Counterparts, Dying Wish, Terminal Sleep @ The Gov, Adelaide 12/6/2025
Counterparts are best described as a volcano that spurts out poetry rather than lava. Musically volatile, edgy, and always rumbling when the words eject, they are insightful, raw, and emotionally charged. Tonight, in Adelaide, on the band’s epic Heaven Let Them Die EP tour, the band – and show, are exploding.
The Rob D track Clubbed To Death plays out over the PA, the brilliant electronic masterpiece the walk on song Melbourne’s Terminal Sleep take the first swings to tonight. It has a hard beat, sounds like impending doom and it crushes. Bit like the band who are a powerful distorted presence.
The band sound like a tank with vocalist Bec Thorweston the commander of this weapon of mass destruction. The distortion is loud, the drummer swings like a jazz musician and the deranged look of zombified hunger permeates from Thorweston throughout as tracks A Liars End and Life Guilt roar through the speakers. Hardcore is not meant to sound this epic, yet it does.
Coming over from Portland is Dying Wish. Portland is known for having officially the world’s smallest park – according to the Guinness Book Of Records anyway – however that’s where the similarities end. Nothing is small nor delicate here.
SOS opens and the band firmly place their foot on your throat and do not let up. Vocalist Emma Boster a glorious, mouthy, antagonistic singer backed by the big brothers of a band that have razor riffs and drops that has the place bouncing.
A few hardy stage divers take the lead during Watch My Promise Die however it’s the bands ability to fire up the pit over and over where the real action is. With riffs and breakdowns so deep they could have only been concocted in church’s basement by bored evil spirits, it’s a moshers delight.
Enemies In Red and Lost In The Fall typify the bands sound, the guitar work so sharp and clean they should’ve been in the Saw movies, and every-once in a while a song breaks out in between the Godzilla level breakdowns that everyone is worked up for. Heavy is an understatement.
As those last screams of ‘are you willing to die for this?’ from Dying Wish still ring in your ears we then have the headliners, Counterparts.
The band are like a mixed bag of M&M’s, their records can shift direction and styles subtlety, and their performances can be both simultaneously extravagant or introverted, so you just don’t know what is going to happen.
Recent EP Heaven Let Them Die absolutely crushed last year and the set list starts with two tracks from there, A Martyr Left Alive and With Loving Arms Disfigured and it’s clear we are locked in for something a bit special.
Brendan Murphy, the poet and vocalist of the band, seems to be in an extroverted mood, maybe the tight confines of The Gov stage allow him to express himself freely as the space matches the claustrophobic lyrics?
Either way, he is prowling, fist bumping and sharing the mic with the punters (a theme for the whole evening) as they tore through a fifty-minute run of seventeen tracks of their finest.
Bound To The Burn and the pit is bouncing, Choke and its one-two punches from the guitars rips a hole in time to the point that Murphy states this is the best time he’s had in Adelaide.
Unwavering Vow booms that my drink shakes and To Hear Of War has the guitarists literally drag fans to the sides to allow the carnage that begins to ensue in the lions den of the pit.
Monument shows how much fun the band are having as they jostle for prime position up front, and that becomes clear in the performance. The time changes and subtly of the music can be lost in the fury – and they do love an open chord – yet I’ve arguably never heard them this clean, this surgical while whipping up a storm.
Finishing with Love Me and Whispers Of Your Death, fifty minutes of poetic volcanic eruption has subsided. The band, and Murphy in particular, left nothing off the table. Ears ringing and sweat drenched, neither did the crowd. Splendid.
Live Review By Iain McCallum