Endfest is a volunteer-run festival for all ages, focusing on underground heavy music. This year it was held at the Pori Cultural Center Annis on February 21st. The event featured six bands from across Finland, representing styles ranging from alternative metal to death metal and goregrind.
The band performing on this year event were: Taste of Moth, AherA, Kantør, Fatal Renal Failure, Guts & Corpsume (we have not see this last band).
Taste of Moth‘s music has harsh riffs and a gray world. The band’s prog-tinged alt metal will surely appeal to fans of Katatonia, Muse and Gojira.
AherA is a progressive groove metal band from Jyväskylä, founded in 2024. Their broad genre palette inspires and drives music forward purposefully on its own path. You can hear nuances of groove, black, thrash, death and progressive metal, as well as reggae, jazz and funk. That unique palette takes the listener on a journey through anger, despair, purification and melancholy. The soundscape is colored by frustration with our society and how far humans have fallen from the natural.
KANTØR is a young, fresh and powerful goth-death metal band from Turku. Founded in 2020, the band has grown from a shared passion of friends to an emerging name in the Turku metal scene, aiming for bigger stages. Their music combines melodic death metal and gothic metal with industrial, cathedral and symphonic elements, creating a dark but catchy sound that has been compared to Amorphis, Sentenced and Type O Negative, among others. The band is known for their intense live performance and energetic stage charisma, which has taken them to metal festivals and several cities around Finland.
Founded in 2025, Fatal Renal Failure plays tight and old school style Extreme Death Metal. The band is made up of 3 young guys.
Guts is a Death Metal band from Turku. Their music focuses on mid-tempo rhythms, as well as grooving and trotting riffs. The band has already released 2 rock-hard albums, Decay and Nightmare Fuel. These works, which respect the old school vibe, have gained appreciation among the scene.
The bands featured were very interesting and musically skilled, and most of the audience was under 18. As a reporter, I spotted a couple of bands that could grow internationally in the future. Below are some shots from the evening, credits: Cristina Gregori.