Artists
Converge: Hardcore's Most Violent Art
How four men from Massachusetts turned chaos into craft, made the defining heavy record of its decade, and never once coasted
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48 articles
Artists
Lamb of God: American Groove Metal's Angriest Engine
How a band from Richmond, Virginia turned precision, fury and one genuinely dark chapter into the standard-bearer of a whole American movement
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Airbourne: AC/DC's Torch Carried at Full Sprint
The Australian hard-rock band who took one very old idea, refused to complicate it, and became one of the most physical live acts in the world
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D-A-D: The Danish Cowboys Who Nearly Conquered America
How a Copenhagen band called Disneyland After Dark rode the western myth to the edge of US stardom — and why the door shut
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Parkway Drive: The Pyro and the Aussie Rise
How five surfers from Byron Bay turned melodic hardcore into a stadium fire show — and headlined Wacken doing it
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Clutch: The Best Bar Band That Also Sells Out Theatres
Four men from Maryland who turned relentless touring and a preacher's cadence into one of rock's most durable live franchises
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Behemoth: Poland's Blackened-Death Provocateurs
How a black-metal band from Gdańsk became the loudest argument against blasphemy law in Catholic Europe — and made their best record after their frontman nearly died
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Gojira: The French Band That Made Metal Care About Whales
How four musicians from the Basque coast turned ecological grief into the most physically overwhelming metal on earth — then played the Olympics
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Volbeat: How a Rockabilly-Metal Hybrid Became Denmark's Biggest Export
The Copenhagen band that welded Elvis to groove metal and somehow filled arenas
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Trivium: The Metalcore Mainstay He Keeps Catching
Twenty-odd years and ten albums into a career built on the least glamorous virtue in music — turning up
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Mastodon: Atlanta's Prog-Sludge Shape-Shifters
Four Southerners who started out as pure sludge and slowly turned into one of the most ambitious rock bands America has
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Lordi: The Monsters Who Won Eurovision for Finland
How a horror-obsessed frontman from Lapland smuggled full latex monster suits onto Europe's most respectable stage — and won the whole thing
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Cult of Luna: Post-Metal as a Slow-Moving Storm
How seven men from a frozen university town in northern Sweden turned patience into the heaviest thing in the room
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Leprous: Norwegian Prog's Rising Force
How a band from Notodden that started as Ihsahn's backing group became one of Europe's most distinctive art-prog acts
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Metallica's Danish Accent: Lars Ulrich and the Band That Keeps Coming Home
How a tennis prodigy from Gentofte carried European metal to California and never quite let Denmark go
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Satyricon: Norwegian Black Metal Goes to the Opera House
The night a genre born in freezing basements filled the Oslo Opera House with a 55-strong national chorus
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Enslaved: Black Metal That Kept Growing Up
How two Norwegian teenagers started in the coldest corner of extreme metal and spent thirty years turning it into something vast and exploratory
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Rammstein and the Art of the Flamethrower: Pyro as Narrative
How six men from East Berlin turned stadium fire into a language
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Watain: Swedish Black Metal as Ritual Theatre
Erik Danielsson's Uppsala coven turned the stink and blood of orthodox black metal into a genuine live event
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Kvelertak: Six Norwegians and a Very Loud Owl
How a Stavanger sextet welded black metal, punk and classic rock into one enormous, gleefully unserious sound
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Turbonegro: Deathpunk, Denim, and Bad Taste as Art
How an Oslo band turned deliberate provocation, sailor caps and denim into one of Scandinavia's most beloved cult institutions
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Amorphis: Finland's Kalevala Metal
How a Helsinki death metal band turned a nineteenth-century folk epic into a thirty-year career
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Refused: The Shape of Punk That Actually Came
How a broke Swedish hardcore band from Umeå made the most influential record of its genre, then quit before anyone noticed
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Opeth: Mikael Åkerfeldt's Long Goodbye to Growling
How a Stockholm death metal band followed its leader into seventies prog
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Nightwish: Symphonic Metal at Full Scale
How a Finnish keyboard player built metal's biggest orchestra and survived three singers
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Meshuggah: The Swedish Machine That Bent Metal's Rhythm
How four men from Umeå rewired the way heavy music counts
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King Diamond & Mercyful Fate: The Corpse-Paint Originators the World Forgot Were Danish
How a Copenhagen falsetto in white face-paint quietly drew the blueprint half of extreme metal still works from
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Katatonia: Swedish Melancholy Made Heavy
How a Stockholm doom-death duo became the sound of beautiful, functional sadness
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Amon Amarth: Viking Metal as a Stadium Sport
How a melodic death metal band from Tumba built the loudest longship in Europe
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Arch Enemy: Melodic Death and the Frontwoman Era
How Michael Amott's melodic death machine made the growling frontwoman a headline act
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Sabaton: History Lessons at Maximum Volume
How a band from Falun turned the twentieth century into stadium metal
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Ghost: Sweden's Theatre Kids Who Conquered Metal
How a masked Linköping band turned corpse paint into arena spectacle
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In Flames: Gothenburg's Giant and the Sellout Wars
How the men who helped invent melodic death metal became their own fanbase's villains
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Pretty Maids: Denmark's Melodic-Metal Lifers
Forty years of hard rock from Horsens, a huge run in Japan, and a frontman who kept singing through cancer
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Emperor: Black Metal's Grandest, Live at Inferno
How Notodden's symphonic black metallers turned frost and fury into cathedral music
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Iceage: The Copenhagen Kids Who Grew Into a Great Band
From teenage punk chaos to one of the most interesting rock bands Denmark has produced
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Myrkur: Amalie Bruun and the Fight to Be Taken Seriously
How a Danish musician made black metal on her own terms and survived the backlash that came for it
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Baest: Aarhus Death Metal With a Butcher's Confidence
The hometown five-piece who turned old-school death metal into a Century Media export
Artists
Tool at Royal Arena: Patience, Geometry, and 10,000 Held Breaths
The most demanding band in mainstream rock brought Fear Inoculum to Copenhagen — phones down, eyes up, and a drummer doing arithmetic at the speed of light
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Hatesphere and Illdisposed: Danish Death Metal's Workhorses
Two Aarhus institutions who never went stadium-sized and never stopped, and the scene they held up
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Children of Bodom: A Finnish Farewell
One year on from Alexi Laiho's death, a look at the band that made neoclassical speed metal fun again
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Rammstein at Parken: Fire as a Civic Event
The Europe Stadium Tour brought its own cargo operation to a Copenhagen football ground in June 2019 — a whole city sanctioning a spectacle of controlled flame
Artists
Metallica at Parken: When the Biggest Band Alive Plays a Football Ground
The WorldWired tour filled Copenhagen's national stadium in July 2019 — a homecoming for the Gentofte boy who built the biggest metal band on earth
Artists
Slayer's Farewell: When the Riffs Meant Goodbye
The most uncompromising band in metal announced its own ending — and the farewell tour rolled toward Copenhagen with the weight of a genre behind it
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Judas Priest in Copenhagen: Leather, Chrome, and the Metal God
The band that gave heavy metal its uniform, its twin-guitar attack and its operatic scream brought the Firepower tour to the Royal Arena — a Harley, a leather army, and one quietly heroic absence
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Iron Maiden at Royal Arena: The Circus Comes to Copenhagen
Spitfires, flamethrowers and a fighter-pilot frontman — how the Legacy of the Beast tour turned Amager into a war theatre
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Black Sabbath, The End: Watching Metal's First Family Bow Out
The band that invented the whole genre in a Birmingham factory town spent 2016 and 2017 saying a long, deliberate goodbye — and it passed through a Copenhagen harbour on the way
Artists
Motörhead in Copenhagen, 2015: The Last Time Lemmy Came North
The fortieth-anniversary tour crossed Scandinavia at the end of 2015 and skipped Denmark — an elegy from Copenhagen, weeks before the end