What Can We Learn From the Summer of Sabbath?
Late Summer Festivals & a Health Check on Heavy.
This is going to be a long one - sorry - feel free to skip to the take aways at the end, or just scroll through the pictures, whichever’s your preference!
The reason the post is long is that this has been an astounding summer for metal, particularly in the UK.
In Birmingham, Back to the Beginning proved to city authorities, who’ve always been sceptical of metal and underestimated the breadth of its appeal, that the genre has diverse, young, global audiences. £27.7 million flowed into the city, and £140 million to charities, because of that concert alone. The BBC showed faith in heavy music by committing significant resources to a grassroots equivalent to Ozzy’s final show, held at the Town Hall in June. It has been amazing to see the careers of the three local bands who featured – Gans, Meatdripper, and Cherrydead – just soar in the wake of this event.
A record number of summer festivals also took place. Many, such as Bloodstock, sold out in record time; others such as Arctangent had their second fastest ticket sales on record. And metal media showed increased receptiveness to the range of powerful purposes bands are putting the music to. With the release of Blackbraid III and Mawiza’s UI, the burgeoning field of indigenous metal, for instance, has finally been getting the attention it deserves. The unique brand of metallic hardcore practiced in a few UK cities, Queercore, received its first documentary film, giving heavy music’s power for queer activism new degrees of exposure.
In Birmingham, a series of events has been established, led by Andy Miller (DJ Millabong) and called Building an Alternative Network, to try and sustain all this momentum. The next is at The Night Owl in Digbeth on 25 September (I’ll be one of four speakers – do come along if you can).
This made 2025 an excellent summer to begin the Why Metal Matters research. I began interviewing (including bands like Pallbearer, Fen, Sylvaine, Selbst, and Agriculture) and took part in events that (thanks in part to the Ozzy effect) have led to coverage for the project on BBC TV, Sky News, and Birmingham’s local radio stations (the project now exists on Instagram too, as @whymetalmatters - please do follow!).
I think I’ve seen over 100 bands this summer, and added more than 100 books and articles to the project’s bibliography. A lot of things have struck me through the process. One is just the scale of the heavy music revival we’re going through. One of the bands I saw this year was a crusty old death metal band who’ve been going since 1991. I saw them in Birmingham in 2017, when the crowd was small and middle-aged. When I saw them in 2025 the show was a sell-out, with a front row of people almost exclusively in their twenties and proudly sporting the merch of equally crusty old bands.
But for this post, I want to focus on two weekends in August, and the last three festivals of the UK’s epic summer of metal. All were events I’ve never been to before. One – Noosefest - is tiny, held in the upstairs room of a Birmingham pub, but is exactly the kind of event the wider musical ecosystem is built on. The other two – Arctangent and Supersonic – are large and hugely successful, but also emblematic of the challenges faced by heavy music today.
One reason I’ve never been to Arctangent or Supersonic before is that I hadn’t thought they represent my tastes directly. Both cover a huge range of creative, experimental, and genre-hopping territory, but Arctangent specializes in genres that are either post- or prog-, and Supersonic in drone and a kind of minimalist-maximalist mix that’s hard to pin down (but is distinctively Supersonic). Deep down, I’m a death-doom fan, with a love for most music that’s maximalist-maximalist (and distrust of the idea that less is ever more). I needed to go to both festivals to research the UK scene – particularly for an article I’m sending to The Conversation this month - but both had a little work to do to convince they were my musical home.
Both festivals did feature bands I adore whose work is central to the goals of the research project.
At Arctangent, I knew Wren would be a highlight. Their most recent, heart-rending album is like a case study in everything I’m researching.
I knew Horrendous would be another peak. This photo of their guitarist and a fan sums up the remarkable atmosphere of Arctangent. And this set, I think, might have been the moment I became a total Arctangent convert.
Melvins, unsurprisingly to anyone, were in an uncompromisingly weird league of their own:
Ithaca’s last show, featuring Kate Davies from Pupil Slicer, was an extraordinarily epic final bow:
Rolo Tomassi more than lived up to their legend:
And Green Lung’s high-energy show was, as always, as infectious as the sweating sickness in a rural medieval village. “We don’t”, shouted singer, Tom Templar, have many of Arctangent’s usual “weird time signatures”. “What we do have is massive riffs, huge choruses, and an epic amount of thoroughly researched folklore!”
But there were also major bands I’d never really connected with, who suddenly made total sense in this live context. Between the Buried and Me:
Leprous (whose set was one of the best shows I’ve ever witnessed):
Giant Walker:
And several lesser known (for now) bands who performed like they were the biggest bands on the planet, such as Dimscua:
This was also, without doubt, the friendliest festival I’ve ever been to, with a politics of inclusivity that was clear everywhere (and a beautiful antidote to the weird weaponizing of national flags evident on the journey to get here).
Two weekends later, I was at Supersonic, giving the festival a little extra coverage on media including BBC TV and BBC online.
There were bands here who are doing really exciting things with metal, such as Divide & Dissolve. I enjoyed hearing that the musicians behind this Australian band (whose heritage is Tsalagi, African-American, Maori, and white Australian) didn’t realise they were playing doom metal until they were told so, and learned their instruments so independently that guitarist, Takiaya Reed, still holds her guitar upside down. What could be more metal?
And Witch Club Satan:
Some sets, such as Backxwash, took heavy music to places that do everything metal does (except guitar solos) in styles that exist beyond genre.
Some drone bands, especially Water Damage, showed me that this genre is an infinitely more powerful live prospect than I’d known from my home stereo:
This festival also made me realise, thanks to the spectacularly fresh energy brought by bands like Death Goals, that Queercore at the Birmingham venue Centrala is likely to end up as much of a canonical moment in heavy music history as grindcore at The Mermaid.
Some performances just carried so much energy that the genre was irrelevant, such as Hang Linton:
There was dark, doomy folk (in the hands of bands like Lankum, one of my favourite genres) from Funeral Folk:
And there was the legendary un-metal-but-amazing Richard Dawson:
One of the most remarkable things about Supersonic weekend was the fact that, on the Sunday in particular, every subgenre of metal you can imagine was being played somewhere in Birmingham. There was shock rock and metalcore at The Flapper, there were death metal, slam, and thrash bands in Digbeth pubs, there was doom and post metal in the O2 and sludge and math metal in XOYO. Black metal even had its own talk. Every time I felt the need for a guitar solo or some technical death metal wizardry, I headed just across the road from Supersonic into Noosefest where one of my students at the University of Birmingham was playing the last gig for one of his bands:
It felt like such a luxury to be able to just flit between my favourite genres like this, and I wondered whether there’d ever been many occasions when this would have been possible.
I’m guessing it’ll be pretty clear already that both Arctangent and Supersonic did convert me: instantly and irrevocably. Both far exceeded anything I’d imagined in terms of the music and the atmosphere they generated. Each presented a face of metal that’s desperately needed in our politically polarized times: open, inclusive, friendly, and welcoming – showing that metal is for everyone and that the counter-cultural cutting-edge of heavy music remains as sharp as ever.
In the festivals’ aftermath I began arranging a few interviews with leading figures in the industry. First, I spoke to James Scarlett, director of Arctangent and 2000 Trees (as well as co-host of the podcast 2 Producers 1 Pod). He gave me a lot of the info I’m going to need for publishing the research I’m doing. Demand for the festivals is at an all time high, “post-festival sales [this year] the best we’ve ever had by a long way”. In terms of music he said, “there’s definitely good periods and bad periods, and we’re in a very strong time at the moment where there are a lot of great bands. Loads of sort of “nobody bands” are really great - no fans and nobody’s heard of them yet - there’s so much great music out there across the whole heavy music spectrum”. He pointed to an interesting new harmony in the scene, where, in contrast to a decade or two ago, the bands that critics love and the bands that are hugely popular are in unusually close alignment. But he detailed the spiralling costs (up by a third), and growing logistical challenges of putting on a festival: Brexit, Covid, and the cost of living crisis amount to “a perfect storm of bad news”. We discussed the multiple ways in which festivals generate economic, as well as cultural, capital for a locality - “hundreds of thousand of pounds going into the local economy just from the people working and trading on the site”, nevermind the hotels, food and drink, and fuel that takes the festival’s contribution into the millions. Despite the immense headaches the current situation must cause him, James comes across as an impossible optimist: in love with the music (he watched 84 bands at this year’s Arctangent) and with an utterly tenacious commitment to creating spaces for it. That Arctangent and 2000 Trees generate so much value despite the barriers in their way just raises the question of what would be possible – for the festivals, the region, and the UK - if people like James had genuine support from local authorities, the arts council, and government. Instead, there’s still an unexamined assumption that heavy music can’t provide the social benefits that other genres of music represent and must therefore survive by market forces alone.
Supersonic is an even more striking case. I left with the sense that this festival, after twenty-two years in action, is one of the city’s greatest assets. Digbeth felt vibrant and bustling in ways I’ve rarely seen it before and every shop, café and bar got a huge boost to its footfall. It was only after leaving that I learned the festival has lost its venues for next year. This might have been the last ever Supersonic. Even if it isn’t, the strong bond between Digbeth (even Birmingham as a whole) and Supersonic is likely to be broken as the festival looks for a home in a different city. Too much of Digbeth has now been bought up by property developers, with no protections from the council, to leave space for this staggeringly successful festival to continue.
If this summer were a film or novel, an additional plot twist that occurred this month would be dismissed as too far fetched. Just as the council and city authorities began to take the first baby steps in proper commemoration and celebration of the city’s grassroots music heritage, they enacted a total ban on busking in the city centre. Having already defunded many of the city’s cultural institutions to the point of existential threat and desertification, while showing no awareness of the economic opportunity loss this represents, this draconian act suggests the council still has little conception that music is key to everything from the city’s global reputation to its citizens’ wellbeing.
Globally, nationally, and on the civic scale we’re at an unprecedented crux. The opportunities are immense. There are more musicians, breaking more musical boundaries, than ever before. There are audiences ever-more receptive to that creativity. But at the moment the threats still have the upper hand.
In other places with equally significant histories of metal things are different. In Norway, diplomats have been, for the last fifteen years, trained in black metal. Metal festivals, as major drivers of “musical pilgrimage”, have state support. Earlier this year, I was invited to the Norwegian ambassador’s residence in London to see what results when states recognise heavy music as a cultural and economic asset. Representatives from the UK music industry (leading musicians, editors of magazines including Metal Hammer, PR companies, and agents) were invited. The fifty-or-so people present were greeted by the ambassador, who personally introduced the directors of Beyond the Gates and Inferno festivals. Sylvaine played a ravishingly beautiful acoustic set.
Metal’s value wasn’t in dispute. It was recognized that every Krone spent on metal brought disproportionate returns. The result of this isn’t the kind of commercialization that any metalhead will find repulsive, but a sense for organisers that running metal events isn’t a constant struggle with irrational levels of personal risk, and for fans that their favourite venue isn’t just one minor crisis from annihilation.
I guess it’s up to us as metal fans to create the narratives that will change perceptions of the cultural significance and value of music. Let’s organize. Let’s pool our knowledge and resources. Let’s make sure council and MPs can see that a heavy music scene enhances any city, but especially the town billed as the “Home of Metal”.
Maybe “Building an Alternative Network” at The Night Owl on 25 Sep can be a start. Come along. Bring anyone you know who’d like musicians, or anyone else in metal, to be able to make a living from the music. Let’s ask, at the end of the Summer of Sabbath, what changes would be required for the best new bands today to have a chance at the kinds of careers Tony, Ozzy, Bill, and Geezer enjoyed.
