Dying Fetus and Sanguisugabogg Bring a Sold-Out Night of Extreme Metal to Toronto

Toronto got a full night of death metal on September 23, with five bands packed onto the bill at the Danforth Music Hall. Scorching Tomb, Left To Suffer, Crowbar, Sanguisugabogg and Dying Fetus all came at it from different angles, with Dying Fetus and Sanguisugabogg sharing headlining duties. The show was sold out, and over the course of the night the room went from old-school death metal and sludge to deathcore and the technical brutality of Dying Fetus.

Scorching Tomb from Montreal opened the night with underground death metal. "Stalagmite Impalement", "Diminished to Ashes" and "Bloodlust Sacrifice" established that sound right away, followed by "Feel the Blade", "Skullcrush" and "Sanctum of Bones (Ossuary)". There was no mistaking what they were going for: heavy riffs, a grim atmosphere and a sound that stayed firmly rooted in old-school death metal.

Going on first meant starting the night from zero, and Scorching Tomb did exactly what an opener needed to do. They got the early crowd moving and gave the evening somewhere to go from there.

Left To Suffer brought deathcore into the mix, built around blunt riffs, breakdowns and harsh vocals. The change from Scorching Tomb was immediate. The sound moved away from old-school death metal, leaning more on chugging guitar riffs, sudden stops and the sharp changes.

They stayed in that lane for the whole set. It was a compact slot between Scorching Tomb and Crowbar, but it gave the night another completely different sound before things got slower and much heavier.

Crowbar came on with the confidence of a band that has been doing this for a very long time. They didn’t need to run around the stage or constantly try to grab the crowd’s attention. The bassist was easily the most animated one up there, bringing plenty of movement and personality to the performance. The rest of Crowbar stayed relatively still, letting the music speak for itself and settling into the slow, deliberate heaviness they’re known for. Their seven-song set included "...And Suffer as One", "Planets Collide", "I Feel the Burning Sun", "All I Had (I Gave)", "To Build a Mountain", "Repulsive in Its Splendid Beauty" and "The Cemetery Angels". By the time they reached the last two songs, nothing had really let up. For a band with this much history behind them, the set never felt like some nostalgia exercise either. Crowbar still sounded like a band with plenty of force left in them.

Crowbar also changed the feel of the room. The response they got was huge, and that energy didn’t really drop after they left the stage. By the time the show moved into Sanguisugabogg and Dying Fetus, the crowd was already fully switched on.

Sanguisugabogg came out to a packed, sold-out Danforth Music Hall, and the reaction was immediate. The pit was absolutely wild, with people running in circles, colliding and surging back into the crowd, while crowd surfers kept coming over the barricade. But perhaps nothing speaks to the band's insane energy better than the biggest wall of death I've ever seen at the Danforth Music Hall.

The band opened with "Face Ripped Off" and "Feening for Bloodshed", bringing out the blunt force and lurching rhythms that define their sound right away. A few songs into the set, the band announced that this was their first sold-out date of the tour, which got another huge reaction from the room. The set moved through "Skin Cushion", "A Lesson in Savagery" and "Rotted Entanglement" before pushing into "Repulsive Demise" and "Felony Abuse of a Corpse". The slower, heavier parts hit especially hard, and the sudden jumps back into speed kept the songs from all bleeding into one another. "Ritual Autophagia", "Abhorrent Contraception" and "Narcissistic Incisions" followed, with "Dragged by a Truck" and "Dead as Shit" closing out the set.

Sanguisugabogg’s sound has grown beyond simply throwing speed and brutality at the listener. Their 2025 album Hideous Aftermath put more emphasis on groove, arrangement and production, and you could hear that live too. The riffs would slow down and get almost oppressive before the band kicked back into speed again. That gave the set a lot more shape than just staying at full speed from beginning to end. By the time "Dead as Shit" finished, the set had been relentless, heavy and brutally direct from start to finish. Sanguisugabogg could go from the faster side of death metal into those slower, crushing sections without breaking the flow of the set, and the sold-out room was the right setting for it.

Dying Fetus closed the night in front of a crowd that was already fully fired up. Three musicians, one stage, and more energy than you’d expect from a band that size. It was hard not to think about how much sound they were getting out of just three people. The playing was tight, intense and technically impressive, but it never felt like they were trying to prove anything. The songs stayed at the centre of it all. "One Shot, One Kill" and "From Womb to Waste" got the set moving, followed by "Unbridled Fury" and "Raped on the Altar". The songs came one after another. "Into the Cesspool", "Intentional Manslaughter" and "In the Trenches" didn’t let up, while "Your Treachery Will Die With You" and "Wrong One to Fuck With" brought some of the band’s most recognizable material into the set.

The last stretch brought "Grotesque Impalement" and "Justifiable Homicide". Dying Fetus have spent decades refining this mix of technical playing and extreme aggression, but seeing three musicians actually pull that level of complexity off live is still hard to wrap your head around. With only three people onstage, Dying Fetus managed to fill the entire room with a sound and presence that felt enormous. There was so much happening musically that it was sometimes hard to take it all in. The riffs, the drumming, the constant shifts in intensity it was a lot to process, in the best possible way. They didn’t need elaborate stage theatrics to do it. The music itself was more than enough.

The night ended with the room still giving the band its full attention. Dying Fetus delivered the kind of precise, punishing performance that made their shared headlining spot feel entirely natural. Sanguisugabogg had already made a distinct impression earlier in the evening. With Crowbar adding their own seasoned presence and the two opening bands bringing different shades of heaviness, the sold-out show gave each act a clear place in a long night of metal.