Concert Review: Samurai Pizza Cats & Enemy Inside, Club Volta Cologne, 1 May 2025

It’s been a while since I last saw the Samurai Pizza Cats, and I think I’ve never been to a headline show before, so I was pretty excited about this one. The excitement grew even more when they announced that people coming to the show in a super hero costume would get a goodie. While I didn’t plan to wear a super hero costume myself, I expected this show to be fun. And it was – although it was probably one of the hottest days of the year.

Enemy Inside

Opener that night were Enemy Inside. Before the show I took a moment to listen to their latest album, just to get an idea of their sound. I personally wouldn’t know how to classify their music. The latest album Venom sounds pretty much like metalcore with a heavy electronic influence, which kinda matches the vibe of Samurai Pizza Cats. Personally, I think their sound is nice, but not super … varied? I hoped that maybe their live performance would convince me a bit more.

Generally, their sound was good and I liked their performance visually (once the fog was gone – in the beginning there was so much fog on the stage that I couldn’t see anything that was going on, maybe also because we decided to stand quite far at the back at the sound/light technicians. Because of my spot there I found out that they had the same light guy as Self Deception, so shout out to Andy, who once again did a great job with the light, if only there was less fog :D). Also their singer has a great voice, I absolutely loved her vocal performance! Really powerful, and I’m a fan of her tone. Unfortunately, otherwise they didn’t quite catch me. I had the same issue as with their album: there wasn’t really much diversity in their music, so halfway throughout the set it started to drag on a little for me.

The most outstanding song was Sayonara, which really has a lot of earworm potential – but also a lot of potential to quickly go on my nerves 😅 Although the live performance of that song was nice and energetic.

But I don’t think that there was generally much activity in the crowd, so maybe I was not the only one not quite vibing with them. To be fair, that day was super hot, and so was the club, and I personally already felt that just breathing was too much activity, so that might’ve kept others from powering too much, too, but I can’t tell for sure.

So all in all they were okay, I liked their sound, but I wished for a little more … I don’t know.

Samurai Pizza Cats

As mentioned in the short intro, Samurai Pizza Cats invited people to visit the show in super hero costumes – and they stuck to their own assignment. At least more or less: Singer Sebastian entered the stage dressed as Super Mario, so I guess the term „super hero“ was a little stretched here 😅 Guitarist Daniel and bassist Stefan wore … I don’t know how to describe their outfits. Skirts. Both of them. I didn’t see Daniel as much, so I can’t say too much about his outfit, but Stefan combined his skirt with a pink fluffy vest and a pink headband. So not really super heros, but super hilarious. I didn’t see drummer Stefan though, I was simply too far in the back, so no idea what he wore.

And I kid you not: as soon as they started, mayhem broke out. They really tore down the club. The moshpit was huuuuge and totally crazy and there were crowdsurfers and crowdsurfers and crowdsurfers (great fun because there was no pit at the front, they simply arrived on stage and quite a lot of them then jumped back in and surfed all the way back). The energy I was missing during Enemy Inside exploded during the Samurai Pizza Cats set and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen so much energy in the crowd. It was truly amazing. Despite the temperatures! Everyone was feeling hot, the band needed a few water breaks and I’m sure Sebastian kinda regretted his Super Mario outfit 😂

I don’t remember their full setlist, but I think their latest single Pandastruck came quite early in the set, soon followed by Outcast. I also remember for example Freakshow, Alpha, Have A G.O.O.D. Day, Welcome to the Fight Club, The Wolf In Me and of course Super Zero. Unfortunately I can’t find a complete setlist of the show either, so I can’t say anything about the order of the songs and this set seems very incomplete to me. Anyway, the grand final was a pizza eating duel for which they chose two people from the audience to compete in pizza-speed-eating. The winner more or less loked like she was about to choke because she just … I don’t know, inhaled her part of the pizza 😂 It was probably one of the wildest „show acts“ I’d ever seen at a concert. Obviously this was followed by their song Pizza Homicide, which, if I remember correctly, was also the last song that night.

Now coming back to the goodie-thing: Instead of only giving goodies to people dressed up as super heroes, every visitor of the show got a Super Zero energy drink and a signed SPC-poster when leaving the venue. The print of the poster has a really good quality, super nice to touch, but I haven’t tried the energy drink because I don’t like them very much (I assume it’s the same drink as the Tentacle Tantrum drink Electric Callboy once gave out as a goodie for merch orders).

All in all that was a super wild – and super hot! – evening and I felt super groggy afterwards. Very intense – but I hadn’t expected anything else. Samurai Pizza Cats shows are always an intense workout, and with almost 30°C outside it gets even worse 😂 Great show and I’m excited to see them again at least two times this year.