-to-back banger album Dark Skies in 2018, the album that followed, 2020’s The Path, was a disappointing step down. The Hell We Create in 2022 was an improvement, but 2025’s Lonely God sees the Texan five-piece back at their peak. The band seem to know it too – their setlist for this tour contains all but one song from the album.
The show at Manchester’s O2 Ritz was the sixth of a fourty-six-show run through Europe and North America, each kicked off by the Pennsylvanian metalcore outfit 156/SILENCE. Despite being the first band of a four-band lineup, the energy was high throughout – this is a relentlessly heavy band that had the mosh pit open from the first song, and crowdsurfers flowing from the fourth. The massive success of 2024’s People Watching has made 156/SILENCE well worth keeping an eye on, and with punishing performances like this to back it up, it will certainly not be long before they are moving up the billing, and we recommend you be there when they do.
Fresh off the release of their latest album The Host, ACRES kept the momentum going with another very strong set. After three songs of moshing and screaming along to every word, the crowd heartily joined the band in singing happy birthday to bassist Jack Rogers as the band’s team brought out a cake, complete with candles. After that brief wholesome interlude, ACRES returned to their set, putting Ben Lumber’s vocals to work, blending soaring choruses with some brutal screams in their heavier moments. This is a truly versatile band with a lot of range across their discography, which makes their live performances a varied and engaging watch.
You would be forgiven for thinking MEMPHIS MAY FIRE were headlining based on the energy in the crowd when they took the stage. Their set drew heavily from their most recent two albums, 2025's Shapeshifter and 2022’s smash hit Remade In Misery, after kicking off with the older fan-favourite songs The Sinner and Vices. Each member of the band was electric on stage – bassist Cory Elder headbanged so hard it was a genuine wonder his cap did not fly off his head into the seething mosh pit. The Manchester audience was at a fever pitch by the time the band was cheered off stage, but as it turned out, FIT FOR A KING were about to turn it up even further.
Accompanied by unsettling visuals that displayed a title card for each song, FIT FOR A KING opened the pit from the first moments of Begin The Sacrifice, and it did not close again until the end of the night with the final notes of Witness The End – a very neat bookending to both the Lonely God album and the set. It was almost as if those in attendance were trying to make up for the relatively low attendance at this particular show, and when Ryan Kirby announced a run of three particularly heavy songs, the pit was whipped up into a frenzy, raging through Monolith and Blue Venom before culminating in a self-organised wall of death during Ryan’s always-astonishing twenty-five-second scream at the end of Backbreaker.
Bassist Ryan ‘Tuck’ O’Leary then took the spotlight to lead the vocals for Between Us, the closest thing to a ballad the band has released. He quickly returned to his usual incredible bass-spinning antics until the band left the stage after back-to-back floor-shakers Technium and Lonely God. However, no one was fooled by the false exit and FIT FOR A KING shortly returned to perform their biggest hit When Everything Means Nothing and to close the set for real with the Witness The End, a song inspired by horror series Midnight Mass that features one of 2025’s best guitar solos.
Everyone went home sweaty, sore-throated, and incredibly satisfied after an evening that saw four bands delivering kinetic and varied sets to a crowd that met them with everything they had. It is best summarised by a direct quote from John, one of the main characters of the FIT FOR A KING mosh pit – ‘What a night! ‘
Words and photos: Isaac Laing
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