Metal on vo.rs

Copenhell 2026: The Maiden Voyage, Again

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

Why Scandinavian Winters Bred the Loudest Music

Tue, 11 Nov 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

Growled Vocals: How to Scream for Twenty Years

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

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

Sludge, Doom, Drone: A Field Guide to Slow and Heavy

Wed, 24 Jul 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

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.

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.

Illegible on Purpose: The Metal Logo as Gatekeeping

Thu, 14 Mar 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.

What the Mosh Pit Is Actually For

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

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

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

Copenhell 2023: The Old Gods Return

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

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

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

Copenhell 2017: The One That Got Serious

Sat, 24 Jun 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

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.

Copenhell 2015: The Year I Finally Went

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