Virgil and I trekked out to The Theater at MGM National Harbor, which is the kind of venue where the parking is free but the casino floor between you and the door is itself a slow processional (but excellent for people watching). The bill said “The Amonklok Conquest,” Amon Amarth and Dethklok co-headlining with Castle Rat opening, and I will tell you up front that Steve had it right.
I met Steve in the beer line during the changeover. Steve had not bothered to check the running order beforehand because Steve, being a serious person, assumed that the actual touring metal band with the Viking statues and the rowing songs would be playing last, in the headliner slot, as is tradition. When Amon Amarth came on first, Steve was holding a beer and a confused expression in equal proportion. He scrambled back into the room to catch “Raven’s Flight.” His instinct was correct, the bill was inverted on May 5. I will return to this.
Castle Rat
Castle Rat played old-school doom metal in the Black Sabbath tradition, not the contemporary genre called “doom,” but the sound Sabbath actually made before everyone else got hold of the word. They are also a theatrical production, which they are clear-eyed about. You don’t bring a giant rat monster on stage if you want to be taken seriously. It works.
The lineup is the Rat Queen on rhythm guitar and vocals (somewhere between Cyndi Lauper and Slave Leia), a zombie axeman on lead, a plague doctor on bass, and a heathen shaman in furs on drums, hammering with the fury of a man auditioning for Thor’s cult. The zombie can shred. The Rat Queen narrates the Lore between songs (capital-L Lore, as the kids say), and after trotting out the Castle Rat itself, during “Now Is Forever” a Death Rat appeared on stage and dueled the Rat Queen in dramatic combat. The Death Rat won. The plague doctor revived the Rat Queen with the same potion that had revived the original Castle Rat earlier in the play, while the band swelled behind the resurrection like a community-theater company bracing for the curtain.
Watch Castle Rat perform live for KEXP on YouTube:
I will note, neutrally, that the women on stage were costumed in ways that revealed considerable ass, and the heathen shaman drummer was costumed in ways that revealed only his chest. The asymmetry is observed. The performers are willing participants. I don’t have a verdict; I have a notebook.
It would all read as cheesy if the band were aiming for menace, but they aren’t. Oderus is smiling in Valhalla.
Amon Amarth
Amon Amarth came on as if they were the headliner because they should have been. A Dimmu-Borgir-grade orchestral overture, their runic wordmark emblazoned everywhere, the curtain drop, and then full Viking regalia: Olavi Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg on twin guitars, Ted Lundström on bass, Johan Hegg at center, and Jocke Wallgren elevated behind them on a drum riser shaped like a Viking helmet, hosting an enormous Pearl rig (approximately one thousand and one toms and cymbals), the whole arrangement flanked by giant Viking warrior statues that made the helmet riser look modest. Genuine, historically-accurate Norsemen posed menacingly on either side of the riser during “Shield Wall” with shields and your choice of sword or axe. It’s the kind of staging that has been thought through.
“Live for the Kill” (my personal favorite from Twilight of the Thunder God) produced the first crowd surfer of the night and a glorious cello-into-melodic-death-metal segue. A mosh pit formed during “Cry of the Black Birds,” and Johan Hegg, a veteran showman who has been doing this for thirty years, worked the room with the patience of a man who knows exactly how long it takes a crowd to stop screaming before you can address them. “Are you ready to feast like Vikings tonight?” Yes, Johan (to his credit he addressed the room as DC throughout, dropping the conceit that any band willingly travels to Oxon Hill).
“Death in Fire” was next, it was my first and remains my most-cherished Amon Amarth song from Versus the World, 2001. They followed with “Asator,” “Hermod’s Ride to Hell” (which slowed for a moment just long enough to bring Skaði out as a talking witch-head on the backdrop, which is somehow not the most absurd onstage visual I’ve seen this year), and then “Put Your Back Into the Oar.”
Watch the official music video for “Put Your Back Into the Oar” by Amon Amarth on YouTube:
At some point during the previous song the giant warrior statues were swapped for longships. For “Put Your Back Into the Oar,” Johan instructed everyone to row, and the mosh pit became a Viking ship replete with a topless taskmaster whipping the pit with his shirt. A line of bodies pulling at imaginary oars in unison. “Wow,” Johan said, mid-song, looking out at the rowpit, “you guys really are Vikings, huh.” This is what stagecraft looks like when the band shows up to do the work. Virgil rowed with the gravity of a man who has never been to sea. “We Rule the Waves” followed with backdrop footage of Amon Amarth out on the actual North Sea in actual Viking boats bearing their runemark — no expense spared — and “One Thousand Burning Arrows” added archers posing next to the boats on the helmet riser. “War of the Gods,” from Surtur Rising, is their most accessible thrash-death track, and the dueling lead guitars on this one were the high-water mark of the night.
Steve was lit up during “War of the Gods.” Steve had made the right call.
“Raise Your Horns” was perfunctory, which is fine. And then they did not close with “Twilight of the Thunder God” as advertised but instead they pulled out “Saxons and Vikings,” their collaboration with Saxon from The Great Heathen Army, played live with a recorded call-and-response from Biff Byford on the backdrop. Per the setlists online, they do not always play this song. Tonight they did, and it was a real treat for the heathens in the audience. Then “Twilight of the Thunder God” arrived as the actual closer, with a sea monster looming on stage where the longships had been. It’s been a few years since I saw Amon Amarth live. They’ve still got it.
Dethklok
Here we are.
Dethklok is the in-universe band from Metalocalypse, the Adult Swim cartoon that ran from 2006 to 2013 and which, briefly, made it culturally permissible for the mainstream to like heavy metal again. I was in a not-serious-yet-serious metal band in college during the run, and I owe the show this much: It gave a generation of people permission to laugh with metal instead of just at it. I want to say that clearly so the rest of what I am about to say isn’t mistaken for ingratitude.
The touring band assembled to play the Dethklok music is led by Brendon Small (who created the show and writes the music), backed by a band of accomplished session players whose names you can look up if you care to. The set ran 20 songs. For approximately all of those songs, the band was left unlit on a darkened stage and rendered as silhouettes along the bottom edge of an enormous backdrop, on which the actual show — meaning the Metalocalypse cartoons — played above them.
This is the part that is hard to overstate. Across an entire concert, the touring band declined to be visible. The audience came to see musicians, and the musicians had agreed in advance to be eclipsed by their own cartoons. The cartoon was the show; the band was the backing track, performed live, in the dark, beneath the cartoons, so that nobody would mistake them for the point. Dr. Rockso, the rock-and-roll clown, was wandering around the venue in full cosplay all night and at no point was he less visible than the people on stage.
The set: “Deththeme” intro, “Awaken” (the crowd briefly went bananas), “Bloodtrocuted,” “Burn the Earth,” “Bloodlines,” “Aortic Desecration,” “Happy Klokaversary,” “Birthday Dethday,” “Black Fire Upon Us,” “Dethsupport,” “Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle” (a coffee jingle, genuinely fun), “Concert Tips With Facebones” (which is Aqua Teen Hunger Force energy, complimentary), “The Duel”, “The Gears”, “Face Fisted” (a Batman song, evidently), “Andromeda” (the cartoons turned briefly to female nudity, which I read as a small effort to wake the room), “The Cyborg Slayers,” “Murmaider,” “Thunderhorse,” and “Go Into the Water.”
Watch the official music video for “Go Into the Water” by Dethklok on YouTube:
During “The Cyborg Slayers,” from somewhere down in the silhouettes beneath the screen, a voice addressed the crowd: “Baltimore.”
The room responded “DC.” Repeatedly. Every time the silhouettes said Baltimore, the people muttered corrections in real time. The silhouettes did not adjust. They could not see the room and the room could not see them, and somewhere in the negotiation the city was lost.
The crowd thinned visibly toward the end. The energy Amon Amarth had built across 75 minutes of physical, in-the-flesh metalcraft drained out of the room as the cartoons rolled and the silhouettes played on. By “Go Into the Water” the floor had room to move that it hadn’t had since the beer-line shuffle.
After the last song, the stage lights finally came up, and the band (visible at last) stepped forward and curtseyed. The introductions came after the cartoon was over, which is to say after the show was over, which is to say that the touring musicians were treated as a footnote to their own performance.
This is the diagnosis: It was not a concert. It was a screening with live musical accompaniment (what is this, Wolf Trap?), the accompaniment provided by some of the best players in the genre, hidden on purpose. People paid concert prices and got a multimedia presentation. The people around me on the way out called it legendary, and I do not doubt them, because for the right kind of fan, with the right kind of memory of the cartoon, this was exactly the experience they came for, and Castle Rat and Amon Amarth were the warm-up acts to the real headliner, which was the fans own nostalgia.
I am not that fan. I never quite loved the music enough. Steve and I both were incandescent for Amon Amarth and respectful through Dethklok. A meaningful share of the room that came for Dethklok left before the final song. Make of that what you will (or just blame traffic).
Here are some photos of Amon Amarth performing live at MGM National Harbor on May 5, 2026. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Gerald Henry.
Here are some photos of Dethklok performing live at MGM National Harbor on May 5, 2026. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Gerald Henry.
Here are some photos of Castle Rat performing live at MGM National Harbor on May 5, 2026. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Gerald Henry.
