The announcement on July 25, 2025, that The Royal Ritual would replace the cancelled Piston Damp at Infest Festival felt less like a last-minute substitution and more like a homecoming. For a festival celebrating its 25th full edition, the return of David Lawrie’s project was not a sudden elevation, but the continuation of a long and storied relationship.

Lawrie’s history with the festival dates back to a 2008 performance with his former band, Coreline, and The Royal Ritual itself had its beginnings tied to the festival, with a music video premiering during the 2021 online “Stay-in-Fest” edition. This deep connection culminated in the project’s first in-person appearance in 2024, where Lawrie, performing as a duo with live member Dan Kentley, delivered a fascinating and well-received set at the festival’s final year in Bradford.

The 2025 performance marks another evolution. This time, Lawrie returns to the stage as a solo act, stepping into a new, highly significant setting. After years in Bradford, Infest Festival is moving to a bold new home for its anniversary: Manchester Academy. This is not merely a logistical shift. It is a symbolic return to one of the historical crucibles of British post-punk and industrial music.

Manchester is a city haunted by the ghosts of its own darkwave past, a landscape where the spectral melodies of Joy Division first echoed from clubs like Pips, and where venues like The Banshee became sanctuaries for a burgeoning goth scene in the 1980s. In a challenging climate for live music, the endurance and strategic relocation of a 25-year-old festival to this hallowed ground feels less like a change of address and more like a defiant act of cultural fortification.

The Ceremony in Manchester: ‘Live at Infest’

Into this charged atmosphere steps The Royal Ritual, solidifying its place within the festival’s history. On August 15, the opening night, the project will host the official launch event for its new album, ‘Live at Infest.’ The record itself is an artifact of the project’s previous appearance, a full recording of the milestone duo performance at the 2024 festival—an event made more poignant as it was the final year Infest Festival was held at Bradford’s coveted St George’s Hall.

The decision to release a live album capturing the 2024 duo show, and to launch it at the 2025 solo performance, is a confirmation of the primacy of the live experience and the project’s artistic development. This connection is further underscored by a pre-order campaign that feels more like a parish initiative than a marketing strategy: attendees who pre-order the album can collect it in person, bypassing shipping fees and receiving an exclusive tote bag, a small token for their pilgrimage.

The launch of an album commemorating a past triumph at a new moment of evolution confirms that The Royal Ritual is not just selling a product; it is weaving its own history directly into the fabric of a resilient, history-laden community.

The Royal Ritual: The Making of David Lawrie

The sound of The Royal Ritual is defined by the central paradox of its creator, David Lawrie, an artist whose work is forged in the tension between meticulous discipline and transgressive chaos. His journey to the heart of Britain’s dark electronic scene was not a straight path, but a winding one that ultimately defines his unique sonic signature.

The foundation was laid not in a grimy punk club, but in the quiet focus of classical training. Lawrie began formal piano lessons at age seven, but it was recorded music that truly sparked his lifelong obsession. Around the age of nine or ten, after discovering artists like Pink Floyd, he became fascinated with the mechanics of sound production, recalling an obsession with how the immense sound of a band could be captured on something as small as a CD.

This fascination became his guiding principle, leading him from the piano to the electric guitar and, eventually, to the discovery of the artists who would form his darker pantheon: the abrasive electronics of Nine Inch Nails, the abstract genius of Aphex Twin, and the industrial dread of Skinny Puppy.

This combination of structured training and chaotic inspiration propelled him into a professional career marked by academic rigor and diverse practical experience. He earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Music Production from what is now Leeds Conservatoire, all while building a freelance career as a producer for a wide array of independent artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including notable work with IAMX, CocoRosie, and London After Midnight.

He even fell, almost by accident, into a successful side career in film audio, winning an award for his sound design on his very first feature, a shark documentary. This background establishes Lawrie not as a dilettante dabbling in darkness, but as a highly skilled craftsman, a master of audio engineering who chooses to apply his formidable talents to a dark and challenging palette.

The Royal Ritual, then, was not a beginning, but a culmination. It was a project Lawrie says he had “always wanted to do,” born from a desire to be entirely self-sufficient in the studio. The impetus was rekindled in 2018 after seeing friends from the band ohGr perform at the Cold Waves Festival in Chicago, a moment that made him remember how much he wanted to return to the industrial fold.

The project began to take shape in 2019, but it was the profound isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 that solidified it into its current solo form. Working in his private studio in Northern California, Lawrie completed the debut album, ‘MARTYRS,’ a record born entirely of the lockdown. The name itself, which came to him during a cross-country road trip that same year, reflects this very nature: the “Royal” precision of his craft applied to the chaotic, emotional “Ritual” of the genre. He is not a punk making noise in a garage; he is a polished transgressor, a figure of evolution whose work is a highly constructed exploration of chaos, making it at once emotionally wrought and, as critics have noted, “eminently listenable.”

The Catharsis of ‘Pleasure Hides Your Needs’

If ‘MARTYRS’ was an album that looked outward, a product of the global anxiety and political commentary of the pandemic era, then its 2024 successor, ‘Pleasure Hides Your Needs,’ represents a profound inward turn. On this record, Lawrie shifts his gaze from the societal to the self, creating a concept album where each track blends into the next, forming a continuous sonic journey designed to be experienced as a whole.

Lawrie has explained the album’s origins, stating it chronicles “the closing of three distinct chapters of my life,” a process he found to be an “interesting challenge—if at times quite emotionally exhausting.” The album’s very title suggests its therapeutic nature: the idea that the pursuit of pleasure is often a sophisticated defense mechanism, a way to mask our most fundamental and unmet needs. This vulnerability offers a resonant framework for listeners grappling with their own internal struggles in a world still processing its collective trauma.

The album’s sonic landscape mirrors this emotional journey. The music eschews explosive outbursts for a more unsettling form of restraint; Lawrie constructs a soundscape built on a foundation of tightly coiled energy, where the meticulous production seems to serve as a containment field for the raw, underlying emotions. This creates a palpable sense of unease, a feeling that the polished surface could fracture at any moment under the weight of what it holds within.

The record unfolds like a narrative arc, with the instrumental opener ‘Shadow Self’ serving as the prologue. The track constructs its atmosphere by contrasting gentle, chiming sounds with a rising tide of deep, unsettling noise, creating a sense of a storm gathering just over the horizon. It moves through the prog-inflected rock of ‘Vantage.point’ and the “unexpectedly pop tune” of ‘Fifteen14,’ before plunging into the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, ‘Sinner, Gambler, Fugitive,’ a track described as a “sonic and emotional rollercoaster.”

The journey reaches its most abrasive peak with ‘Modes of Violence.’ Here, the album’s simmering tension boils over into outright industrial aggression. The track is driven by sharp, metallic percussion and a distorted, menacing bassline, creating a harsh sonic backdrop for Lawrie’s vocal performance, which is delivered with a raw, strained intensity that conveys a deep internal conflict. Lawrie has called the song “a love song to sing to the narcissist(s) in your life,” a stepping stone for listeners that still contains elements of the more aggressive ‘MARTYRS’ sound. Following the instrumental interlude ‘Magnitudes of Reason,’ the record reaches the bleak, minimal title track before concluding with ‘Coma,’ leaving the listener in a state of quiet, exhausted contemplation.

The music video for ‘Modes of Violence,’ released on May 29, 2024, features a haunting appearance by the artist Alesoun and visually manifests this theme of psychological conflict. Shot in stark, high-contrast black and white, it presents a claustrophobic dance between two figures, one seemingly in control, the other tormented.

The visuals aestheticize the internal struggle, turning a private dynamic of control and anguish into a public spectacle, a visual key that unlocks the album’s core concerns with hidden forms of violence and the fraught nature of human connection. From this peak of aggression, the album descends into its final act.

The Lyrics as Liturgy: Why the Darkness Resonates

At the heart of The Royal Ritual’s appeal lies a profound psychological resonance. The project’s lyrics, whether tackling grand societal critiques or intensely personal struggles, function as a form of secular liturgy for an audience seeking meaning and catharsis outside of traditional institutions. For many who feel alienated and unheard, the dark, emotionally honest music of Lawrie provides a space for a communal reckoning with the shadows, both external and internal.

This is perhaps most explicit in the 2021 single ‘Pews in a Pandemic.’ The song is a direct and incisive critique of organized religion, particularly its commercial and coercive aspects, which Lawrie witnessed firsthand during his decade living in the United States.

While careful not to insult individual belief, he describes the track as an observation of the “divine dictatorship” wielded by a select few who claim a direct line to a deity for financial and social gain. This anti-authoritarian stance taps directly into the historical DNA of industrial music, a genre founded on transgressive subject matter and a deep skepticism of control systems, be they governmental, corporate, or religious.

This introspective focus is most apparent on the album ‘Pleasure Hides Your Needs,’ where the critical lens turns from social commentary to the complexities of the human psyche. The title itself is a therapeutic thesis, and the songs that follow are its supporting chapters. The lyrics of ‘Modes of Violence,’ for example, provide a vocabulary for a specific and painful type of psychological warfare.

The album’s overarching theme of grappling with personal history and emotional exhaustion offers a mirror to listeners navigating their own pasts. The fact that Lawrie offered hand-typed copies of the lyrics on a vintage 1930s typewriter as a Kickstarter reward further emphasizes their significance not just as song components, but as tangible, intimate artifacts of this process.

In creating and performing this music, Lawrie takes on a role akin to that of a modern shaman for his subcultural tribe. He undertakes a difficult journey into dark psychological territory—a process he admits was “emotionally exhausting”—and returns with artifacts of that journey. These artifacts are not just raw screams of pain, but highly structured, articulate explorations of complex themes. They are the insights he brings back to a community that, according to industry reports, finds significant “emotional and mental health improvements” and a powerful “sense of belonging” at such events.

The music provides a framework and a language for processing difficult emotions, transforming a concert into a ritual of shared catharsis. The live performance is the crucial final step in this process—a communal ritual where this shared experience is enacted collectively, solidifying the bond between the artist-as-guide and the audience-as-congregation.

The Ghost in the Machine: Britain’s Darkwave Scene

The Royal Ritual does not exist in a vacuum. It is a product of, and a participant in, a British subculture that is as resilient as it is beleaguered. The United Kingdom’s goth, industrial, and darkwave scene is a complex tapestry woven from threads of historical legacy, vibrant contemporary community, and a struggling economic ecosystem. To appreciate Lawrie’s work is to understand the world from which it emerges—a world born from the decay of post-industrial Britain that continues to find beauty in darkness.

The genre’s roots are deeply embedded in the post-punk malaise of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a sound that emerged from the “gloomy, resigned side of punk and new wave,” a reaction to the political bleakness of the Thatcher era. In the satellite towns and deindustrializing cities of the North, bands forged a new, darker aesthetic.

Leeds gave birth to goth-rock titans like The Sisters of Mercy and The March Violets, while Manchester, already home to the funereal post-punk of Joy Division, became a key hub with clubs that nurtured the nascent scene. These were the crucibles where a generation of outsiders, feeling alienated from the mainstream, banded together under a shared uniform of black clothing and melancholic romance.

Today, the scene presents a study in contradictions. On one hand, its cultural influence is undeniable. Electronic music is the second most streamed genre in the United Kingdom, with London standing as a global capital for listeners. The subculture is experiencing a resurgence, framed as a necessary rebellion against a new era of hard times—from the cost-of-living crisis to rising nationalism.

In this climate, goth is not just an aesthetic; it is an act of finding “joy and beauty in darkness.” Yet, even as its cultural footprint expands, its physical foundations are crumbling. The United Kingdom’s live music industry is in crisis. Since the start of the pandemic, 32% of the nation’s nightclubs have permanently closed their doors. Grassroots venues, the lifeblood of any underground scene, are being squeezed into oblivion by soaring inflation, diminished audiences still feeling the social hangover of lockdowns, and the crippling post-Brexit costs of touring.

This precarity has forced the scene to adapt. In the face of vanishing permanent spaces, the United Kingdom’s goth and industrial community has evolved into a mobile, event-based network. It now operates as a circuit of temporary sanctuaries. Large-scale festivals like the biannual Whitby Goth Weekend, Blackpool’s punk-oriented Rebellion Festival, and, of course, Infest Festival, have become crucial nodes in a decentralized system. These are supplemented by dedicated club nights in cities like London, Manchester, and Leeds, which serve as regional gathering points.

These events are no longer just parties; they are pilgrimages, essential gatherings that allow a geographically scattered tribe to congregate, trade, and reinforce its collective identity before dispersing back into the wider world.

The upcoming Infest Festival is a prime example of this model’s importance. On Friday, August 15, 2025, The Royal Ritual will take the stage as part of a diverse international lineup that highlights the scene’s global reach. The evening will feature German darkwave pioneers Project Pitchfork, the theatrical futurepop of Eisfabrik, the “goth metal mommy” Harpy, and the dark rock of Auger, among others, showcasing a wide spectrum of the dark alternative genre.

This new reality is further complicated by a cultural identity crisis. As goth and darkwave aesthetics are co-opted by high fashion and mainstream pop culture—seen on runways and sported by celebrities—a tension arises within the community about authenticity and dilution. The “hipsterisation” of the look, with its tracksuits and plain t-shirts, stands in stark contrast to the elaborate, theatrical styles of traditional goth, sparking debates about who gets to claim the identity.

At the same time, the scene is becoming more diverse and inclusive, moving beyond its historically white origins and embracing a wider range of voices and influences, a sign of healthy evolution in a culture that has always defined itself as a home for outsiders.

Conclusion

As the launch of ‘Live at Infest’ approaches, the path for The Royal Ritual is already stretching forward, moving from the heartlands of the British scene to new territories. The project, born in American isolation and honed in the United Kingdom, is now poised to become a truly transatlantic entity, carrying its unique blend of polished craftsmanship and raw emotional honesty to a global audience.

This autumn marks a significant milestone: the first-ever United States appearances for The Royal Ritual. As part of the Glōm Fest, Lawrie will bring his sound to the American West Coast, a region with its own rich history in the darker corners of alternative music.

As previously noted in coverage of the festival, The Royal Ritual’s inclusion adds “a layer of sonic diversity and mystique,” with the project bringing an “innovative blend of electronic and industrial music” that “pushes the boundaries of the traditional goth and post-punk framework.”

This tour, which also includes a date back home in Leeds on October 24, represents a crucial expansion, a test of how this distinctly British-forged sound will resonate with a new congregation. It is the next logical step for an artist whose work has always straddled the two continents.

The evolution of the project’s sound also continues. Lawrie has spoken of developing more “Equal Temperament” versions of his songs—stripped-down, atmospheric arrangements led by the piano, the instrument of his childhood training. This hints at a future that may lean further into the “Royal” aspect of his project’s name, a continued exploration of the delicate balance between classical structure and industrial abrasion. It suggests an artist unwilling to rest in a single sonic space, constantly seeking new avenues of expression.

In the end, the upcoming album, ‘Live at Infest,’ is more than just a record. It is a snapshot of an artist, a community, and a culture at a pivotal moment. It captures the sound of a musician reaching a new level of prominence, the energy of a subculture gathering in defiance of economic headwinds, and the enduring power of a tribe that understands the profound beauty and catharsis that can be found in darkness. The ritual, it seems, is far from over. It is merely preparing for its next phase.