Roadburn 2023: Back in Tilburg, Six Years On

Six years after my first Roadburn I flew back into Tilburg, and the festival I found had changed in one telling way: for 2023 there was no curator. Roadburn’s signature device — handing the artistic keys to a single artist each spring — quietly went missing, and how the festival held together without it turned out to be the most interesting thing about the weekend. Running 20 to 23 April 2023 in the same clutch of Dutch venues, this edition tested whether the doom pilgrimage runs on its curators or on something deeper. It ran on something deeper.

The same town, a different festival

Tilburg had not changed. Still the 013 as the beating heart, still the smaller rooms — the Koepelhal, the Hall of Fame, the Paradox with its jazz-and-avant-garde sideline — spreading the festival across the town centre for four days. My first trip in 2017 had taught me the geography; coming back, the muscle memory returned instantly. You learn the walk between venues, the timing of the clashes, the particular hush of a Roadburn room before a heavy set. That much was continuity.

There was a deeper continuity too, and it mattered more given the year. Roadburn had come through the pandemic, which had wiped out the 2020 and 2021 editions entirely and left the whole festival calendar with a two-year hole. A lot of festivals limped out of that gap diminished. Roadburn came back with its identity intact, and by 2023 it was fully itself again — the same reverent crowd, the same trust in the booking, the same willingness to programme difficult music for people who wanted exactly that. Standing in the 013 again after everything, six years on from my first visit, the reassuring thing was how little of the essential festival had been lost.

What had shifted was the absence of a guiding hand. In 2017 the whole weekend bent toward Baroness’s John Dyer Baizley; the curator gave the edition a personality you could feel. 2023 had no such figure — by the festival’s own admission the booking that year was a harder puzzle than usual, and it went out without the single-artist spine that normally shapes it. I have written about how central the curator model is to what Roadburn is, so going in I wondered whether a curator-less year would feel rudderless. It did not. It felt, if anything, like the festival trusting its own taste directly rather than routing it through a guest.

Deafheaven, Sunbather, ten years on

The set that defined 2023 for me was Deafheaven playing Sunbather in its entirety. The record turned ten that year — a blackgaze landmark that dragged a whole strand of the underground toward beauty and blast beats at the same time — and Roadburn is the natural cathedral for that kind of anniversary rite. The band played the album front to back, and on a separate night ran through their cleaner, later Infinite Granite as well, showing both faces of a group that has spent a decade refusing to sit still.

There is a reason a full-album performance lands so hard at Roadburn specifically. The crowd here treats sets as significant events, attentive and reverent in a way festival audiences rarely are, and a record that means as much as Sunbather does to its listeners, played whole, in that atmosphere, becomes something closer to a shared ceremony. I have tried to pin down why these anniversary and full-album rituals move us so much — a decade of your own life measured out in a record you love, performed once, in a dark room full of people who feel the same. Roadburn 2023 was a clean demonstration of the whole phenomenon.

Cave In, and the residencies that carry the weight

The other pillar was Cave In. The Massachusetts band returned to the Roadburn main stage for two sets, the second a front-to-back run through their 2022 album Heavy Pendulum — a heavy, ambitious record given the full-length treatment the festival reserves for work it believes in. Watching a band trusted with two slots stretch out across them is Roadburn at its most generous, and Cave In used the room the way you hope a band will: loud, expansive, unhurried.

With no overall curator, the festival leaned harder on its Artist-in-Residence tradition to give the weekend its shape. Two residents carried real weight in 2023: Sangre de Muérdago, the Galician folk outfit, played three sets drawing out different threads of their sound, and Oiseaux-Tempête performed three of their own across the weekend. The residency device — hand one act several slots and let them reveal every side they have — did in 2023 some of the structural work a curator normally does, threading recurring artists through the days so the programme still felt authored rather than assembled. Around them the bill ran wide and dark: Wolves in the Throne Room’s cascading black metal, Julie Christmas’s harrowing vocal performances, Zola Jesus, Boy Harsher’s cold electronics, the raw newer intensity of Chat Pile and Backxwash. Roadburn has never policed its genre borders, and 2023 wandered from folk to blackgaze to industrial to sludge without once feeling incoherent.

Even without a headline curator, the festival kept its habit of handing side-programmes to trusted hands. The Paradox venue ran its own thread under the guidance of that room’s artistic director, leaning into jazz and the avant-garde — a reminder that Roadburn’s definition of “heavy” has always stretched well past distortion into anything with real weight and intent. That willingness to book a free-jazz set two doors down from a black-metal band is exactly the openness the curator model was invented to protect, and it survived the curator’s absence intact.

Six years of change, and what stayed

Coming back after six years, I could measure what had shifted. The heavy underground had grown; the crowd felt a touch younger and broader than the doom-purist congregation I remembered from 2017, with the blackgaze, industrial and noise-adjacent audiences now firmly part of the mix. The full-album anniversary set had become a Roadburn staple, almost a fixture of the format. Ticket prices had crept, as everything has, and the town felt a little more used to the annual invasion. These are the ordinary drifts of any festival that survives long enough to have a history.

What had not changed was the essential contract. The rooms were still dark and loud and cleanly mixed. The crowd still travelled in from all over the world and treated the sets like the significant events the booking made them. The town still transformed into a small capital of heavy music for four days. Roadburn in 2023 was recognisably the same festival that hooked me in 2017 — older, slightly larger, briefly curator-less, and still the most trustworthy booking in its world.

Does Roadburn need a curator?

That was the question I flew home turning over, and 2023 gave a clear answer: the curator is a wonderful device, and the festival does not fall apart without it. What actually holds Roadburn together is the accumulated trust — the audience’s faith that whatever gets booked will be worth the leap — and that faith is bigger than any single guest artist. A curator gives an edition a face. The residencies, the full-album rituals, the willingness to fly a band across the Atlantic for one impossible set: those are the deeper machinery, and they ran fine on their own in 2023.

If anything, the curator-less year clarified what the festival is. Strip out the guiding artist and you are left with a few thousand people who trust the booking, gathered indoors in a Dutch town for four days of heavy, difficult, carefully chosen music, treating every set like it matters. That is Roadburn with the marketing removed, and it is still the best-curated festival in its world.

The trade-offs are the same as ever, and worth stating plainly. It is genre-committed to the bone — four days of slow, heavy and adventurous music will not convert a sceptic. Capacity is tight and the good sets fill, so you plan around clashes and get to the small rooms early. It is a real trip from Copenhagen: flights, a hotel, a town you would visit for nothing else. And the ticket, secured months out and often before the lineup is even known, still asks that same leap of faith it asked in 2017. But the doom pilgrimage still earns its name six years on, curator or no curator.

That faith is really the whole story of the 2023 edition. A festival built entirely on its audience’s trust lost the one device it uses to signpost that trust — the curator — and the audience showed up anyway, blind, the way they always have. Nothing proves what Roadburn is more cleanly than a curator-less year that sold out on reputation alone. The trappings can go missing for a year. The trust is the festival.

For where the story started, my first Roadburn in 2017 is the one where Baroness held the keys and Coven crossed the ocean. The full portrait of the festival explains how a stoner-rock blog built the underground’s most trusted institution in the first place. In 2023 I learned that the trust outlasts the trappings. You still buy the ticket first. You still come out having seen things assembled nowhere else on earth.