Rituals and Riffs at Club Academy Manchester - Dogma Turn the Night into a Sin-Soaked Spectacle
- Luke Storey
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Club Academy, Manchester, May 1st , 2026
WORDS / IMAGES LUKE STOREY (ShotbyStorey)
You could feel it before you even got through the doors—something weird and devotional brewing in the concrete lungs of Club Academy. Not your standard Saturday night metal crowd either. This was a congregation. Leather, lace, corpse paint, and yeah—more than a few ghostly nuns drifting through the Manchester night like they’d taken a wrong turn out of some fever dream Vatican.
South of Salem kicked the whole thing open like a cracked ribcage.
From the first note, no easing in, no polite handshake—they just went for it. Big riffs, immediate impact, like a bar fight set to a groove. The kind of energy that makes you forget the room isn’t that big. They played it like an arena anyway. Bodies started moving fast—heads snapping, shoulders loosening, strangers suddenly united in that primal nod of “yeah, this is it.”
They had that rare thing: chemistry you can’t fake. Bouncing off each other like pinballs, feeding off the crowd, feeding off the noise. Those breakdowns hit like collapsing scaffolding—heavy, deliberate, made for headbanging until your neck begs for mercy. And the crowd? Already singing along like they’d been waiting all week just for this release.
At some point I caught myself thinking: this is just the support? That’s when you know they’ve done it right. Not just warmed up the room—they claimed it. And there was something else too, something lurking beneath the riffs: a shared atmosphere with what was to come. A kind of dark, ritualistic edge. Like they were the opening sermon before the main rite.
Then came Dogma.
And suddenly the whole night tipped over into something else entirely.
You don’t just “go to” a Dogma gig—you stumble into it like a hallucination. People dressed as spectral nuns lining the street, some grinning, some dead serious, like they’d signed a pact. I swear I saw Jesus at one point. Or someone doing a very committed impression. Either way, it fit.
Five women. Nun attire. Metal music. Satanic overtones turned up to eleven and dipped in something unmistakably theatrical—part ritual, part cabaret, part unholy mass. Imagine if Ghost got dragged through a velvet-draped dungeon and came out wearing lipstick and bad intentions.
They opened with “Forbidden Zone,” and from that moment, it wasn’t just a gig—it was a performance in the full, old-school sense. Every movement choreographed but never stiff, every glance loaded, every expression dialed up like they knew you were watching and dared you to look away. Especially the faces—twisted, seductive, mocking, divine and profane all at once.
The lead singer didn’t break character for a second. Not once. Calling the crowd her “sinners,” framing the whole night as a ritual—and the wild part? It didn’t feel like an act. It felt committed. Like we were all in on something slightly dangerous and completely ridiculous, and that was exactly the point.
Musically, they didn’t slack either. Tight, loud, and confident. But it was the fusion—the sound welded to the spectacle—that made it hit. A metal cover of “Like a Prayer” turned the place inside out. Madonna reimagined as something darker, heavier, almost blasphemous in the best way. The crowd ate it up, shouting along like they’d just discovered religion and immediately rejected it again.
By the encore, the room was theirs completely. “Pleasure with Pain” landed like a confession screamed into the void, and “Father I Have Sinned” had the entire crowd roaring that chorus back like it meant something personal. Like absolution through distortion.
They closed with “The Dark Messiah,” and it felt final in that dramatic, curtain-falling way—not just the end of a set, but the sealing of whatever strange pact had been formed in that room.
Is it a gimmick?
Of course it is.
But here’s the thing—gimmicks don’t work unless you believe in them. And Dogma believe. Fully. Unapologetically. And because of that, so do you—at least for the length of the show.
It was ridiculous. It was theatrical. It was loud, sweaty, and a little bit unhinged.
And yeah—I’d go back and do it all again without hesitation.
SET LIST
Forbidden Zone
Feel the Zeal
My First Peak
Made Her Mine
Banned
Fate Unblinds
Carnal Liberation
Free Yourself
Bare to the Bones
Like a Prayer
(Madonna cover)
Make Us Proud
(Unknown)
(New song)
Pleasure From Pain
Father I Have Sinned
The Dark Messiah
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