After a fourteen-year struggle for independence followed by more than a quarter-century of civil war, Angola is a country sunk in devastation. Hardcore death metal, thrash metal and melodic death-core: this is the music of a generation of people growing up with the failed promises of the post-war world in Angola. They consider themselves on the brink of a new history, but are disappointed by failed attempts to reconstruct their country after the war. Through music and the truth it expresses, they are picking up the fragments and starting to tell a compelling new story. Huambo was one of the hardest-hit cities in the war, and is where the orphanage is situated, and so there is great symbolic importance in having this concert here. Far from the nihilist connotations we attach to death metal, in this context it is very much a life-affirming event.
