It's FA Cup semi-final weekend, and 82,000 fans are streaming out of Wembley stadium after watching Arsenal grind out a prosaic victory against Wigan Athletic. It would be deeply surprising if even 82 of them had heard of the band who are about to headline the cavernous arena next door.

Six albums into their career, Dutch gothic metal band Within Temptation have spent almost 20 years chiselling out a ferociously devoted cult following. Their overblown, splendidly overwrought music is exactly what would result were Jim Steinman to abandon the high camp and sly wit of his Meat Loaf material and, instead, play it straight.

Bare-shouldered in a leather bodice and thigh-length boots, singer Sharon den Adel appears to have been recruited from a bygone era, when female singers were automatically "rock chicks", but she makes a compelling focus. Sprinting up and down stairs, pogoing and throwing devil horns through songs such as Let Us Burn, she could scarcely be more fervently committed without self-combusting.

It works because Within Temptation leaven their churning metal riffs with razor-sharp melodies. The portentous Our Solemn Hour samples a Winston Churchill speech and veers off into cod Latin, but still boasts a cunningly infectious pop tune. Edge of the World is a power ballad – you can imagine Celine Dion giving it a bit of welly.

The encore of Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness sees Den Adel take the melodramatic romanticism of the sultry arthouse original and bellow it from a windswept mountaintop. Within Temptation are a corny potboiler of a band: complete hokum and yet oddly enjoyable.

Academy, Glasgow, 15 April. Box office: 0141-418 3000. Then touring.

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