When Bloodstock lit its first indoor fires back in 2001, with Saxon presiding over the whole thing like a set of iron-clad godparents, nobody was drawing up business plans for what a quarter-century of British metal might become.
For the 25th anniversary the organizers threw the rulebook onto the barbecue (Careful now there's a drought in effect - Ed), opening the Ronnie James Dio main stage on the Thursday and letting Saxon the festival’s very first headliner, back in 2001 to close the circle they started.
Bloodstock is bigger now, unarguably, but it still runs on the same principle it always has put the grassroots New Blood hopefuls, the cult heroes and the genuine legends on the same patch and trusted the crowd to move between them.
What follows is the full three-day account of extreme warmth, dust, jet sprays, and great music.
Bloodstock is bigger now, unarguably, but it still runs on the same principle it always has put the grassroots New Blood hopefuls, the cult heroes and the genuine legends on the same patch and trusted the crowd to move between them.
What follows is the full three-day account of extreme warmth, dust, jet sprays, and great music.
FRIDAY 07.08.26
The first full day of the weekend for me was Friday and this spanned the entire breadth of what Bloodstock celebrates: black metal before midday, New York hardcore mid-afternoon, thrash carnage at teatime, a piece of genuine metal history in the penultimate main-stage slot and one of the modern era’s most reliable headline acts to bring the curtain down. It read like a festival firing a warning shot for the two days still to come.
Black metal at twenty past eleven in the morning is a proposition that sorts the committed from the curious, and the crowd who made the pilgrimage to the Sophie tent for Blood Countess got exactly what they came for: cold, blasting, unrepentant darkness deployed as a wake-up call. Half an hour is not long, but it is enough for a band with a clear identity to make an impression, and Blood Countess understand the value of atmosphere as much as velocity, tremolo-picked ice one moment, a mid-paced churn the next. A reminder that Bloodstock’s underground booking remains as fearless as ever.
Following the pre-noon blackness, Hammer kept the Sophie stage’s momentum ticking over with another half-hour blast as the tent gradually filled with the day’s first proper wave of arrivals. There is an honesty to a lunchtime festival slot, no lights to hide behind, a crowd still assembling and it is exactly the environment that separates bands with real conviction from those going through the motions. Hammer belonged to the former camp, using their window to press their case with the sort of no-nonsense delivery that wins new followers one riff at a time.
If the first two Sophie slots dealt in darkness and grit, Sellsword brought a dose of drama and swagger, their brand of heavy metal built for banners, choruses, and raised fists. There is a long and noble Bloodstock tradition of bands who take the theatre of metal seriously without ever slipping into self-parody, and Sellsword pitched themselves squarely in that lineage big, melodic, unashamedly grand giving the growing crowd exactly the sort of chest-out heavy metal that plays beautifully in a festival tent and not forgetting the t-shirt firing trebuchet.
Life Of Agony brought it to a sun-warmed early-afternoon crowd. Keith Caputo remains one of the most distinctive voices the New York scene ever produced — a rasp that can crack open into something startlingly tender within the same bar — and the material from River Runs Red still lands like a confession shouted across a room. Dropped into a 45-minute festival window, the set was built for maximum emotional impact rather than deep-cuts connoisseurship, and it was all the better for it.
Opening on This Time and rolling straight into the title track of River Runs Red, the band set out their stall early: this was a set about the songs that made their name, delivered without ceremony or filler. Bad Seed and Ugly kept the momentum taut, Lost At 22 and I Regret gave the crowd their cathartic singalong moments, and by the time the groove of Method Of Groove and the closing surge of Underground arrived, an early Friday audience that might reasonably have still been finding its feet had been fully activated. For a band who have weathered more than most, there was no sense of a legacy act coasting.
If Life Of Agony warmed the field, Fit For An Autopsy set fire to it. Returning to Bloodstock for the first time since 2023 and to the UK for the first time since their storming late-2024 run, the New Jersey deathcore heavyweights arrived with something to prove and a stated intention to go after the festival’s crowd-surfing record. On the evidence of a 45-minute demolition job, they meant it. Fit For An Autopsy occupy that rare space where genuine songwriting and pure physical brutality coexist the breakdowns are colossal, but they are always in service of a bigger structure, and Joe Badolato’s delivery carries an anger that never tips into cartoon.
Lower Purpose detonated the pit immediately, A Higher Level Of Hate and Heads Will Hang kept the intensity pinned to the top of the dial, and the atmospheric heft of The Sea Of Tragic Beasts proved the band can do dread as convincingly as they do violence. Pandora and the one-two of Savior Of None / Ashes Of All into Far From Heaven closed things on the kind of down tuned devastation that leaves a crowd grinning and bruised in equal measure. Whether or not the crowd-surfer counters were troubled, the intent was unmistakable: a band treating a mid-afternoon slot as if it were a headline, and a field responding in kind.
There are bands you watch at a festival, and there are bands that reach off the stage, grab a field by the collar, and refuse to let go until they are done with it. Biohazard, unsurprisingly, belong firmly to the second camp. Dropped into the mid-afternoon heat of a sun-scorched Friday at Catton Hall Bloodstock's 25th-anniversary edition baking under a genuinely un-British sky the Brooklyn crew turned their slot into a tight, uncompromising burst of concentrated New York menace.
It was no small task, either. Following the modern deathcore battery of Fit For An Autopsy, who had already whipped the barrier into a churn of crowd-surfers, could have left a lesser act treading water. Biohazard simply changed the flavour of the violence. Where the deathcore came at the crowd in slabs, Biohazard came at it sideways, that unmistakable crossover swagger, half hardcore stomp, half hip-hop-inflected groove, all attitudes. This is their third visit to the site, following the S.O.P.H.I.E. headline appearance back in 2023 and the mud-caked 2014 outing, and the years of festival craft showed.
Riding the momentum of last October's Divided We Fall, a reunion record that arrived sounding hungry rather than obligatory, a genuine surprise given how fractured the band's road back had been the set leaned hard into the catalogue's most bruising crossover moments. Urban Discipline and Shades Of Grey arrived early and did exactly what three decades of muscle memory demanded: pits opened, the front rows folded inward, and thousands of voices bellowed every word back without a syllable of prompting. That's the thing about a Biohazard crowd; there is no coaxing required. You don't so much watch the songs as brace for them.
Billy Graziadei remained the beating heart of the whole thing, prowling, barking, and at one point simply abandoning the stage altogether to plant himself in the middle of the throng during Wrong Side Of The Tracks. It is a well-worn move, but it never fails to detonate, and the Bloodstock faithful obliged with the kind of surge that sends bodies pinballing over the barrier in waves. Nobody on that stage settled for a second. The energy was relentless, the delivery all coiled aggression and blue-collar snarl, and the musicianship far tighter than the ragged-glory image might lead the uninitiated to expect.
Newer material earned its place too. Fuck The System barbs aimed squarely at governments and politicians — proved the band's teeth have not dulled with the reunion. If anything, it slotted in beside the classics with a swagger that suggested Biohazard still have something to say, not merely a legacy to trade on. That balance is what separates a heritage act coasting on nostalgia from a band that still means it, and Biohazard, gloriously, remain the latter.
By the time the closing salvo landed the crowd a heaving, dust-caked sea under the afternoon sun — the argument had been comprehensively won. There is a particular volatility these guys bring to a metal festival that even the heaviest death and thrash acts on the bill don't quite replicate: that streetwise, anything-could-happen crackle. It never actually tips over, of course. But the threat of it is half the thrill.
Municipal Waste had the unenviable job of following it. Biohazard, meanwhile, had once again proved that reunion or not, turmoil or not, they remain one of the most physically compelling live bands the genre has produced. A masterclass in doing more with less: no pyro, no gimmicks, just riffs, fury, and a relentless run of controlled chaos.
Municipal Waste appear on Bloodstock bills with the regularity of a returning tide: nobody turns a field into a joyous, beer-soaked riot with quite the same efficiency. Richmond, Virginia’s finest crossover-thrash export does not deal in subtlety and never have. What they deal in is velocity, gang chants, and a communal understanding that the entire point of the exercise is to make as many people as possible run in a circle while grinning. By their teatime slot the Friday crowd was fully lubricated and ready to be conducted, and Tony Foresta is one of the great crowd-conductors in the business.
The set was a greatest-hits assault of the band’s party-thrash canon: Slime And Punishment and You’re Cut Off out of the gate, Beer Pressure and the immortal The Art Of Partying turning the arena into a single heaving mass, and the sub-two-minute grenades of the back end — Poison The Preacher, Breathe Grease, Mind Eraser — going off like a string of firecrackers. If any single set on Friday was purpose-built for the sort of horizon-to-horizon circle pit Bloodstock loves to boast about, this was it. Waste do not reinvent themselves each cycle; they don’t need to. They arrive, they detonate, and they leave the field happier and more knackered than they found it.
Some sets you review; others you simply bear witness to. Sepultura’s penultimate main-stage appearance fell firmly into the second category. Billed as part of the Celebrating Life Through Death farewell, this was their last European festival appearance, the closing of a book that opened in Belo Horizonte more than four decades ago. There is a version of the farewell-tour narrative that curdles into sentimentality; Sepultura, to their enormous credit, refused it. They did not come to Catton Hall to be mourned. They came to flatten it one last time.
The setlist was a career in seventy-five minutes, and it was sequenced with real intent. Inner Self and Desperate Cry anchored the early section in the untouchable late-’80s and Arise-era material; Kairos and the Quadra-era Means To An End proved the band’s more recent lineup had every right to stand on that stage; and the run home was simply devastating. Territory, Refuse/Resist and Arise arrived like a fist, a shortened Ratamahatta gave the tribal percussion its last festival airing, and then Roots Bloody Roots — of course Roots Bloody Roots — turned tens of thousands of people into a single roaring organism.
For a generation who grew up with Chaos A.D. and Roots as foundational texts, this was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Whatever your feelings on the long, complicated arc of this band, standing in that field as they said goodbye to the UK was a genuine piece of metal history, and Bloodstock was exactly the right place for it to happen.
Birmingham’s Vanitas provided a set of progressive metal that punched well above the size of the platform. There is something fitting about a Midlands band making their mark on Midland’s turf during a 25th-anniversary celebration, and Vanitas used the opportunity to show off the ambition in their writing — the shifting time signatures, the light-and-shade dynamics, the sense of a band reaching for something bigger than a half-hour slot might suggest. Precisely the reason the EMP and New Blood stages remain, year after year, the beating heart of what makes Bloodstock more than just a big-name festival.
Few bands have ever fit the shape of a festival headline slot as neatly as Lamb Of God fit Bloodstock. Returning to the top of the Ronnie James Dio Stage as a homecoming of sorts for a band who have made no secret of their love for the UK and for this festival in particular — Randy Blythe and company delivered the kind of set that reminds you why the phrase “modern metal institution” exists. This was the Into Oblivion tour, in support of the band’s twelfth studio album, and the setlist threaded the new material through the canon with the confidence of a band who know precisely how good their catalogue is.
The opening salvo of Ruin and Laid To Rest was a statement of intent — no slow build, just a headline band going straight for the throat — and for the next ninety minutes Randy Blythe was in constant, restless motion, the sort of frontman who fills a festival stage through sheer physical intensity rather than choreography. The new songs held their own: Into Oblivion and Blunt Force Blues slotted in beside Resurrection Man and Grace without any drop in intensity, and the crushing middle stretch of 512 and Walk With Me In Hell had the whole field moving.
Birmingham’s Vanitas provided a set of progressive metal that punched well above the size of the platform. There is something fitting about a Midlands band making their mark on Midland’s turf during a 25th-anniversary celebration, and Vanitas used the opportunity to show off the ambition in their writing — the shifting time signatures, the light-and-shade dynamics, the sense of a band reaching for something bigger than a half-hour slot might suggest. Precisely the reason the EMP and New Blood stages remain, year after year, the beating heart of what makes Bloodstock more than just a big-name festival.
Few bands have ever fit the shape of a festival headline slot as neatly as Lamb Of God fit Bloodstock. Returning to the top of the Ronnie James Dio Stage as a homecoming of sorts for a band who have made no secret of their love for the UK and for this festival in particular — Randy Blythe and company delivered the kind of set that reminds you why the phrase “modern metal institution” exists. This was the Into Oblivion tour, in support of the band’s twelfth studio album, and the setlist threaded the new material through the canon with the confidence of a band who know precisely how good their catalogue is.
The opening salvo of Ruin and Laid To Rest was a statement of intent — no slow build, just a headline band going straight for the throat — and for the next ninety minutes Randy Blythe was in constant, restless motion, the sort of frontman who fills a festival stage through sheer physical intensity rather than choreography. The new songs held their own: Into Oblivion and Blunt Force Blues slotted in beside Resurrection Man and Grace without any drop in intensity, and the crushing middle stretch of 512 and Walk With Me In Hell had the whole field moving.
There was room for the more recent Parasocial Christ and the enduring devastation of Omerta and 11th Hour before the band left and returned for an encore that was never really in doubt: Memento Mori and, to send twenty-five years of Bloodstock Friday nights off in the only appropriate fashion, “Redneck”. Thousands of voices, one enormous groove, a Derbyshire sky gone fully dark. If you were writing the brief for a 25th-anniversary Friday headliner, you would be describing this.
Day one of Bloodstock’s 25th anniversary did what the best festival days do: it made the impossible business of choosing to feel like a privilege rather than a chore. From black metal in a morning tent to a farewell from one of thrash’s founding families and a headline set tailor-made for the occasion, Friday spanned the full breadth of what this festival has always celebrated. Sepultura’s goodbye gave the day its lump-in-the-throat moment of history; Lamb of God gave it the emphatic, groove-drenched full stop a milestone Friday deserved; and the underground stages did what they always do, sending people home with a fistful of new favourites.
Day one of Bloodstock’s 25th anniversary did what the best festival days do: it made the impossible business of choosing to feel like a privilege rather than a chore. From black metal in a morning tent to a farewell from one of thrash’s founding families and a headline set tailor-made for the occasion, Friday spanned the full breadth of what this festival has always celebrated. Sepultura’s goodbye gave the day its lump-in-the-throat moment of history; Lamb of God gave it the emphatic, groove-drenched full stop a milestone Friday deserved; and the underground stages did what they always do, sending people home with a fistful of new favourites.
No comments:
Post a Comment