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The profile · researched 2 November 2026
Gruz from a Warsaw basement: Diving Stove's five years from budget demo to arena support
Diving Stove are a Warsaw thrash band who recorded their first songs at home on cheap gear in 2022 and spent 2026 playing in front of Municipal Waste and Acid Drinkers. Their November and December dates put them on arena stages for the first time.
Warsaw, 2021, and a demo cut in a front room
Diving Stove formed in Warsaw in 2021. The first physical evidence of them is a three-track demo, Straight Outta Basement, released on 29 August 2022: The Room, Mercy Never Arrives and Hell On Earth, running just under thirteen minutes between them. The band's own note on the release is unusually plain about how it was made — three tracks that started the history of the group, recorded in house conditions on budget equipment, which they credit for the raw and heavy character of the result. All three songs survived into the live set and two were later re-recorded for the debut album.
The genre tag that follows them around is thrash metal, and it fits, but the band prefer their own word: gruz, Polish for rubble. Music Week Poland, which later booked them, repeated the description and called it an honest one. It is a useful label because it covers what the thrash tag misses — the crossover and punk edges, the deliberate scruffiness, the refusal to present as a polished product.
What made them conspicuous on the Polish scene was arithmetic. When the debut arrived they were still teenagers, a fact every reviewer led with, and one that placed them alongside Hamulec and Sanity Control in what Polish promoters started describing as a new school of domestic thrash rather than a revival of the old one.
Atavism, and the reviews that followed it
Atavism, the debut album, came out on 26 October 2024 through South Warsaw Studios, a small Warsaw label run by Filip Pągowski of bhp and R.I.P., whom the band call their godfather. The record was split across two rooms: drums at Nebula Studio with Maks Szymczak, vocals and the remaining instruments at No Stress Studio, with an engineer credited as Zoran handling the recording, assembly and mix. The sleeve and booklet were designed by Ela Woźniak and function partly as a photographic record of the band's first four years.
The track order is deliberately uneven. Trains Colliding, issued as a single in August 2024, opens; Everasting leans on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and Iron Maiden in particular; Mercy Never Arrives returns from the demo. Then comes a short comic stretch — the chanted Oh Tonight, and Alone in a Diving Stove, a ballad interlude that nods at Acid Drinkers' habit of putting a joke in the middle of an early album. The thrash resumes with Hell On Earth, In Space, which became the second single, and The Room. The closer, Winter/Our Lake, abandons metal almost entirely for cold wave before remembering itself in the final minute.
SztukMix published the fullest Polish review on 12 December 2024, under the byline Michał "Sezamek" Borowski, and gave it five out of six. The notice calls Trains Colliding a firework and predicts the band will be playing it as an encore for the rest of their careers; it singles out vocalist Franek Pyzel for a natural rasp and stage presence, and praises a mix that manages to sound professional and raw at once. The single point deducted was for running time — the reviewer's position being that an album ought to clear forty minutes, and Atavism does not. Teraz Rock covered it in issue 12 (261) 2024, where Robert Filipowski heard death metal, progressive metal and cold wave threaded through the thrash, and made the same point about the players' ages.
Radio sessions, showcases and the festival ladder
2025 was the year the band stopped being a club-circuit secret. In March they recorded and performed a special set at Polskie Radio Czwórka, the national broadcaster's youth station — a live studio session rather than an interview slot.
They were then picked out in Road to Mystic, the competition Mystic Festival runs to fill slots on its own bill, and played the festival in Gdańsk on the Warm Up Day, on the Park Stage, sharing the day with Witch Club Satan, Martwa Aura, Intrepid and Burner. In June they took a Saturday-night showcase slot at Komuna Warszawa for Music Week Poland, on at 21:00 on 28 June, billed there as the new hope of the Polish metal scene.
Two other engagements from that stretch matter for what came next: a support to the American thrash band Sacred Reich in Poznań, and a set at Antoniów Rock Fest. They also appeared at the Great September showcase. Taken together, these put them in front of bookers and in front of audiences who had come for someone else — the training that the current support run depends on.
A changed line-up and a Polish-language single
The band that goes out now is not quite the band that made Atavism. Guitarist Stanisław Gliniewicz, who has been there from the start, still leads; the line-up around him is Krzysztof Śniadecki on rhythm guitar, Jacek Głuch on bass and Witold Argasiński on drums, with Eryk Zubowicz on vocals in place of Pyzel. The group describe themselves in 2026 as operating in a refreshed formula, which is the polite phrasing for a line-up that has turned over at more than one position since the album.
The first release from that version of the band is Byle nie zmądrzeć — roughly, don't go getting wise — issued in 2026 with an accompanying video. It is their first single sung in Polish rather than English, which is a meaningful shift for a band whose whole recorded output to that point was in English, and which lands them closer to the domestic lineage of Acid Drinkers than to the Metallica-and-Megadeth comparison promoters keep reaching for.
No second album has been announced. The gap between Atavism and now has been filled with touring rather than recording, and the closing track of the debut was read at the time as a promise of a wider stylistic range next time out.
Where they are now: in front of Acid Drinkers
The current standing is best measured by who they are opening for. On 31 July 2026 they played Kraków below Municipal Waste, on a Knock Out Productions bill alongside Hamulec and Sanity Control — three Polish acts presented as the front rank of the country's contemporary thrash, with Diving Stove billed as the straightforwardly fast and catchy one.
Then the bigger one. Acid Drinkers, formed in Poznań in 1989, back together in the Titus–Litza–Popcorn–Ślimak line-up that last played together before Litza left in 1998, announced a run of autumn and winter dates with Diving Stove opening throughout. LiveRock reported the Kraków show on 29 September 2026: Acid Drinkers at Klub Studio on 21 November 2026 under the banner Party in the Dragon's Den, with the Warsaw band opening the evening. The rest of the run, as listed by rockmetal.pl, is Katowice at the Międzynarodowe Centrum Kongresowe on 27 November, Gdynia at the Polsat Plus Arena on 29 November, Wrocław on 5 December and Warsaw at Progresja Music Zone on 12 December.
For a band whose first recordings were made on budget gear in a house, the Gdynia date is the jump: an arena, in front of an audience that has been going to Acid Drinkers shows longer than Diving Stove have existed. The Warsaw date on 12 December closes the run on home ground.
The show, now
Every Diving Stove show between now and the end of 2026 is a support slot, so what audiences get is an opener's set rather than a headline one — they open the evening, and the room is filling while they play. The material comes from a catalogue of roughly a dozen songs: Atavism in near-complete form, with Trains Colliding the fixed point (the SztukMix review predicted they would be encoring it for the rest of their careers), Hell On Earth, Mercy Never Arrives and The Room carried over from the 2022 demo, and the 2026 Polish-language single Byle nie zmądrzeć now in the set. There is no production to speak of: five players, backline, no set dressing, which is consistent with a band whose stated appeal is lively playing and direct contact with the crowd rather than staging. The venues vary enormously across the run — Klub Studio in Kraków on 21 November, the Międzynarodowe Centrum Kongresowe in Katowice on 27 November, the Polsat Plus Arena in Gdynia on 29 November, Wrocław on 5 December and Progresja Music Zone in Warsaw on 12 December — so the same half-hour has to work in a club and in an arena. Polish promoters pitch them as a thrash band in adolescent form, fast and hook-driven; the Kraków bill in July, below Municipal Waste, put them in the mosh-heavy end of the crossover scene rather than the technical one.
Researched from pl.wikipedia.org · divingstove.bandcamp.com · sztukmix.pl · liverock.pl · rockmetal.pl · eventpack.pl · musicweekpoland.com · 2025.mysticfestival.pl