Rook on vo.rs

Roskilde: The Festival That Gives All Its Money Away

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Royal Arena: What Copenhagen Gained (and Lost) With a Proper Big Room

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2026: The Maiden Voyage, Again

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Sankt Hans Aften: The Night Denmark Lights Bonfires on the Beach

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Nordic LARP: The Weekend You Become Someone Else

Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Norwegian Black Metal: Corpse Paint, Cold Forests, and a Very Dark Chapter

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The story of Norwegian black metal is two stories tangled together, and any honest account has to keep hold of both. One is about a small group of young musicians in early-1990s Norway who invented a genuinely new and powerful strain of extreme music, cold and atmospheric and unlike anything before it. The other is about arson, and a murder, and a set of real crimes committed by some of those same people. The music is remarkable. The crimes were crimes. Pretending either fact away produces a lie, so this piece holds both at once.

The Gothenburg Sound: How a Swedish City Rewired Metal's Melody

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every so often a single city coughs up a sound so distinct that the geography becomes the genre. Gothenburg, the rainy industrial port on Sweden’s west coast, did exactly this in the early 1990s. A handful of young bands there took death metal, the ugliest and most extreme form heavy music had yet produced, and did something nobody expected: they made it sing. The result got labelled the Gothenburg sound, and its DNA is now so widespread that most metal fans hear it every day without knowing where it came from.

Lamb of God: American Groove Metal's Angriest Engine

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Lamb of God make anger sound engineered. Where a lot of heavy bands aim for chaos, this five-piece from Richmond, Virginia builds fury like a machine shop builds an engine, every part machined to tolerance, every explosion timed. They spent the 2000s becoming the flagship of an entire American metal movement, they survived a courtroom tragedy that would have ended weaker bands, and they remain one of the most physically overwhelming live acts you can stand in front of. This is how a group of Virginia art students became the angriest precision instrument in the genre.

Airbourne: AC/DC's Torch Carried at Full Sprint

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the seaside town of Warrnambool, on the wind-scoured southern coast of Victoria, a teenager named Joel O’Keeffe decided that the finest musical idea in human history had already been discovered by AC/DC in the 1970s and required no improvement whatsoever. Two decades on he is still making that case, and he makes it by walking out on stage every night with a guitar and a bottomless supply of certainty. Airbourne are not the most sophisticated band you will ever see. They may be the most committed.

D-A-D: The Danish Cowboys Who Nearly Conquered America

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a photograph in every Danish rock fan’s memory of four men in cowboy hats who have plainly never worked a ranch in their lives, grinning like they got away with something. They did. For roughly eighteen months at the tail end of the 1980s, a Copenhagen band that started life with the gloriously stupid name Disneyland After Dark had a Warner Bros. contract, a song climbing the American rock charts, and a genuine, credible run at the thing every European band dreams about and almost none of them get: breaking the United States. They did not break it. But how close they came, and precisely how the door swung shut, is one of the best near-miss stories the Nordic scene has to offer — and the reason D-A-D remain a national institution at home forty-odd years on.

Clutch: The Best Bar Band That Also Sells Out Theatres

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a category of band that never troubles the charts, never has the crossover single, never gets the magazine cover, and yet can roll into almost any city on almost any continent and fill a room of a thousand people who know every word. Clutch, four men from Germantown, Maryland, are the reigning champions of that category. They have been at it since 1991 with the same four musicians, no reunions required because they never broke up, and they have quietly become the closest thing modern rock has to a guaranteed good night out.

Little Country, Loud Export: How Denmark Became a Metal Heavyweight

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Horsens Medieval Festival: When a Danish City Time-Travels 600 Years

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Wife-Carrying World Championships: The Prize Is the Wife's Weight in Beer

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The finish straight at Sonkajärvi is 253.5 metres of sand and gravel with a chest-deep pit of brown water dug into the middle of it, and the man barrelling towards you has a fully grown adult hanging upside-down off his back like a rucksack that grew legs. She is gripping his waist with both hands. Her ankles are hooked over his shoulders. Her head is somewhere around his kidneys. He can’t see her, she can’t see where they’re going, and the pair of them are moving at a speed that would embarrass most club runners on dry, unencumbered ground. This is the Wife-Carrying World Championships, and the winner will be handed his teammate’s exact bodyweight in beer.

Roskilde 2025: Still Giving It All Away

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Hellfest: France's Cathedral to Loud

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Clisson is the kind of town French tourist boards photograph at golden hour. Seven and a half thousand people, a ruined medieval castle on a rocky spur where the Sèvre Nantaise meets the Moine, and — this is the strange part — a skyline of Italianate loggias and terracotta arcades, because a sculptor named Lemot came home from Italy in 1807 and rebuilt the place to look like Tuscany. Around it spread the vineyards of Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine, Clisson itself now a named cru of the appellation, the white wine that goes with the oysters up in Nantes. It is bucolic, Catholic, deeply provincial western France. And for four days every June it becomes the loudest square kilometre on the continent.

Copenhell 2025: Is It Still a Metal Festival?

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Aalborg Karneval: Northern Europe's Biggest Carnival Is in Jutland

Sat, 24 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Why Every Festival Now Feels the Same

Thu, 22 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Behemoth: Poland's Blackened-Death Provocateurs

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

To grasp Behemoth you have to hold two facts at once: they are one of the most theatrically anti-religious bands in extreme metal, and they come from Poland, one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe. That collision has defined the band for thirty years — musically, legally and personally — and it has made their frontman a genuine free-expression test case in a country where blasphemy is still a crime.

Walpurgis Night: How the North Burns Winter on the Last of April

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The last night of April is when the North collectively decides it has had enough of winter and lights a fire about it. From Copenhagen you can practically hear it happening across the Sound — Sweden going up in bonfires, choirs bellowing the spring in, a whole student class deciding that thirty hours without sleep is a reasonable price for the end of the dark. This is Valborg, Walpurgis Night, and it is the loud cousin of the quiet Danish midsummer I grew up with. I want to tell you where it comes from, because the answer involves an English saint who never set foot up here and almost certainly never wanted a bonfire named after her.

Gojira: The French Band That Made Metal Care About Whales

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a Gojira riff that sounds like the ocean breathing — a scraped, pulsing harmonic that the whole band locks onto until the room seems to inhale and exhale with it. That sound belongs to a band from the French Basque coast who spent twenty-five years writing about whales, extinction and the weight of the living planet, and somehow turned all of it into the most physically overwhelming heavy metal going.

SO36: Kreuzberg's Punk Cathedral

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Volbeat: How a Rockabilly-Metal Hybrid Became Denmark's Biggest Export

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Mastodon: Atlanta's Prog-Sludge Shape-Shifters

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Play someone Mastodon’s first album and then their fifth and they might not believe it’s the same band. That distance — from feral Atlanta sludge to intricate, melodic prog with harmony vocals and concept-album architecture — is the whole story. Most heavy bands find a sound and defend it. Mastodon kept moving, and kept getting better while they moved.

Docks and Markthalle: Hamburg's Reeperbahn Rock Rooms

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Lordi: The Monsters Who Won Eurovision for Finland

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

On 20 May 2006, in an Athens arena built for pop ballads and key-changes, five people dressed as latex monsters played a hard-rock song called “Hard Rock Hallelujah” and won the Eurovision Song Contest with 292 points — the highest total in the contest’s history to that point. It remains Finland’s only Eurovision victory, and it is still, twenty years on, the single most improbable thing that competition has ever produced.

Loppen: Christiania's Sweatbox Where the Sound Still Wins

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

You climb a narrow staircase in an old military warehouse, push through a door, and the ceiling drops on you like a lid. Timber beams a hand’s width from your skull. A stage barely raised off the floor. A few hundred people already generating the kind of collective body heat that fogs the windows within twenty minutes of doors. This is Loppen — “the flea” — on the first floor of a warehouse on Bådsmandsstræde, deep inside Freetown Christiania, and it has been sweating out loud music since roughly 1973. The room is small, hot, and cramped, and it is one of the best places in Copenhagen to stand three metres from a band that is about to become your new favourite thing.

Cult of Luna: Post-Metal as a Slow-Moving Storm

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Most heavy bands hit you in the first ten seconds. Cult of Luna spend those ten seconds tuning down and letting a single chord ring out, and then they make you wait four more minutes before the payoff lands like a collapsing building. They are the great practitioners of delayed gratification in loud music, and once the delay works on you, nothing else quite scratches the same itch.

Rockefeller: Oslo Rock in an Old Bathhouse

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Krampus Runs: The Alpine Night the Devils Take the Street

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

On the evening of 5 December, in Alpine towns from Salzburg down through the Tyrol and across into Bavaria and South Tyrol, the streets fill with horned devils. They stand two and a half metres tall in matted fur, faces carved from limewood into something between a goat and a nightmare, cowbells the size of buckets slung around their waists, and they come at the crowd swinging birch switches and roaring. This is the Krampuslauf — the Krampus run — and it is the loudest, strangest, most physical Christmas tradition in Europe. I have not stood in an Alpine square while a Krampus singled me out, so this is a correspondent’s read from history and reportage rather than a night I have survived. What it is, where it comes from, and why a region would build this into its December, is worth the walk through.

Debaser: Stockholm's Waterside Rock Institution

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Metallica's Danish Accent: Lars Ulrich and the Band That Keeps Coming Home

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

With Full Force: East Germany's Extreme-Metal Institution

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Satyricon: Norwegian Black Metal Goes to the Opera House

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Den Grå Hal: Christiania's Cathedral of Noise

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Enslaved: Black Metal That Kept Growing Up

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Tavastia: Helsinki's Legendary Rock Club

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Alcatraz: Belgium's Hardcore-and-Metal Prison Break

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Kubb: The Viking Lawn Game With a World Championship on Gotland

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0000

On the Swedish island of Gotland every August, hundreds of teams gather on mown grass to throw wooden sticks at other wooden sticks, and the last team standing is crowned world champion of kubb. It is the calmest, sunniest, most beer-friendly world championship I know, and I have made the trip across the Baltic to see it with my own eyes.

Kubb — pronounced roughly “koob” — is a Nordic lawn game, and the World Championship, the Kubb VM, has been held since 1995 in the village of Rone on Gotland’s southern half. That first year drew 28 teams, most of them local Gotlanders. It has grown into a genuinely international gathering since, hundreds of teams filling a field for a long August weekend, but it has kept the character of the first edition: relaxed, sunburnt, faintly ridiculous, and utterly charming.

The Borderland: Denmark's Participatory Burn, Where There Are No Spectators

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Roskilde Naked Run: The Festival's Oldest, Barest Tradition

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment on the Saturday of Roskilde Festival, somewhere in the sprawling chaos of the campsite, when a crowd thickens along a stretch of dirt track, a countdown goes up, and a few dozen entirely naked people take off running for a lap while thousands cheer them home. This is the Roskilde Naked Run, and it is the daftest, most good-humoured, most reliably Danish thing on the whole festival calendar. I have stood in that crowd more than once — Roskilde is home turf for me, the festival I keep coming back to — and I can tell you the run is exactly as silly and exactly as warm-hearted as its reputation promises. Here is where it came from and why it still, gloriously, happens.

Copenhell 2024: Bigger, Broader, Louder

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell: Building Hell on a Harbour

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Posten: Odense's Loyal Little Rock Room

Tue, 28 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Distortion: The Week Copenhagen's Streets Become the Venue

Tue, 14 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Rammstein and the Art of the Flamethrower: Pyro as Narrative

Sat, 11 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment near the end of a Rammstein show when a man in a harness rises off the stage floor, spreads a pair of steel wings that reportedly weigh around fifty kilograms, and throws fire out of the wingtips into the dark. The crowd — a hundred thousand people who mostly do not speak German — makes the same noise every time, in every city, in a language older than any of them. That noise is the whole argument for what this band does. You do not need the lyric. The fire has already told you the story.

Roadburn: The Doom Pilgrimage Where the Lineup Is a Dare

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Kvelertak: Six Norwegians and a Very Loud Owl

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Smukfest: Denmark's Beautiful Festival in the Beech Woods

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Wall of Death: A Short History of Pop's Daftest, Best Ritual

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Picture the field from above. A band vamps on one riff, the singer walks to the lip of the stage, and a seam opens down the middle of ten thousand people like someone unzipped the crowd. Two walls form, forty feet apart, staring each other down across a strip of bare, trampled grass. There is a countdown. And then, on a cue nobody voted on and everybody understood, both halves sprint at each other and collide. Bodies bounce. Nobody dies. Everybody laughs. Thirty seconds later the field has healed over as if nothing happened, and the song lurches into its next section like a bus finding gear.

That is the wall of death, the most theatrical, most obviously mad piece of choreography in loud music, and one of the very few crowd rituals with a genuine origin story worth telling. It has a borrowed name, a debated inventor, a rough birthday, and a physics all its own. Take it seriously for a minute and it stops looking like meatheads running into each other and starts looking like one of the more sophisticated social contracts you’ll ever watch a stranger honour.

VEGA: The Union Hall That Became Denmark's Best-Sounding Room

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Voxhall and Train: Aarhus Rock, Where I Started

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Rock am Ring: A Racetrack, a Storm, and the German Masses

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Turbonegro: Deathpunk, Denim, and Bad Taste as Art

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Battle of the Oranges: Ivrea and the Carnival That Throws 500 Tonnes of Fruit

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every February a small town in Piedmont, at the mouth of the Aosta valley, spends three days pelting itself with citrus until the cobbles run with pulp and the whole place smells like a marmalade factory that has caught fire. This is Ivrea, an hour north of Turin, and the event is the Battaglia delle Arance — the Battle of the Oranges, the centrepiece of the Storico Carnevale di Ivrea. It is one of the oldest and by some distance the most violent-looking carnivals in Europe, and I have never been. I want to say that plainly, because the honest version of this piece is a correspondent’s read from the record, not a war story I have earned. What follows is the town’s own history, the mechanics of the fight, and why a place would agree, year after year, to bruise itself for a legend.

Up Helly Aa: A Thousand Torches and a Burning Galley

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The last Tuesday of January, when the North Atlantic has spent weeks trying to peel the roofs off Lerwick, up to a thousand men march through the town carrying flaming torches over their heads. At the front walks a man dressed as a Norse chieftain, in a raven-winged helmet and a mail shirt he has spent a year and a fortune assembling. Behind him, a full-size wooden longship rolls on wheels. The procession spirals in on a marked burning site, the torch-bearers form a ring, and on a bugle signal they hurl a thousand burning brands into the galley at once. The thing goes up like a struck match. Sixty seconds later it is a bonfire the size of a house, and Shetland stands in the orange dark, singing, while the wind carries the sparks out over the harbour.

Refused: The Shape of Punk That Actually Came

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Desertfest: The Fuzz-Rock Church of the Riff

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Parken: What Happens When a Football Ground Becomes a Stage

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Reunion Tour Is a Séance

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Three nights ago, on 2 December 2023, KISS finished. Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people, two and a quarter hours of pyro and blood and platform boots, and then the four men in the make-up took their bow and walked off for the last time. Except they didn’t walk off. After the last chord of “Rock and Roll All Nite”, the screens read A NEW KISS ERA STARTS NOW, and four digital avatars — younger, taller, smooth-faced, laser-eyed — strode on to finish the encore. The band that had just retired was already back, rebuilt in polygons by Industrial Light & Magic and the Swedish company that runs the ABBA hologram show. The corpse was still warm and the séance had already started.

Docken and Forum: Copenhagen's Big Utility Rooms

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Opeth: Mikael Åkerfeldt's Long Goodbye to Growling

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In 2011 one of the best death metal bands in the world put out an album with no death metal on it, and split its own audience clean down the middle. That album was Heritage, the band was Opeth, and the man who did it on purpose was Mikael Åkerfeldt, following his own taste off a cliff he had been walking towards for years.

Opeth formed in Stockholm in 1989, and Åkerfeldt took the wheel early, becoming the songwriter, guitarist, lead vocalist and guiding intelligence of the whole project. For roughly two decades they were the most sophisticated death metal band going — a group that treated brutality and beauty as equal partners, and swung between them inside a single ten-minute song. That combination is the thing to understand about Opeth, because it explains both the greatness and the eventual divorce with half their fans.

Pumpehuset: Rock in an Old Waterworks, With a Beer Garden Out Back

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Resurrection Fest: A Galician Village That Becomes Metal's Capital

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Viveiro is a fishing town on the north coast of Galicia, up in the green, rainy, Atlantic corner of Spain that most people never associate with the country at all. It has a medieval old town, an estuary, a few thousand permanent residents, and for one week every summer it becomes one of the biggest metal cities in Europe. Resurrection Fest is the reason, and its rise from a small local hardcore gig to a festival pulling tens of thousands a day is one of the great modern festival stories.

What the Mosh Pit Is Actually For

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Meshuggah: The Swedish Machine That Bent Metal's Rhythm

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the far north of Sweden, in a university town where the winter dark lasts most of the day, four men spent the nineties working out how to make a metal riff feel like the floor was falling away beneath you. They called the band Meshuggah, and they ended up rewiring how a whole generation of heavy bands thinks about rhythm.

Meshuggah come from Umeå, a cold city on the Gulf of Bothnia, and they formed in 1987. That geography matters more than you would expect. Umeå is a long way from the melodic west-coast scene that made Swedish metal famous, and Meshuggah never sounded remotely like their compatriots. Where the Gothenburg sound built melody on top of aggression, Meshuggah went the opposite way entirely and stripped melody almost out of the equation, leaving rhythm, texture and a kind of mechanical menace. They are the great outliers of Swedish metal, and also its most influential export you have possibly never heard on the radio.

Midgardsblot: Metal Among the Burial Mounds

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Most festivals with a Viking theme are working with polystyrene longships and a rented smoke machine. Midgardsblot has the actual graves. It stages Viking and atmospheric metal at Borre in Vestfold, on the largest concentration of monumental burial mounds in northern Europe, ground where real Iron Age chieftains were actually buried more than a thousand years ago. The setting is the entire point, and it is not a set dressing anyone could fake.

The Air Guitar World Championships: Absurdity With a Peace-and-Love Manifesto

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every August, in a mid-sized city 500-odd kilometres north of Helsinki, a crowd gathers in the market square to watch grown adults play guitars that do not exist. There is a stage, a proper PA, a panel of judges with scorecards, a compère, and stakes that the organisers will tell you, entirely straight-faced, involve the future of the human species. The instrument is imaginary. The championship is not. Welcome to Oulu, and to the single most Finnish sporting event ever devised.

KB Hallen: The Hall That Burned and Came Back

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Wacken: How a Village of 1,800 Hosts 85,000 Metalheads

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The World Bodypainting Festival: Skin as the Last Untaxed Canvas

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every July a lake town in the south of Austria fills up with people who have spent eight hours painting on other people, and by evening the results walk out onto a stage under lights: humans turned into reptiles, into galaxies, into cubist portraits, into things with no name at all. This is the World Bodypainting Festival, the largest gathering of its kind on earth and the closest the discipline has to an Olympics. I have never been — Carinthia in July is a long way off my usual loud-and-Nordic beat — so this is a correspondent’s read from the record: where the thing came from, how the competition actually runs, and why the human body turns out to be the most demanding canvas an artist can choose.

Roskilde 2023: Back to Full Strength

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2023: The Old Gods Return

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

King Diamond & Mercyful Fate: The Corpse-Paint Originators the World Forgot Were Danish

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Play a certain kind of metal fan a burst of high, keening falsetto over galloping twin guitars, show them a face painted white with black around the eyes and a microphone stand built from what looks like a human femur and an inverted cross, and they’ll nod along to a story about Norwegian forests, church fires and the early 1990s. They’ll be wrong by roughly a decade and about 900 kilometres. The man who assembled most of that vocabulary was a Copenhagen singer named Kim Bendix Petersen, and he’d finished doing it before anyone in Bergen or Oslo had recorded a note. That the wider public still can’t place him — or his country — is one of the stranger accounting errors in heavy music.

Hotel Cecil: The Copenhagen Club That Time Swallowed

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill: Chasing a Wheel Down a Cliff

Mon, 29 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Once a year on a hillside in Gloucestershire, a man rolls a wheel of cheese off the top of a near-vertical slope, and a crowd of people throw themselves down after it. The cheese wins. It almost always wins. The cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill is the most reckless folk event in Britain, and I say that with enormous affection.

Cooper’s Hill sits near the village of Brockworth, outside Gloucester. It is a grassy slope of roughly 26 degrees at the shallow end and something close to a 1-in-2 gradient at the worst of it — steep enough that from the bottom, looking up, the runners at the top appear to be standing on a wall. Every Spring Bank Holiday, at the tail end of May, people gather here to chase a 7-to-9-pound wheel of Double Gloucester down that wall, and the winner keeps the cheese.

Roadburn 2023: Back in Tilburg, Six Years On

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Amon Amarth: Viking Metal as a Stadium Sport

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At some point in the last decade a Swedish death metal band from a Stockholm commuter suburb started arriving on stage inside a giant Viking helmet, flanked by inflatable warriors and a longship, and the crowd started rowing. Actual rowing. Thousands of people sitting on the floor of a festival field, pulling imaginary oars in time. That is Amon Amarth in 2023, and getting there took thirty years of very committed hard work.

Beyond the Gates: Bergen, Black Metal's Home Ground

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

If Oslo is where the Norwegian black-metal story turned violent and famous, Bergen is where a lot of it was actually recorded. The rainiest city in Europe, wedged between seven mountains and the North Sea, is where the sound itself was engineered — and Beyond the Gates is the festival that plants a flag on that home ground every August. It is a small, curated, fiercely serious extreme-metal weekend in exactly the place the genre came from.

Ideal Bar and Lille VEGA: The Small Rooms Where Careers Start

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Las Fallas: Valencia Builds Giants for a Year, Then Burns Them in a Night

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in Valencia right now, a workshop the size of an aircraft hangar holds a thirty-foot cartoon politician with the head of a pig, and the people who built him already know the exact hour they are going to set him on fire. That is the deal. That is the whole engine of Las Fallas, and once you understand it the festival stops looking like a party and starts looking like something closer to a religion with better pyrotechnics.

Sabaton: History Lessons at Maximum Volume

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a band from a small Swedish mining town that has probably taught more people about the First World War than most secondary schools manage. That band is Sabaton, and the fact that they did it while wearing camouflage cargo trousers and standing next to a tank should not count against them.

Sabaton come from Falun, a modest town in Dalarna better known for its copper mine and its red paint than for heavy metal. They formed in 1999 around bassist Pär Sundström and vocalist Joakim Brodén, and for their first few years they were an unremarkable power-metal outfit trying to work out what they were for. Then they found the theme that would define everything: history, specifically military history, written as anthemic, fist-in-the-air metal. Once they committed to it, they never looked back, and it turned them into one of the biggest live draws in European metal.

Inferno: Oslo's Easter Weekend in the Dark

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a specific joke in a black-metal festival landing on Easter, and everyone involved is entirely in on it. Easter is the Christian calendar’s most important weekend, the resurrection, the whole point of the thing. Inferno takes that holiday, in the country that produced the most church-hostile music scene in history, and fills Oslo’s biggest concert hall with several days of the darkest metal on earth. They call it Black Easter, and the timing is the joke and the statement at once.

Tons of Rock: How Oslo Learned to Throw a Proper Metal Party

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

For most of my festival life Oslo was the neighbour that didn’t have one. Norway had the money, the bands and one of the deepest metal scenes on the planet, and yet if you wanted to see a big loud outdoor bill you flew to Sweden Rock or drove to Copenhell. Then Tons of Rock arrived, and within a decade it had become the largest music festival in the whole country. That is a genuinely strange thing to have happened, and it is worth walking through how.

Ghost: Sweden's Theatre Kids Who Conquered Metal

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

A band spent almost a decade refusing to say their own names, then a Swedish court made them do it anyway. That is the strange spine of Ghost, the Linköping act that dressed heavy metal up in cathedral robes and pop hooks and rode the disguise all the way to the Grammy stage.

For years the pitch sounded like a student prank that got out of hand. One singer in the paint and mitre of a Satanic anti-pope, calling himself Papa Emeritus. Behind him a rank of Nameless Ghouls in identical masks and chrome, credited to nobody, interviewed only in silhouette. It should have been a novelty that burned out inside a tour cycle. Instead Ghost turned into one of the biggest metal bands Sweden has ever exported, and the story of how they did it is more interesting than the costumes suggest.

Pretty Maids: Denmark's Melodic-Metal Lifers

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Rust: Where Nørrebro Goes to Lose the Plot

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Summer Breeze: Germany's Well-Oiled Metal Machine

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Dinkelsbühl is one of those absurdly preserved medieval towns that Bavaria specialises in — a walled Franconian gem on the Romantic Road, all timbered gables and stone gates and coach parties photographing the market square. It is the kind of place that exists in a permanent postcard. And every August, in the fields just outside those medieval walls, forty thousand metalheads assemble for Summer Breeze Open Air, one of the most quietly efficient large festivals in European metal. The contrast is glorious, and the efficiency is the whole story.

Ottery St Mary's Tar Barrels: Devon Runs Flaming Casks Through the Crowd

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every fifth of November, in a small Devon town, a grown adult crouches, and a group of other adults lower a burning wooden barrel — coated on the inside with tar, fully alight, throwing sparks and smoke — onto their back and shoulders, and then that person stands up and runs into a crowd so tight there is nowhere for the crowd to go. This is Ottery St Mary’s Tar Barrels, and it is, by a distance, the most alarming fire tradition in Britain. I have never seen it. Having read everything about it I could find, I am not entirely sure I would keep my nerve if I did, and I have spent years in the front third of metal crowds specifically because I like it there.

Iceage: The Copenhagen Kids Who Grew Into a Great Band

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Tuska: Helsinki's Midsummer Metal Ritual

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Finland has more metal bands per head of population than any country on earth, a statistic that has become a national in-joke and a genuine cultural fact. In a country of five and a half million people, heavy metal is not a subculture skulking at the edges; it is mainstream enough that a monster band won the Eurovision Song Contest for Finland and the president has been photographed at metal shows. Tuska is where that saturated national obsession gathers once a year, in the concrete yard of a decommissioned power plant in the middle of Helsinki, and its name is Finnish for pain.

Myrkur: Amalie Bruun and the Fight to Be Taken Seriously

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Stengade: Nørrebro's Sweatbox for the Underground

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Bog Snorkelling: Wales's Great Peat-Trench World Championship

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every August Bank Holiday, grown adults in wetsuits and flippers lower themselves face-first into a trench of cold peat water in mid-Wales and thrash 120 yards through the dark. This is the World Bog Snorkelling Championship, and it is exactly as absurd, as cold, and as gloriously pointless as it sounds.

The venue is Waen Rhydd, a boggy patch near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys — a place that bills itself as the smallest town in Britain and behaves like the eccentric uncle of the whole country. The organisers cut a trench roughly 60 yards long straight through the peat, fill it with the sort of brown, tannin-stained water that gives Welsh bogs their smell, and invite anybody daft enough to swim two lengths of it against the clock. First championship: 1985. It has run in August almost every year since, pausing only when the whole world paused in 2020 and 2021.

Mobile Phone Throwing: Finland's Sport of Hurling Your Nokia

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the year 2000, in the Finnish lake town of Savonlinna, somebody decided the most satisfying thing you could do with an obsolete mobile phone was to throw it as far as humanly possible. They were, of course, completely correct. Thus was born the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, and Finland added another entry to its remarkable catalogue of taking a joke entirely seriously.

The origin story is almost too good. The event was launched by a Savonlinna translation and interpretation company, whose multinational staff apparently had a lot of frustration and a lot of dead handsets to work through. The two problems solved each other. You take yesterday’s technology, you wind up, you hurl it across a field, and the local recycling centre collects the wreckage afterwards. Catharsis and waste management in one clean motion. It has run in Savonlinna most years since, usually in late summer.

Brutal Assault 2022: Metal in a Fortress

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Viking Markets: Denmark's Living Iron Age, Every Summer

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2022: The Return

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Baest: Aarhus Death Metal With a Butcher's Confidence

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Amager Bio: Copenhagen's Perfect Mid-Size Room

Tue, 10 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Tool at Royal Arena: Patience, Geometry, and 10,000 Held Breaths

Sat, 07 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Beltane Fire Festival: Edinburgh Wakes the Summer on Calton Hill

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

On the last night of April, a hill in the middle of Edinburgh fills with drums and torchlight and several hundred people painted red from the scalp down, and they spend the dark hours dragging summer up out of the ground by force. That is Beltane, and the strangest thing about it is how new it is. The rite it performs is old enough to be genuinely Celtic. The festival you can actually attend was built by a handful of art-punks in 1988, and I think that combination is exactly why it works.

Bloodstock: The Fan-Built Festival That Refused to Sell Out

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every big metal festival tells you it loves the underground. Bloodstock is the one that actually built its main-stage pipeline out of it. The UK’s largest independent metal festival is family-run, owned by nobody but the family that started it, and it has spent two decades doing the thing the giants only talk about — putting unsigned British bands in front of a crowd of thousands and letting some of them climb. It sits in the grounds of Catton Park in Derbyshire every August, and it is the most convincing argument in Britain that a festival can grow large without losing its soul.

Hatesphere and Illdisposed: Danish Death Metal's Workhorses

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Download: The Spiritual Home of British Metal at Donington

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Donington Park is a motor-racing circuit in Leicestershire, a ribbon of tarmac in the English Midlands that spends most of the year hosting touring cars and bike championships. For one weekend every June the infield fills with tents and the whole place becomes the most important patch of ground in British metal. Download Festival is what happens there now, and it carries a weight that no new festival could manufacture, because the ground itself has been sacred to loud music since 1980.

Graspop Metal Meeting: Belgium's Cathedral of the Loud

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Dessel is a village of about nine thousand people in the Antwerp Kempen, the flat sandy heathland where Belgium bleeds into the Dutch border, and for fifty weeks of the year it does very little that would interest anyone outside the region. There is a nuclear research site down the road, a canal, a lot of pine plantation. Then in mid-June the population of the field on Kastelsedijk multiplies by twenty and Dessel becomes, briefly, one of the loudest addresses in Europe. Graspop Metal Meeting is the reason, and it is one of the strangest success stories in continental metal.

The Two Years Hell Stood Empty: Copenhell 2020–2021

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Rammstein at Parken: Fire as a Civic Event

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

On 19 June 2019, Rammstein brought their first stadium tour to Parken and set a Copenhagen football ground alight. The show sold out. Somewhere in an office in Østerbro, weeks earlier, a Danish official had signed a permit that authorised a German band to burn several hundred litres of propane, in choreographed bursts, in a residential neighbourhood, for two hours, on a Wednesday night. That signature is the thing I keep coming back to. A stadium concert is loud. A Rammstein stadium concert is a small municipal decision to allow fire.

Wacken 2019: The Rain Year

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Metallica at Parken: When the Biggest Band Alive Plays a Football Ground

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000

On 11 July 2019, just under forty-five thousand people packed into Parken, the Copenhagen football stadium, to watch Metallica. It was a Thursday. The roof was open, the Danish summer holding for once, and the pitch that normally belongs to FC København had been floored over and turned into the biggest standing crowd the city can legally assemble. There is a specific strangeness to seeing the biggest band alive play the ground where you watch the national team lose to Germany, and that strangeness is the whole subject here.

Roskilde 2019: The Last Summer Before the Silence

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Nobody at Roskilde 2019 knew they were living through the last one for a while, which is exactly why it plays back so strangely now. Held from 29 June to 6 July, it was a completely ordinary edition of an extraordinary festival — a wide, warm, sprawling week in the Zealand fields with a top-heavy bill and the usual hundred-thousand-strong temporary city around it. Then the world shut, the 2020 and 2021 festivals were cancelled to silence, and 2019 became, in retrospect, a kind of farewell nobody attended as a farewell. I have gone back to it in my head more than any other year, precisely because it was so normal.

Copenhell 2019: The Last One Before the Silence

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Slayer's Farewell: When the Riffs Meant Goodbye

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Judas Priest in Copenhagen: Leather, Chrome, and the Metal God

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2018: Long Days on the Harbour

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Sweden Rock 2018: My One Year in the Sölvesborg Forest

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Iron Maiden at Royal Arena: The Circus Comes to Copenhagen

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Roskilde 2017: The Year the Mud Won

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Every Roskilde regular keeps a private ranking of the years, and 2017 is filed, in most of the ones I know, under the muddy one. The rain came on the Friday and the site never fully recovered its footing; the camping fields turned to the particular grey-brown churn that gets into your boots, your tent, your food and your soul, and by the back half of the week you were navigating a hundred thousand people’s worth of trodden mud on progressively less sleep. And yet — this is the thing about Roskilde — it was still, by common agreement of nearly everyone I spoke to, a magnificent week. The mud won the war of attrition. It did not win the festival.

Copenhell 2017: The One That Got Serious

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Roadburn 2017: The Doom Pilgrimage, First Steps

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Black Sabbath, The End: Watching Metal's First Family Bow Out

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Wacken 2016: First Time in the Holy Mud

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Copenhell 2016: Refshaleøen Settles In

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Motörhead in Copenhagen, 2015: The Last Time Lemmy Came North

Fri, 27 Nov 2015 09:00:00 +0000

In the first days of December 2015, Motörhead’s fortieth-anniversary tour crossed Scandinavia and left Denmark off the map. The routing went Gothenburg on the first, Oslo on the third, Stockholm on the fourth, Helsinki on the sixth — a tight little arc across the top of Europe that came within sixty kilometres of the Danish coast and never touched it. From Copenhagen you could stand on the Øresund shore and more or less watch the tour bus pass on the Swedish side. We got nothing. And because of what happened three weeks later, we now know that nothing was final.

Roskilde 2015: Orange Feeling in the Rain

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 09:00:00 +0000

The 2015 edition is the one where a Beatle closed the Orange Stage and the sky spent a week deciding whether it liked us. Paul McCartney headlined the final Saturday, 4 July, and the whole festival bent itself around that fact for days beforehand — an actual member of the band that half your parents’ record collections were built on, standing under the orange canopy that his old rivals the Rolling Stones commissioned in the seventies. If you want a single image for how strange and how big Roskilde gets, it is a 72-year-old Liverpudlian playing to a field in Zealand under a Stones-era awning while a hundred thousand Danes lose their minds in the drizzle.

Copenhell 2015: The Year I Finally Went

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 09:00:00 +0000