Our live report from the DIMMU BORGIR and HULDER show at The Warfield in San Francisco on Friday, August 21, is now online. It was the Norwegians' first appearance in the city since November 28, 2010 — fifteen years and nine months earlier — and part of their first North American tour in eight years.
The bill shrank on the way over. HYPOCRISY were announced for the run but never made it to North America after failing to get visas, and SUFFOCATION played only the eastern dates. That left HULDER opening, and she took a real support slot rather than a token one: seven songs in forty minutes, three of them from "Verbolgen", released two weeks before the show, and nothing at all from the 2021 debut "Godslastering: Hymns Of A Forlorn Peasantry" that made her name.
DIMMU BORGIR played fourteen and pulled only three from "Grand Serpent Rising", the album we scored 7.5/10 earlier this year, leaning on "Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia" and "Spiritual Black Dimensions" instead. There was no encore: "Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse" ran straight into the taped outro "Perfection Or Vanity" and the night ended there.
The report covers what was missing as well — ICS Vortex's clean vocals now come off a backing track, with Shagrath screaming those parts himself on "Reptile" — and what has not changed since our previous report from this same venue in 2008, when six of Friday's songs were already in the set.