Gig review: Møl at The Key Club, Leeds
Touching down with emo-tinged guitars and a relentless sense of muscular fission, the Aarhus blackgaze favourites further their palate with dexterity and deliverance.
Washes of melancholic synth waft through a smog of dry ice. Neon-hued lights flash in shades of fuchsia and emerald, swirled behind the fog. Then, a scream – singular and brutal, lit with a bludgeoning level of reverb – cuts through The Key Club.
As opening salvos go, there is much to be applauded for Møl’s entrance. The Aarhus blackgaze favourites, back on British shores in support of their third record Dreamcrush, have evolved with the times since they first emerged as the scene’s multi-faceted upstarts.
Here, on a brisk wintery night beneath the Merrion Centre, nestled away from the heavy drizzle that has seemingly hung above Leeds since the new year, they touch down with an unexpectedly eerie sense of euphoria about their sound; crushing rhythms underpinned by emo-tinged guitars and a relentless sense of muscular fission.
Vocalist Kim Song Sternkopf, crouched alternatively low before the risers and atop them, hand braced against the ceiling, has long been a powerhouse vocalist within the domestic scene back home in Denmark.
Here, presiding over his bandmates across an hour-plus set, he snaps from hoarsely guttural to clean fluidity and back again with impressive velocity, switching between his native Danish and English with shrewd delivery; across the frenetic hardcore rhythms of Vestige to the bruising melodies behind Ligament, he holds court with dexterity and deliverance.
Møl’s refusal to be pigeonholed into specific genre constraints serves them well elsewhere; Hud, with its expansive slow-burn hooks, turns its navel-gazing depth into the echo-laden pop-polish of U2, while Penumbra breaks out with surprisingly yearning tones, almost stadium-sized in their writ-large emotion.
Throughout, the band profess a gratitude to those who have braved the cold to make this pilgrimage. “From the bottom of our hearts, thank you,” Sternkopf says, before he finally dives into the crowd for closer Bruma.
It is a fascinating evening that pushes against expectations in all the best ways.