Canadian duo ROMES brought their raw, genre-blurring intensity to London with a headline slot at The Black Heart in Camden Town.
Opening the night were suited Danish upstarts Farveblind, sharp-dressed and primed to detonate with chaotic, techno-fuelled party energy. Seemingly compensating for the absence of their usual third member, the pair hurled themselves around the stage with skull-vibrating electronic beats. Their obvious camaraderie and joy made it easy to forget this was a support slot. It felt more like crashing an unhinged house party. Buckets of sweat, relentless movement and noise made them a hard act to follow.
ROMES took to the stage with a different kind of intensity. The Canadian brothers, currently on their first-ever European tour, traded Farveblind’s colourful chaos for something darker and more controlled. Their sound lands somewhere between nu-metal, hip-hop, industrial and punk, pulsing with a consistent dark electricity across all genre boundaries they cross.
‘Dissolver’, the latest single from their 2025 album SONIC TRASH, arrived angsty and circuit-board possessed, bristling with the spirit of an enraged Trent Reznor. Elsewhere, the dance-punk of ‘Black Honey’ and especially ‘Distorted Feelings’ set the tightly packed room in motion, bodies dancing/bouncing beneath the venue’s low lights.
At other moments, the glitch-heavy synth bombast of ‘The Dread’ carried flashes of Justice-style distortion.
That said, The Black Heart’s cramped confines weren’t ideally suited to the duo’s sound. The small but crowded room offered limited sightlines and little breathing space, at times swallowing the clarity of their layered production. While the intimacy added a sweat-soaked urgency, a larger stage may have better matched the scale of their ambition.
Still, as a statement of intent on their first European run, ROMES proved they are unafraid to experiment, distort and overwhelm — even if the room can barely contain them.
