Devin Townsend played Union Chapel in London on Sunday, September 6, another stop on "Metamorphosis", the European solo tour he is currently working his way across the continent with. Fan-filmed video from the night has since gone up as a YouTube playlist, one song at a time.
The premise of "Metamorphosis" is that there is nothing standing between Townsend and the room. No band, no fixed running order, no production to disappear into. It is 23 shows across ten different countries, and the setlist is expected to move night to night — which, for a musician with 31 studio albums behind him, means the pool he is drawing from is close to bottomless. PUNKY BRÜSTER, CASUALTIES OF COOL, DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT and STRAPPING YOUNG LAD all sit somewhere in that catalogue, and any of it is fair game. So, in typical fashion, are the surprises.
Union Chapel is a pointed room to do this in. It is a working Victorian church in Islington with pews instead of a floor, and it rewards exactly the kind of unaccompanied performance Townsend has built the tour around.
The run follows "The Moth", the orchestral metal record he released in May through InsideOut Music. Twenty-four tracks long, it started as a vague idea more than a decade ago and sat in the back of his mind as what he has called his life's work. It stayed there until roughly six years ago, when, after an acoustic show in Amsterdam, the head of the Noord Nederlands Orkest approached him with an offer to bring an orchestra to his back catalogue.
"The Moth" ended up split across three distinct releases. Alongside the main album, "The Moth - The Afterlife" foregrounds the orchestra and choir in what amounts to a purer version of the piece, while "The Moth - The War" documents the live debut, performed in the Netherlands in March 2025, with all the exposed nerve that a first performance carries.
Townsend's career has run from extreme metal through ambient and into orchestral writing without ever fully settling in any of them. He came up fronting STRAPPING YOUNG LAD; records such as "Ocean Machine" (1997), "Empath" (2019) and "Lightwork" (2022) have since made a virtue of swinging between brutality and something close to weightlessness. Stripping all of that back to one man and a stage is, on paper, the least likely move available to him — which is presumably the point.