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Diary of an aging metalhead: infernal heat, new blood, and a single question – what is metal??

I’m carrying day two on my shoulders from the moment I wake up. Yesterday’s fatigue is hitting me today, because that’s how it works at a certain age: you get the bill the next morning. Turning fifty makes itself known, and this year’s heat is straight out of an infernal pit, temperatures Denmark has never seen before. So I experience the whole day along a single axis, both physical and mental: on one side Pandemonium and Helvíti. Sun, dust, scorching heat; on the other, Gehenna—the woods, my refuge, the cool shade. Back and forth between hell and the shadows. And right in the middle, a question that won’t leave me alone today: what actually is metal today?

Gridiron: Hardcore as a first love

I start at Gehenna, catching the first gig of the day: Gridiron, from Baltimore. Old-school hardcore with a hip-hop soul mixed in, low and groovy riffs, crushing breakdowns, and vocals spitting street life. Seeing these kids pull it off today in front of a massive, young crowd hit me in a particular way, because hardcore was my first love.
It takes me back to being a kid, listening to Negazione and Raw Power, thinking: yep, this is my sound, this speaks to me. New blood from the core. Glory to the new blood. And right here, I’m already anticipating my own cynicism, because the risk at fifty is becoming that guy. The one who claims new music sucks and that you only need to listen to the old stuff. The older guys used to tell me the exact same thing back in the nineties: “Forget that noise, listen to Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, now that’s real music.” Don’t get me wrong, I loved the classics, but Nirvana were brilliant, and today Nirvana stand at the absolute pinnacle of history. So no, I refuse to end up like that. I decided that today I would listen to the new generation completely free of prejudice.

Rap Martin Rap: A finger

[Stefano]

No pitying or inclusive rhetoric here. Martin stands tall on stage like a raised middle finger slammed right in the face of bureaucratic frustration, the alienation, and the hypocrisy of a society that prefers you invisible and sedated inside a welfare form. You need rage, not violence: inflatable clubs and a party in the moshpit will do. One mosh will bury them all. Punk, caustic, and raising just that single finger. [/]

(0): Intellectual and brutal

Over at Pandemonium, under the blazing sun, I went to catch (0). I’m not even going to try and box this Danish band into a genre, because labels constrict me. Let’s just say they draw from post-metal, blackgaze, and experimental doom, churning out something beautiful and brutal all at once, as precise as mathematics and as chaotic as raw emotion. Growling, hypnotic guitars, a frozen soundscape that sucks you in like a black hole, every track playing out like a chapter of a ritual. A beautiful opening, romantic emotions, a great story. A side note: there is very little true black metal on the bill this year, almost none. (0) were one of the few windows into that world, and it was darkness at its absolute best.

A Patrician Interlude, with Red Nail Polish

Here I’ll indulge in a quick digression, because that’s part of a diary too. Dying from the heat, I took refuge in the village, the RIP area, the place you only get into with the right ticket. Fortunately, I feel a bit patrician, so I have one. Fine restaurants, shade, and among the things you’d least expect, a manicure station. So yes, I got myself a nice coat of red nail polish and walked out of there happy. A fifty-year-old metalhead with red nails, and I’m totally fine with that.

Die Spitz: The needed jolt

Still trying to escape the scorching heat and dust, I head back to Gehenna in the woods to find some relief, and that’s where I hit the best surprise of the day: Die Spitz, from Austin, Texas. Dirty, raw, explosive punk guitars, furious vocals, that mix of punk, garage, and grunge delivered with an attitude that completely disregards the rules. Short, wild, honest tracks. Their energy picked me up massively, giving me the exact boost I was looking for today. So much so that I thought: I’m not moving from this spot. And indeed, that’s the stage where I ended up witnessing the best gigs.

Rotten Leprechaun: Zombies do Punk
[Stefano]

Instead, I run away, stealing a few minutes from the fantastic Die Spitz gig to venture into the local underground.
“We are Rotten Leprechaun… no, I meant KISS! … and this song is about Zombies!” ”
… and now another song about Zombies” (x13)
Delightfully punk-rock and ironically Misfits-esque, Rune and Tobias brought a breath of fresh, loud, screamed simplicity.

Smelling of a (haunted) home and a squat basement occupied by zombies.
A fundamental underground quota.

[/]

PRESIDENT: Out of the comfort zone

I caught President at Pandemonium, and I have to be honest: they pushed me way out of my comfort zone. That style of vocals isn’t something I’m used to in a metal context, and I struggled through the first few tracks. But then I looked at the new generation on stage singing, having fun, pulling me in, and I just let myself go. By the third or fourth song, I was locked in. A fabulous performance. They have something to say and they say it, and that something is being received loud and clear by the new blood of metal, whom I saw under the stage completely invested, totally gripped. And if something strikes those chords, it means it’s real. My advice, especially to those my age, is exactly this: go in without prejudice, give it a listen. Stepping out of your comfort zone isn’t easy, but this is high-substance stuff. Then, at a certain point, my body demanded payment. A heat crash, right in the middle of a sunstroke, despite me chugging a liter and a half of water. I was also paying for the day before, which had been pretty wild. So I retreated to the woods of my legendary sanctuary, Gehenna, to put myself back together.

[Stefano] Either people throw vegetables at them, or they leave everyone speechless. In the end, both happened. The vegetables came from those who didn’t actually listen; the applause from those who stopped to hear them out. A top-tier gig: anyone in the crowd who managed to get past the shock of the first ten minutes was unanimous in their praise.
A minimalist look, calculated to mask any expression. Measured, deliberate movements. A minimalist backing track and a lightweight sound. Few screamed breakdowns and tightly reined-in guitars. Everything concentrates on the vocals, the lyrics, and those rare movements allowed on stage. It is the exact opposite of the metal we are used to: fury, walls of sound, and ostentatious drama even when singing about a tapeworm devouring the brain. PRESIDENT put on a show that is light in sound but caustic in content and delivery, meaning the rare flashes of screeming hit with massive amplification precisely because of it.

End It: The return of hardcore

Back on my feet at Gehenna, End It from Baltimore brought me straight back to the core of the matter. Brutal, intense hardcore: short, explosive tracks, lyrics packed with rage and social consciousness, zero filler. Band and crowd fused into a single, white-hot entity. I didn’t know them, I discovered them right there, and once again I saw a ton of young kids down in the pit. And that made me think: hardcore is back. I saw it yesterday with Twenty-One Children, and today these guys from Baltimore confirmed it. Much like in the eighties, hardcore is acting as a global phenomenon, carrying that pure energy and social awareness that spoke to me so deeply back then. It has returned renewed, but completely uncorrupted in spirit. And maybe that is the true purity of hardcore.

Calva Louise: A lump in the throat

And then came the new-wave band I wanted to see most today: the one I’ve been spinning on repeat for a month and a half, the one I adore, the one that truly has something to say. Calva Louise, a British-French-Venezuelan trio playing alternative rock that refuses to be caged by any genre: punk energy, electronics, a sci-fi psychedelic aesthetic, all blended into a sound uniquely their own, which I think stems directly from the mixture of different roots they carry with them. But here, I couldn’t hold back the tears, and it wasn’t just because of the music. Jess, the singer, is Venezuelan, and the day before, Venezuela was struck by a horrific earthquake: two massive shocks back-to-back, La Guaira and Caracas brought to their knees, hundreds dead, and tens of thousands missing. A massive tragedy, and she comes from right there. She opened up by saying she didn’t even know if she’d be able to sing today. Then she said: “No, I am extremely privileged because I am here. I want to play, and I want to play for them too, to give them hope.” And she started to cry. I understand that feeling to my very core. It’s the expat guilt, when you live far away and something terrible happens back where you grew up, where your loved ones and your friends still are, and you aren’t there. You feel guilty, and completely powerless because you can’t do a thing. It struck a precise nerve in me. And like a true artist, she transformed that pain into a gift: sincere, no frills, massive substance, remarkable as she transitioned from guitar to piano while singing.
She gives a lot.
She gives everything.

Bring Me The Horizon: Hope for the depressed

Helvíti, the main stage, was closed out by them: Bring Me The Horizon. I know, some of the old guard turn their noses up. I’d already seen them live about ten years ago and really liked them, and I’ll admit something: when I listen to their records, I don’t fully get them. But live, I absolutely love them as a spectacle, and above all, live is where I understand. Because up there, I saw the peak of an entire generation: Gen Z. A generation raised attached to the internet, riddled with doubt, submerged in information, with higher depression rates than those before them. And I saw how this band speaks to them. The singer, who with that face tattoo is probably the least intimidating person I’ve ever seen, talks, offers hope, builds a genuine connection with his people, involves them, even brings a girl up on stage. That connection right there, made of fire, spectacle, gamification, but above all, authentic love for the fanbase. They earn their place up there. And I clarified something else to myself: their lyrics might be dark and depressing, but they speak to those who have been through it, and they do it in a way that offers hope. Underlying it all is love, unity, energy, and standing back up after taking the hits. And that, gentlemen, is metal.
That’s why, even if I don’t grasp them on record, seeing them live makes me realize heavy metal will never die.

Sepultura: The farewell, and the value of time

The grand finale at Hades belonged to a band that has been mine forever: Sepultura.
The logo I used to have giant-sized on the top of my school backpack. Seeing them again did me good, but it also pissed me off a little for one specific reason. Because Andreas Kisser, the man who provides the very backbone of this band, is probably the most underrated guitar hero in the world. Nobody ever mentions him. Everyone always talks about the Cavalera brothers, about how great and charismatic Derrick Green is, but about Kisser, silence. Yet he is the one who weaves together thrash precision and Brazilian phrasing; he is the one who, with down-tunings and rhythmic interlocking, shaped the tribal sound of the Roots era; he is the technical spine of the group. It needs to be said, for once.

A fantastic concert, and at one point, about ten crew members joined them on stage to play percussion during the more tribal tracks like “Ratamahatta” and “Roots Bloody Roots”—a wall of drums that hits you straight in the sternum live. And then they close. And as they finish, I realize this is a valediction, their farewell, and that’s where the entire theme of the day ties together. Because underneath it all, I’ve only talked about one thing from morning till night: time.
Seneca used to say it’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it, and that life is long enough if you know how to use it. And suddenly, the dilemma of the aging metalhead stops scaring me. Time passes, fifty years make themselves felt, the heat knocks you flat, the bands you loved say goodbye.

But the new blood is here, hardcore is returning, the kids in the pit are feeling the exact same chords I used to feel. Metal doesn’t die; it sheds its skin. And as long as there’s someone like me who gets red nail polish at fifty and gets choked up over a band discovered a month ago, I’m not wasting a single second.

Day two archived. Sepultura know it better than anyone: sooner or later, you always return to your roots. And as long as there is someone out there making them vibrate, heavy metal will never die.