Lorna Shore, Rain, Rust, and Ritual in Manchester's O2 Victoria Warehouse

ANDI CALLEN
4 days ago
3 min read

O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester 10th February 2026

WORDS CHRIS BELLIS / IMAGES ANDI CALLEN

Lorna Shore, Rain, Rust, and Ritual in Manchester's O2 Victoria Warehouse — Photo Credit Andi Callen

It was one of those Manchester nights where the rain doesn’t fall so much as linger. The pavements around O2 Victoria Warehouse glistened under sodium lights, coats steamed gently in the queues, and everyone looked quietly pleased to be anywhere but dry and sensible. Victoria Warehouse always feels like a place where heavy music makes sense — a brutalist hangover of brick, iron, and echo that seems to demand volume. On nights like this, it doesn’t just host gigs; it absorbs them.

Inside, the venue’s cavernous sprawl swallowed bodies quickly. The air thickened early. You could feel it even before the headliners — a sense that this wasn’t just another stop on a tour, but a pressure point. Manchester crowds have a reputation for not giving themselves away easily, but when they go, they go. And by the time Lorna Shore were due onstage, the room felt primed.

There’s been a lot of chatter following this tour — word filtering north from London and Birmingham that Lorna Shore had levelled up again. Bigger rooms, bigger production, bigger expectations. Those earlier dates sounded like a band learning how to dominate scale without losing menace. Manchester, though, felt like the moment where everything locked into place.

The support acts had already done their job properly: not filler, not foreplay, but a genuine escalation. By the time the stage was cleared for the main event, the crowd was restless in that specific way — half-exhausted, half-hungry, fully ready.

SUPPORT BAND IMAGES -

Humanity's Last Breath, Whitechapel, and Shadow of Intent

There was no easing into it. When Lorna Shore arrived, it was immediate and overwhelming — lights flaring, sub-bass punching straight through the ribcage, and a wall of sound that seemed to stretch the Warehouse’s already generous acoustics to breaking point. This wasn’t precision-for-precision’s-sake technicality; it was controlled violence, theatrical but never hollow.

Being there, in the middle of it, you felt how physical the band’s music has become. Songs didn’t just land — they collapsed into the room. The pit was relentless but oddly communal, strangers hauling each other upright between breakdowns like it was part of the choreography. You didn’t watch this show so much as endure it, and that was exactly the point

At the centre of it all was Will Ramos, less a frontman than a focal point for everything feral and cathartic in the room. His presence was commanding without slipping into cliché — no over-rehearsed crowd commands, no empty bravado. Instead, he let the songs do the talking, switching effortlessly between inhuman gutturals and moments of genuine vulnerability.

Live, the more emotional material hit harder than expected. Where recordings can sometimes feel grandiose to the point of distance, here it was intimate in the strangest way — thousands of people screaming along to something deeply bleak and somehow finding release in it.

What made this night feel special wasn’t just the band’s performance, but how Manchester responded. This wasn’t passive consumption; it was participation. From the front barrier to the very back, heads moved, bodies surged, voices joined in where lungs allowed. The Warehouse, notorious for being hard to fully win over, felt conquered by the final stretch.

As the set closed and the lights came up, the room looked wrecked — fog hanging low, floors slick, faces flushed and grinning. Outside, the rain was still there, of course. Manchester hadn’t changed. But for a couple of hours inside that building, something had.

SET LIST