LIVE REPORT: Death to All, Taine, Species [11 June 2026]

What is there to do when you realise that “Spiritual Healing” turns 35 and “Symbolic” turns 30, and that tracks from both are set to reach your ears live? You start counting down the days until the announced concert date.

For Romania, that point was 11 June 2026. So, we all headed to Quantic in Bucharest for some serious doses of death metal, progressive death metal and technical/progressive thrash metal from Death to All, Taine and Species.

Beyond Familiar Reaches

The task of opening the evening fell to Species from Poland. Active since 2018 and with two full-lengths behind them, the members of the group have built their identity around themes of technology, science fiction and humanity’s increasingly complex relationship with its own creations. Not the easiest themes in the world, right? Yet in the sphere of technical/progressive thrash metal, these themes needed to exist.

From the outset, the musicians showed they knew exactly what they wanted to achieve. Agile riffing, carefully measured tempo shifts and a performance executed with confidence transformed the venue into a departure point aimed somewhere beyond familiar reaches.

The distance between stage and audience quickly disappeared. Engaging with those gathered before them, they offered a brief invitation before accelerating once more into the unknown:

“We are Species and we would like you to invite to a journey through space.”

Their set drew material from “To Find Deliverance” [2022] as well as the more recent “Changelings” [2025], revealing both the early contours and later expansion of their musical language.

Among everything performed that evening, “The Essence” and “Born of Stitch and Flesh” from their latest album captured my attention the most.

It was within those compositions that their approach revealed itself most clearly: taking the momentum of classic thrash metal and pushing those foundations further through attentive execution and a modern perspective that never felt imposed for its own sake. Music made for headbanging and for questioning where meaning begins to fracture, where identity starts to shift, and whether progress eventually reaches a point where humanity no longer recognises itself.

I had never seen Species live before that evening. I enjoyed discovering the musicians. A welcome breath of fresh air within technical/progressive thrash metal.

The Other Side of Reflection

The evening continued with Taine from Romania. Active since 1993, the musicians stepped onto the stage with the sort of longevity that few receive and even fewer justify, while their work has long circled questions of philosophy, human nature and introspection.

With two significant full-length releases to their name, “Cealaltă parte” [1999] and “Chaos & Contemplation” [2023], the members of the formation occupy a distinctive place within the Romanian progressive death metal landscape. Whatever trust the audience had placed in them over the years remained intact.

Their music was never content with noise alone. There were always questions hidden in those songs. Questions without hurry to receive answers.

That remained true live.

No unnecessary gestures. No race to prove technical ability. The musicians allowed the songs to breathe and trusted them to find their own way across the room. Some passages arrived with force. Others stood still for a moment and let the silence around them do part of the work.

There are performances where you admire execution and forget them a week later.

This was not one of those.

Among the songs performed, “Vanity” and “Psalm I & II” from “Cealaltă parte” stayed with me the most.

Something changed once those compositions left the record and entered the room.

“Vanity” sounded harsher than I remembered and, strangely, more human. The reflections hidden in it no longer felt like observations made from a distance but thoughts spoken aloud after everyone else had gone home.

“Psalm I & II” followed differently. Less direct. Less willing to explain itself. The sort of composition that opens one door only to show another corridor.

And somewhere in all of that there remained another feeling.

The members of Taine seemed aware that evenings like this do not happen often. There was no need to announce it. It sat in the pauses, in the expressions exchanged on stage and in the way the musicians approached the material.

What Endures in Sound

Indeed, an evening like that does not happen often. And any path into death metal eventually circles back to Death.

The musicians gathered under the name Death to All pay tribute to the original Death. Among those taking part stand vocalist and guitarist Max Phelps, drummer Gene Hoglan, bassist Steve DiGiorgio and guitarist Bobby Koelble. Together, the Americans return these songs to the stage with the familiarity of people who know where they came from and what they continue to mean.

For newer generations of metalheads, the musicians offer something increasingly uncommon: an opportunity to hear these songs performed by people who stood close enough to their creation to preserve not only the compositions themselves, but also the spirit that once gave them breath.

They came onto the stage with one thought in mind. It did not need to be elaborated further, only voiced aloud:

“This is an evening dedicated to Chuck, to his memory.”

The occasion marked 35 years of “Spiritual Healing” and 30 years of “Symbolic”, and the evening’s selection reflected that accordingly, drawing heavily from both records and returning those songs to the room they deserved.

“Defensive Personalities” from “Spiritual Healing”, alongside “Zero Tolerance” and “Crystal Mountain” from “Symbolic”, stood out in that set. The room reacted immediately to each of them. Familiar riffs brought instant movement, and the attention in the venue shifted as soon as they began.

The artists played them without altering structure or extending passages beyond what was written. The songs moved as recorded, line by line, without deviation.

What remained under them was the same thread that runs through Chuck Schuldiner’s writing: human, uneasy, and still visible inside the precision of the compositions.

Were our neurons shattered? Yes. They were.

More than anything, this was a concert for the adolescent version of myself who never had the opportunity to witness Death on stage. It was also a concert for the person I am today, reminding me what Death once meant to me and why that significance has never truly faded.