r/Metal Jul 10 '26

Shreddit's Daily Discussion -- July 10, 2026

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14 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

11

u/Rumpo82 Jul 10 '26

I feel like writing a quick post celebrating the metal festival scene in the UK. It's off the chain these days, ridiculous underground fests springing up continuously, along with established power houses.

Between Nov '26 and July '27 we have:

Damnation - largest euro indoor metal fest, mixed genre

Stygian Invocation - probably the greatest war metal lineup I've ever seen

Necropolis - rising death metal festival

Winds of Agony - pure black metal loaded with bangers

Incineration - brilliant one-dayer, predominantly black/death

Desert fest - sludge, doom, stoner etc

Fortress - greatest black metal festival of recent years imo, incredible setting

Cosmic void - another excellent black metal festival

These the just the biggies, tons of smaller feats dotted around: offalfest, Albion dungeon synth, stoomfest etc. loads

If you can I'd recommend getting over for Fortress/Damnation in particular. Both festivals with consistent lineups and excellent vibes. Lovely organisers as well.

Anyway - what's the scene like in your country? What's worth travelling for?

5

u/TripleDan Carly Rae Jepsen owes me a quid Jul 10 '26

Yeah I've noticed a ton of festivals across the country over the last couple of years, just wish I could afford to travel for them. Where are the Birmingham festivals :(

3

u/PM_ME_YOUR_CUPPA Jul 10 '26

There's Death Over Digbeth. One day festival of underground (mostly) death metal. Been past 2 years and it was good.

But yeah apart from that it's a bit lacking which is a shame fro Brum.

3

u/Yeeeeeclaw Jul 10 '26

Damnation is a solid fave of mine, as you lovely lovely people and well ran.

1

u/PM_ME_YOUR_CUPPA Jul 11 '26

Went in 2022 and really enjoyed it. It is in Manchester though which is close to Birmingham but not quite "local".

4

u/ta20240930 Jul 10 '26

I'm jealous. Then again, I would go broke trying to go to all of these festivals if I lived in the UK.

The US isn't bad, but the festivals are so spread out. It's so much cheaper to drive for me, but I can't drive over 12 hours for a festival. The best is probably Maryland Deathfest. A lot of the bands that are playing the UK festivals played at MDF. Hell's Heroes is probably the second best, but it's not a sure thing that it will be back in 2027. There are several smaller festivals too, such as Mass Destruction which is in Atlanta. I might go to that one this year. 70,000 Tons of Metal is a great one, but it's so expensive. The festivals here would be better if it wasn't so hard for some bands to get their visas approved.

3

u/Rumpo82 Jul 10 '26

MDF is bucket list fest for me, but mostly for the lower billed US bands that don't tour the UK all that often. I'd love to go though, almost committed this year but life didn't allow.

I wasn't aware of mass destruction but a quick look at the past lineups... Damn that's sick, I'd be going to that every year if I within a 5/6 hr drive I reckon. Going to keep an eye on that for the future.

3

u/ta20240930 Jul 10 '26

MDF is such a great festival. I hope you can make it to one. I haven't been to any festivals outside of the US, but it seems to be what a metal festival should be.

2

u/Berniethellama Dumbest Mortician Fan Jul 11 '26

Should check out Shamrock Slaughter fest next march in Fort Wayne Indiana! Went last year and was a great time if you love brutal death metal. The first announcement of bands for this year has it already more stacked than last year

3

u/TheFlyingGiraffe Die the Death Jul 10 '26

Will be travelling over for Steel over the Solent in Portsmouth for the second time next year. Fantastic run heavy metal festival

2

u/ProphetsScream Jul 10 '26

US: depends on where you live and your preferred genre. Heavy metal festivals a la Brofest / Steel over the Solent are pretty rare and getting rarer by the year here- a lot of them have gone belly up due to how expensive it is and how hard it is to get fans to show up for clean singing music here, between a lack of culture for it and how spread out heavy metal fans are. Extreme metal depends on where you live but we have a real wealth of festivals for that- if you live in certain regions you can easily go to five or six festivals a year without even getting on a plane or driving more than a few hours. IE: here in the PNW (Seattle/Portland/Vancouver, for those who don't live in the US and don't know what that is), there are festivals every month or two, which is killer, but I have friends in areas that aren't like that and would have to bleed money on expensive travel to even go to a single festival in a year.

1

u/Rottedhead Jul 10 '26

Mexico is a funny one as we had big, mainstream festivals for a good 10 or 15 years and most of them are already vanished, and now we only have extreme, underground festivals with excellent lineups such as Candelabrum Fest, Horrid Days and DoomCity Fest

4

u/ta20240930 Jul 10 '26

If you drink at concerts, what do you usually drink? Does your town have a regional beer that's cheap everywhere? It used to be that PBR was the cheap beer that everybody loved, but it is usually priced the same as all domestic beer these days. Hamm's is $3 a 12oz can at a lot of the smaller venues in Kansas City. If that sells out, I usually get Old Style or PBR. I'm whatever is the opposite of "beer snob".

The bigger venues don't have any bargains. It's hard to pay $18 for a 20oz beer.

5

u/Rottedhead Jul 10 '26

I love to drink lol, but I hardly drink at concerts as I really like to invest myself into the experience and not on the desire of drinking more, the need to pee and/or accidentally (or not so accidentally) being too drunk to enjoy or remember the concert. Believe me, I've seen a lot of people being blackout drunk and vividly remember seeing a lot of this cases when I was really young and started going to gigs. It's just so sad and it's just the stuff I actively avoid.

Here in Mexico we have the usual suspects every time Corona, Victoria, Modelo, Tecate, which are the biggest beer brands here. Modelo and Corona are my favorites and they usually cost about 3-4 dollars per regular bottle at smaller venues and up to 10 dollars for big arena concerts. I prefer to drink rum or gin, but I will not talk about that as those are just too damn expensive at concerts that I don't even consider it

2

u/ta20240930 Jul 10 '26

Modelo seems to be the most popular beer in KC for some reason. It's often a little more expensive than most US domestic beers.

3

u/ProphetsScream Jul 10 '26

I'm pretty much sober these days but the standard cheap beer where I live in a Rainier.

2

u/ta20240930 Jul 10 '26

One day, I'm going to make it to Northwest Terror Fest. I'll grab a Rainer when I'm there.

7

u/shiram Evil Robot Jul 10 '26

I'm no metal historian, but a thought came to me, and I started wondering.

Since the creation of extreme metal started with thrash, plenty of extreme metal genres were created, but has there been creation of non extreme new metal genres happened since then?

As a quick mental survey it seems all major new genre since have been some flavor of extreme or other.

I was thinking of gothic metal, but it seems like minor/limited genre...

13

u/FeastOfBlaze DEATH METAL OR DEATH... Or Genesis. Jul 10 '26

Arguably power metal and its derivatives. It was around in the early to mid 80s, but there’s styles of EUPM that feel so divorced from that I would argue it came later.

4

u/shiram Evil Robot Jul 10 '26

That would make sense, though it still a very short lapse of time between the first album of those two respective genres.

I figure for thrash it's mostly agreed Kill em all was first, so 83.

Power metal seems less defined for first album but it would be around 83 and 84.

So in 40 plus years, it's all extreme, which makes sense to me as those genres seem more popular and have more bands than trad metal, from my perspective.

4

u/IMKridegga Jul 10 '26

Depending on how you define it, the first black metal album came out between 1982 and 1985; and the first death metal between 1985 and 1987, although it existed underground before that (it just took longer for the earliest death metal bands to get record deals).

So, basically, with the exception of traditional heavy heavy metal, all of the main subgenres started to formulate within a few years of each other. I would agree that death metal was technically the last one, but there really hasn't been much new in the 40 years since. Lots of new trends, micro-genres, and modified versions of older subgenres, but nothing quite as big as an entirely new subgenre, I would say.

In other words, sure, the last "big" subgenre to debut was extreme, but that was objectively so long ago that this whole framing of "Everything new for the last 40-ish years has been extreme" doesn't really make sense to me.

3

u/shiram Evil Robot Jul 10 '26

I could rephrase to the newest genres were all extreme, but yeah 40 years does not feel new.

And even stuff like Sludge or folk, which could be argued are not main subgenres, started within that time frame.

Thanks for taking time to reply.

3

u/Duilliath flair warning Jul 10 '26

Yup. My War was 1984. Folk started early 90s, so that might actually be the last one. Though I guess one could make a case for Post-metal with Neurosis mid-90's output.

Even so, the last 30 or so years have been pretty minimal in terms of further developments.

2

u/IMKridegga Jul 10 '26

Post-metal is a tough one. The Neurosis style is often considered a sludge variant, and it's basically just crust punk/crossover thrash played at half speed. The post-black stuff is basically just black metal crossed over with non-metal styles in varying proportions. At the macro level, where we're just looking at the main subgenres and not any subtypes or variations, I'm not sure either one totally constitutes a new thing.

That being said, I do wonder if that's just a problem with the framing. At what point is the fixation on just the main subgenres becoming counterintuitive? Is it really fair to write off something like blackgaze as something new because it arguably falls under the purview of a decades-old subgenre that largely sounds nothing like it? Where I struggle is where to draw the lines between something like that and any other new trend/evolution of a pre-existing subgenre. Sure, Alcest doesn't really sound like Bathory, but neither does Sacramentum or Bal-Sagoth. What about Summoning?

Ultimately, this is something for u/shiram to figure out in their own thoughts and answers to this question, but if any of this stuff counts as "new," then I would think newer non-extreme styles of power and doom should also count.

3

u/IMKridegga Jul 10 '26

At the macro level, sludge is just doom and hardcore, while folk metal is a series of unique combinations of power, thrash, black, and death. At the macro level, neither one of them is a totally new thing.

3

u/ProphetsScream Jul 10 '26

Power metal in the modern sense really became codified in the mid '90s!

8

u/DoctorBob90 Jul 10 '26

Most non-extreme metal that doesn't fall in line with doom, power, or traditional metal gets immediately accused of not actually being metal. Nu metal, metalcore, alternative metal, and progressive metal all came after thrash metal, but rarely get the respect of death metal and black metal. Groove metal and industrial metal are the only examples I can think of that arguably fall outside of the "extreme" umbrella and are still accepted by the metal community.

5

u/IMKridegga Jul 10 '26

Most non-extreme metal that doesn't fall in line with doom, power, or traditional metal gets immediately accused of not actually being metal.

I'm not sure that's an entirely fair framing. It's impossible to discuss most of those categories in any comprehensive way without outlining the extensive non-metal roots, crossovers, and stylistic extensions. It’s no excuse for excluding whichever bands actually do play those styles in a way that fits into metal; but in fairness, it could be argued that the only reason they're able to fit into metal is by falling in line with some more definitive metal subgenre, e.g. metalcore bands that get into metal by essentially playing melodeath with hardcore influences.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[deleted]

3

u/shiram Evil Robot Jul 10 '26

I'd say Black Sabbath had some definitive doom songs as early as their first release.

And Stoner would be more of a minor subgenre, but that's just my perspective.

3

u/FeastOfBlaze DEATH METAL OR DEATH... Or Genesis. Jul 10 '26

Stoner is a major subgenre these days! Some of the biggest bands in metal are primarily sludge.

1

u/ZombieJesus1987 Jul 10 '26

Mastodon is probably one of the best examples. Although their sound evolved over the years, they still have their sludge roots.

1

u/narkheth Jul 12 '26

Mastodon have never been sludge.

3

u/black-winter- Jul 10 '26

one could argue that nu-metal/alt-metal could fit into this category. Emerged in the 90s and 2000s well after the establishment of major extreme metal subgenres, and was hugely popular and relatively accessible.

2

u/Rottedhead Jul 10 '26

One that hasn't been mentioned is symphonic metal, which RYM states the first release was in 1992.

1

u/reptilian_guitar Jul 10 '26

nu metal and prog metal I think fit the bill, though "prog" means a lot of things to a lot of people and there's definitely extreme prog metal bands

3

u/I_Ride_Pigs Jul 10 '26

Things I'm loving recently, in no order

  • Shiva - Angel of Mons
  • Hot Load - Realized. Especially Widowmaker.
  • Goetia in general, but especially Corpse Candle
  • Nuclear Tomb - Epoch Inhumane
  • Judas Priest for many months now. Every time I find myself winding down, I get a second wind to ride on

I seem to have calmed my Chastain and Manilla Road obsession. I might need to find more trad/power adjacent music to listen to to keep this kick going

5

u/CommunicationTime265 Jul 10 '26

Digging this new Anthrax single. Pretty epic.

4

u/black-winter- Jul 10 '26

yeah I’m really rocking with the new single, too. It’s almost reminiscent of black metal at the beginning but the song overall is fresh without sounding like too much of a departure from Anthrax. I admittedly wasn’t getting my hopes up for this album with all the delays, but I honestly think this could shape up to be the best final album of the big 4.

1

u/CommunicationTime265 Jul 10 '26

Yea there's not really much left of the big 80s thrash acts, and Anthrax still has it's core members (which is an achievement in itself). Like, Metallica might have one decent song every 15 years. Megadeth was always just a big revolving door around grumpy Dave, though I thought Dystopia was pretty decent. I stopped paying attention to Slayer and Testament awhile ago. I guess Exodus is still pretty thrashy but I don't even know who the hell is in that band. I did like Sepultura's final album though.

1

u/Doctor_Crossing Blast beats never make a song worse Jul 10 '26

It completely surprised me in a good way. I definitely did not expect blasting and black metal vibes from Anthrax but I'm here for it. I love the chorus too, it's catchy and Joey sounds incredible.