(((O))) Live: Igorrr • Master Boot Record • Imperial Triumphant – Shepherd’s Bush Empire

With the reliably awesome Old Empire bringing three of the most interesting avant-garde-leaning bands around to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, tonight is all about combining genres in new and interesting ways. For Imperial Triumphant, that means playing dissonant, grandiose death metal filtered through the mind of a Golden Age jazz musician.  For Rome’s Master Boot Record, that means processing exuberant neo-classical power metal as 16-bit video game music; or is that the other way around?  

With France’s Igorrr, however, it’s a different kettle of fish entirely, constituting nothing less than all-out genre fuckery. Here the rule book – if there ever was one – has been dipped into a fish-besmirched percolator and thrown out of the window. More on that later.  

The Shepherd’s Bush Empire was built in 1903 and ran as a music hall until the 1950s, featuring legendary performers such as Charlie Chaplin in 1906. With Art Deco- and baroque-inspired features, the venue has a sense of history, style, and scale – all of which lend it very well indeed to a band like Imperial Triumphant, whose entire aesthetic is so explicitly inspired by the glitz and glamour of New York during the Jazz Age.  

The band sure set the perfect tone for their show using a black-and-white, cartoon cigarette advertisement, almost uncanny in its strange familiarity, and somewhat menacing for the naivety of its message. Entering the stage, the core three-piece version of Imperial we get tonight stands out against this monochrome video with their golden masks and guitars like a rather theatrical sunrise. I think this is the best sound I’ve experienced for one of their shows, with the density of their compositions rendered clearly, allowing for the nuances to shine through. This is especially important for Imperial as I’ve been to other shows where the sound was a bit muddy and it really took its toll on the experience. And, while I’ve absolutely loved seeing them play with extra brass players in the lineup previously, the relative simplicity of their core three-piece lineup does make for extra clarity here.  

Although. . . Zachary does bring out a bugle at one point, keeping all the brass fans in the audience happy, with brief blasts of plaintive melody.  

Zachary, Imperial Triumphant. Photo: Diana Revell

Steven (the Bull) prowls the stage, his (spray-painted?) gold bass shooting out sunbeams into the crowd, a wonderful contrast to its grinding, dirt-encrusted tone, string slapping to accentuate key notes, and laying down nasty noise solos. Zachary (the Sun), somewhat restricted by his mic-duties, makes the most of every second he is not singing to tease complex, intertwining dissonant harmonies from his guitar. While Kenny (the Moon) nails every rolling tom pattern, and every broken polyrhythm with the Goldilocks combination of precision and passion.  

Tonight’s set leans towards the superb recent album GoldStar (2025), including ‘Gomorrah Nouveaux’ and ‘Eye of Mars’, but it’s exciting to hear an early track (‘Devs est Machina’) from the first record. And it was absolutely superb: a perfect mixture of strong visual and sonic aesthetics that showcases this unique band at the very best of their abilities.  

Whoever chose tonight’s mid-band setlist goes seriously hard as the crowd all starts to dance uncertainly to the unrelenting gabba remixes on offer. (Is that Cher I can hear, somewhere in the mix over furiously pounding beats at tempos beyond the remit of human drummers?)  

As the stage starts to be arranged for the second support, we get a pretty clear reminder of who’s up next: ‘MBR’ reads a banner in the classic IBM font. There’s a kind of nerd ritual shrine to the god of gaming off to the left, with monitors, consoles, laptops, Transformer totems, magical sigils, and possibly even a true magical object that commands mighty power and fear: a desktop printer. 

Master Boot Record position themselves as the expression of a 64MB computer which processes metal and classical music, but, live at least, it does feel the other way around. For a three-piece, this time two guitars and drums, MBR sure make a wide sound. This is power metal, complete with Timotei-grade long hair, fast, flashy virtuoso guitar solos the sheer speed and melodic onslaught of which feels and sounds rather appropriately like Sonic zooming through an endless torrent of rings. And V, the project’s mastermind, certainly doesn’t play down the exuberance of his music, shredding on his highlighter-orange Ibanez.  

V, Master Boot Record. Photo: Diana Revell

As if this didn’t give us enough to process, there’s the screen at the back which moves steadily from user commands entered into the DOS prompt through a selection of classic computer game scenes. While I’m not much of a gamer, I at least recognize seminal Streefighter II combat, and am delighted to see footage from the LucasArts adventure era such as Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle.  

It’s certainly an incredibly fun show, and one which doesn’t drag or outstay its welcome, which – let’s face it – a lot of power metal can do.  

No one is really ready for Igorrr, let’s face that too. I have seen them live before, so I know what to expect, but I’m still not ready. There will be plenty of folks here who are wondering if Igorrr can pull off their utterly unhinged music – jerking frantically between genres, styles, moods, and radically different instrumentations – live.  

The answer is a resounding yes. They don’t just pull it off: Igorrr’s show is a tour de force of live performance, theatricality, staging, and pure sonic madness and power. Not bad for a band named after main-man Gautier Serre’s pet gerbil.  

I count a total of five members tonight. As far as I can ascertain, they are as follows: Gautier on guitar, sequencing, and stripped down drums; Marthe Alexandre on mezzo-soprano “Opera vocals”; JB Le Bail on harsh vocals; Martyn Clément on guitar; and Rémi Serafino on drums.

Martyn Clément, Igorrr. Photo: Diana Revell

If ‘Daemoni’ provides a deep, atmospheric introduction followed by mid-temp glitch-metal, another recent track ‘Blastbeat Falafel’, featuring members of Mr Bungle no less, a little later takes us to a space of thrashing extreme metal with Arabic-scale interludes and virtuoso Dave Lombardo double-kick. 

Purists may well gripe about the amount of Igorrr’s live sound that is sequenced in via samples, with the parts not played on a live instrument: there are no violins on stage for ‘Hollow Tree’ or ‘Nervous Waltz’, for example. But that amount is actually quite low, with Serre and Martyn covering a lot of sounds on keys or guitar.  

The amount of incredible musicianship on display here is staggering, but I have to make a special mention for Marthe on Opera Vocals. Clad in a red dress, streaming woven plaits from the bodice, Marthe’s voice is truly wonderous to hear live: clear and angelic at the top, deep and rousing at the bottom, while she commands attention with her energetic stage presence, and dramatic, expansive gesturing. Not to mention the range of languages that she seems to cover.  

Marthe Alexandre, Igorrr. Photo: Diana Revell

There’s an especially memorable moment where Rémi and Gautier play a guitar/double-drum duet on ‘Very Noise’, demonstrating that those wild, glitching D&B passages can in fact be played live. 

Igorrr aren’t the first band to really fuck with genre, and comparisons can be drawn between them and Mr Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and Aphex Twin. But no one does it quite like this; no one creates sonic tapestries woven from extreme metal, breakcore, baroque music and folk only to unravel and reweave them so chaotically. Whether your ears will actually enjoy listening to art so radical is not something I can comment on; but what I can say is that the Igorrr live experience is second to none, and should be witnessed by anyone with even the slightest interest on one occasion at the very least. 

The organizers of this tour should feel proud for bringing together three acts with such disparate sonic interests, yet making the evening feel perfect, exciting, and essential.  

Igorrr. Photo: Diana Revell