There’s a crackle in the air, the electric hum a festival gains when it’s peaking, and something else too, that instinctive prickle that tells you you’re about to witness something no one’s remotely prepared for. At ten sharp, on the Unicorn Stage, three silhouettes slip out of the shadows: Gustav Danielsbacka, Vidar Nilsson and Nils Lindgren. Hailing from Gothenburg’s Nordic underground, The Family Men walk on with a presence sharp enough to cut straight through the crowd’s chatter.

    The first sound isn’t a chord, it’s a detonation. No count-in, no easing you in. Just a sheer wall of noise slamming into the room like a seismic wave. Guitars crackle, synths erupt in metallic spasms, the drums throb like an engine on the brink of destruction. It’s sound in its rawest state, so physical it seems to bend the air around it. Their music runs on urgency and instinct: industrial rock with shattered bones, glitching electronics, dissonance as emotion, chaos as craft.

    The set leans on their 2024 debut No Sound Forever from Harmful Records, but live, nothing survives intact. Songs are torn apart and rebuilt on the spot. What felt dense and textured on record becomes stripped, direct, almost violent. “Soft Collapse” morphs into an electric mantra, “Machine’s Breath” kicks off in an abrasive loop, and the title track closes the set in an emotional implosion, brutal and beautiful in equal measure.

    They play like they’re testing the limits of what sound can physically withstand. And yet, inside the maelstrom, there’s control. Beneath the distortion and the feedback lurks a kind of surgical precision, an invisible choreography that turns noise into architecture.

    Gustav, the main vocalist, is the epicentre. When he inevitably hurls himself into the crowd, the gig stops being a show and becomes something closer to ritual. Mic in hand, eyes blazing, he wades into the mass of bodies and cables, screaming lines like he’s exorcising something ancient and feral.

    Behind him, washed-out VHS projections jitter against the walls, grainy faces and flickering lights like damaged memories caught in a loop. It’s a visual collage perfectly matched to the music, a universe of glitch and broken beauty, forever on the verge of collapse but never quite tipping over.

    At one point, the sound grows so dense the floor physically trembles. The crowd doesn’t dance, they freeze, eyes wide, breath held, bodies absorbing every frequency. That’s what sets The Family Men apart: they’re not here to entertain, they’re here to infiltrate. Their music hits both body and mind with brute force and strange delicacy, beauty blooming out of breakdown.

    Live, the Gothenburg trio evoke the spirit of bands who pushed rock to breaking point like Swans, Sonic Youth and Einstürzende Neubauten, but they carve out their own vocabulary: broken synths, defective rhythms, loops that feel like worn-out tape. There’s tension between machine and flesh, order and disorder, noise and the threat of silence. And that tension is their power. They’re not seeking harmony, they’re seeking release. It’s the sound of collapse sculpted into art, and we loved it.

    When the last note dies and the feedback evaporates, there’s no instant roar of applause, just a brief, almost sacred silence as everyone tries to process what just hit them. Only the people who truly know this band’s sound were here, and it showed in the way they reacted.

    Straight out of a Swedish underground where rock bleeds into noise, The Family Men proved at MIL Festival that their devastating live show reputation is no exaggeration. What they brought to Lisbon was more than a gig, it was a show of force and fragility, of fury and control. One of the standout performances of the entire festival, and we’d been hyped for a lot of bands.