Festivals on vo.rs

Roskilde: The Festival That Gives All Its Money Away

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

Copenhell 2026: The Maiden Voyage, Again

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

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

Heartland: The Festival for People Who Read the Programme

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Karmøygeddon and Blastfest: Norway's Small Metal Gatherings

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Norway’s reputation in metal is built on the extreme, the frozen and the notorious, but the country’s festival culture is mostly a story of small, stubborn, community-scale gatherings run by people who love the music more than they love money. Two of them make an instructive pair: Karmøygeddon, a survivor that has run for two decades on a small island off the west coast, and Blastfest, a Bergen festival that arrived with real ambition, made a genuine mark, and then collapsed in three years. One is a lesson in staying small on purpose. The other is a cautionary tale about the gap between ambition and arithmetic.

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

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

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

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

Rockharz: The Deep-Cut German Fields

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Germany has so many metal festivals that some of the very good ones live almost entirely in the shadow of the giants. Rockharz is one of them: twenty-five thousand people in a field at the foot of the Harz mountains every July, a festival most of the non-German metal world has never quite registered, run with the sort of unglamorous competence that keeps a thing alive for thirty years. I have never stood in that field myself. I have spent enough time in the German festival machine, though, to recognise a deep cut the moment I see one.

Tinderbox, Odense: The Corporate Danish Festival

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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

Distortion: The Week Copenhagen's Streets Become the Venue

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

Roadburn: The Doom Pilgrimage Where the Lineup Is a Dare

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

Smukfest: Denmark's Beautiful Festival in the Beech Woods

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

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

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

Desertfest: The Fuzz-Rock Church of the Riff

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 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.

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.

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

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

Roskilde 2023: Back to Full Strength

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

Nummirock: Midsummer Metal in a Finnish Forest

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every year on midsummer weekend, a few thousand Finns drive into a pine forest near a lake called Nummijärvi and spend the brightest nights of the calendar in front of a stage that never really goes dark. This is Nummirock, and I have never been, because midsummer is when I am usually standing in a field in Roskilde. That timing collision is the whole story of why Nummirock stays a well-kept Finnish secret to the rest of us.

Copenhell 2023: The Old Gods Return

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

Northside, Aarhus: The Hometown Festival

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Roadburn 2023: Back in Tilburg, Six Years On

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

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.

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.

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.

Damnation Festival: Britain's Indoor Extreme-Metal Day

Sat, 19 Nov 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.

Brutal Assault 2022: Metal in a Fortress

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

Copenhell 2022: The Return

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

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.

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

Wacken 2019: The Rain Year

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

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

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

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

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

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