Collosseum Club in Košice, Slovakia, is one of the top sites for underground metal, punk, and other extreme music in Slovakia, advertising itself with the slogan “Where the subculture lives.” Once we hit the city, it was clear we had to check out what’s cooking in the cave located in the old town of Košice. And on Friday, June 13th, 2025, it was just the offering that seemed fitting to the place’s image, as the Chilean duo DIAVOL STRÂIN and the French-Italian duo PUTAN CLUB arrived to serve their shows at the Collosseum Club.
The Collosseum Club is hard to find in the first place. There is no name on the door, and the visitor has to be brave enough to enter through a corridor that still bears no clear marking of a rock club (albeit one can hear the music and head in following it). Once in the bar, there are two stages, a larger one in the main hall and a smaller one upstairs. The show we went to see was on the smaller stage, large enough for maybe a hundred people, fully packed. There weren’t a whole lot of people present when the show was about to start, but quickly the audience started pouring in, and once the music started, it was maybe half full.
DIAVOL STRÂIN opened the night with their black-lipped makeup and a post-punk / dark-wave approach. The band is a duo of Lau M on bass and lead vocals, and Ignacia Strâin on guitar and backing vocals. The setup is completed by backing tracks with some drum loops and synth lines.
DIAVOL STRÂIN play it straightforward with M‘s bass and the drum loops creating the music’s base, and Strâin building some interesting harmonies on top with a heavily effected guitar sound. For listeners with a taste for post-punk and new wave bands like THE CURE there is a lot to like here. They’re not simple traditionalists, though; there is quite a lot of originality to the songs too, and Strâin definitely has some interesting and original riffs.
The live act started with a somewhat disengaged style, likely a chosen approach, but started to warm up as the intensity of the songs rose as well during the show. By the end of their act, DIAVOL STRÂIN had the audience dancing and well warmed up for PUTAN CLUB.
The first thing to note about PUTAN CLUB’s performance is that they do not play on stage but bring their mics and instruments amongst the audience. This is likely a choice of principle as they have a lot of other principles as well, as they put it on their website: “Supporting ideas of grassroots-level self-organizing, mutual aid, solidarity, sustainable development, animal-friendly lifestyles, anti-authoritarianism, autonomy, feminism & revolution and other initiatives that aim to create a more just and free society.” During the show, we also heard they originally never meant to make a record, although they now have one studio album and a live album for sale.
Enough about the background and on to the show, then! PUTAN CLUB truly blew the place apart from the start. It’s hard to put genre labels on a band that actively defies being labeled, but there is quite a bit of industrial here, but also scents of jazz, techno, and metal. It’s all wrapped in a setup that creates a fabulous atmosphere of a tribe ritual rather than a rock concert: the artists, Gianna Greco (bass, vocals) and François R. Cambuzat (guitar, vocals) started up on the opposite sides of the gig hall, both with their orange effect light shining from the ground, which created and immediate association to two camp fires.
As the playing started, the audience quickly started to create circles around these lights, and soon the place was a dancing frenzy around the two lights. The artists didn’t stick to their places, though, but started moving around the place amongst the audience. There was some fantastic audience-artist interaction going on, as both Greco and Cambuzat went about finding different groups and individuals in the audience and knitting the whole room into one big group all taking part in the hypnotic dancing ritual.
In a way, the PUTAN CLUB show really is what they preach about: an act of bringing people together and creating maybe little seeds of resistance as people interested in their ideals find each other and come together. It really is something to be experienced, as words fail to grasp the feeling in the pumping, pulsating crowd that they bring together.
PUTAN CLUB is also a regular visitor in Finland, so we’ll be sure to keep them on our radar once the band constantly on tour will be to the north again. Check our photo gallery here…
Diavol Strâin
Putan Club
