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Diary from day three: the global nature of metal, a community tearing down the prejudices

Day three is when I realize I’ve traveled around the world without moving an inch from the woods. Indonesia, Japan, London, Nashville, Denmark—all inside the same fence, all speaking the same language. Metal is exactly this: a global language that starts in a remote town and ends up here, and when it truly works, it forces you to look inside yourself and tear down the walls you carry around. Plus the usual hellish heat, which today made me make some patrician choices. Let’s go.

Jakob Stegelmann and the Aarhus Symfoniorkester: the grandfather of nerds

It opens on the main stage with something beautiful and unconventional: Jakob Stegelmann with the Aarhus Symfoniorkester playing nørdmusikken (nerd music). Stegelmann is a living legend in Denmark, the face of the TV show Troldspejlet, and by now he’s like that beloved grandfather telling you the stories you grew up with, complete with his jokes and a fantastic orchestra behind him giving body to timeless themes. Beautiful. But the heat was brutal, the kind where the sun plays dirty, and at a certain point I asked myself: why suffer? And from there begins my day as a patrician of metal.

A Patrician Interlude, with a Haircut and Trim

Here I’ll indulge in a quick digression, because that’s part of a diary too. Dying from the heat, I headed over to the VIP area, which let’s face it, is the playground of patricians: the ticket costs more, but there’s space, few people, shade, restaurants with table service, various bars. Yesterday I got my nails done there. Today I see there’s a barber: a rock’n’roll street crew from Athens, the kind that tours festivals sponsored by Monster, and I tell myself: you know what? It’s too hot, I’m going to get my beard trimmed and a haircut to find some relief. No sooner said than done. A half-century-old metalhead reshaping his look while everyone else roasts outside.

Powerplant: soundtrack to a haircut

One of the things I love about the festival is exactly this: while the barbers from Athens were working their scissors on me, the notes from Powerplant, from London, drifted in as the background noise. Raw punk stitched to cold, mechanical, lo-fi, and hypnotic synths: the kind of sound meant for walking through a neon-lit ruined city. I didn’t see their whole set; I experienced it from the barber’s chair, and it was the most fitting dystopian soundtrack I could have asked for while getting my head sorted under the sun. Sometimes the festival serves things up to you sideways, and they’re perfect.

Soilwork: Porchetta Melo-Death

[Stefano]

While Davide gets pampered by the festival barber, Björn ‘Speed’ Strid is sweating like a pig under the blazing sun.
As a true professional, though, he turns the situation to his advantage and serves up some old-school Gothenburg melo-death chops.
Only now, under this stage, do I realize how much I’ve missed Swedish death metal: the big teddy bear Björn pulls out a setlist that is melodic beyond belief, playing at bridging the old Gothenburg riffs with the stadium-sized choruses of his Night Flight Orchestra.
Call it pop-melo-death, call it a freakshow, but theirs is dirty work, especially when you have to get a Danish crowd moving while they’re completely stunned by the muggy heat.
Fortunately, the frontman makes our thoughts painfully obvious with an epic line while the Refshaleøen asphalt sizzles:
‘What a fucking scorcher! But it could be worse… we could be in France!’
The refreshing melody of Soilwork was therapeutic. Essential if you like life and death metal. [\]

All Them Witches: dark cowboys in the dust

I step out with a fresh head, newly cut hair, and I’m instantly struck by the notes of All Them Witches, from Nashville, playing at Pandemonium, the sandy stage, with all that dust suspended and the smell of grit in the air. What they do refuses to be caged: heavy psych, blues, doom, Americana, each riff breathing like nature itself. A show fitting for the dark cowboys they are. And I, perched on a terrace, listened to them from above under the sun, with that smell of dust all over me, feeling genuinely like a dark knight in an Arizona desert—something both western and spiritual at the same time. I was a step away from a mystical crisis, something dark and sacred all at once.
Beautiful, with my fresh haircut and that newfound peace.

St. Digue: the wagon found by chance

I’m walking, and I stumble upon the Buzz N’ Roll, the mobile stage on wheels, two square meters of drums, synthesizer, and guitar moving through the festival entrance area.
On top is St. Digue, alias of Kasper Deichmann, darkwave electronics and industrial rock from the Copenhagen underground, someone who translates the neurodivergent experience of trauma, alienation, and black metal roots into music. And there I witness an electro-techno circus wagon moving along, dragging behind it a procession of metalheads dancing to the rhythm of electric tarantellas, great sampling. I caught one that sounded like Pulp’s “Common People” which completely floored me.
Barely half an hour, but overwhelming, happy people, perfect atmosphere, and above all, unexpected: it was on the schedule, but I simply found it while walking. And here’s a personal note, because this hits close to home.
He translates exactly that mind that races a mile a minute and out of sync, and I opened this diary three days ago talking about the neurospicy side of me. I had already seen him a couple of years ago, and you can see a true maturation: the show has grown, the personality was already there, but now he has locked the technique together with the details and what he has to say. And he has a lot to say. An excellent artist from the Copenhagen scene.

Voice of Baceprot: the wall falling in real time

Look, if I had to name the band that struck me the most among the discoveries of the entire festival, it’s them. Voice of Baceprot, three Indonesian girls from Singajaya, a village in the Garut regency, West Java—a conservative area.

They met as kids at school, their teacher got them into metal, and “baceprot” in Sundanese means “noisy.” They play wearing the hijab, they are Muslim, and because of this, they’ve faced everything, even rocks thrown at them and death threats, but they transformed it into a platform instead of letting themselves be silenced. Tracks like “School Revolution” or that song whose title is a prayer asking for permission to play music.
Their point, which they state clearly, is that they don’t want to be reduced to the hijab: they want people to talk about their music. And the music is metal, rap, and alternative rock, played with a precision you wouldn’t expect. But the defining scene was social even before it was musical, and it’s the heart of the day.
They are incredibly sweet, speaking with a gentle, tiny voice that contrasts completely with the heavy stuff they blast out. At first, the Copenhell crowd was thrown off. Not out of prejudice: the girls had already won everyone over with their charm and curiosity.
It was the crowd that was out of its comfort zone, not quite knowing how to react to that sight. Until at a certain point, the singer, in her tiny voice, goes: “Did you know that in Indonesia, when we play this, a circle of death breaks out?” And at that exact moment, the wall falls.
The crowd wakes up, the circle of death opens up, and the real metal show begins. I watched it live, the stereotype shattering in real time, the community looking inside itself, recognizing its own bewilderment, and tearing it down right then and there. This is the coolest, most metal thing I could have witnessed. Besides, Indonesia has one of the most vibrant metal scenes in Asia, they even had an openly metalhead president, so it’s anything but a remote backwater. Look them up, listen to them, and see what they represent for girls raised where freedom isn’t to be taken for granted.

Neckbreakker: The birthday celebration of Copenhell

[Stefano]
The official celebration for Copenhell’s fifteen years will arrive with the upcoming headliners, but the real celebration, the one that holds the seminal idea of the project, happens on the Neckbreakker stage.
Copenhell was born around the music and the metal community, an identity embodied from day zero by co-founder Anders Bøtter. This concert, in fact, is his celebration and his vindication, arriving after his departure from the festival due to political differences with Live Nation.
For Anders, Copenhell was never supposed to become just another copy festival made of big, pre-packaged names, a faded version of Hellfest. It was meant to be a deeply Scandinavian organism, capable of taking risks and giving today a main stage to tomorrow’s big names, anticipating their success. Bands like Ghost, Hatebreed, Gojira, Sabaton, Myrkur were literally incubated by Copenhell.

The very young guys in Neckbreakker are a tribute to this philosophy. Five Danish kids thrown onto a giant stage, with all the fire needed to ignite the wildest, most violent, and dustiest pit of the whole day. Theirs is a primal death metal soaked in hardcore attitude: the lifeblood this festival has fed on since it took its first steps. No scenic fluff, just a demonstration of confidence fed by pure energy and a deep metal brotherhood beneath the stage.

Neckbreakker walked onto the stage as prospects and walked off as the new big name in Scandinavian metal. There remains only the irony of seeing that, while the main bills get clogged with algorithm-proof names, the real triumph of the festival is taken home with five twenty-somethings whose only marketing plan is to smash you to pieces and send you to the chiropractor with a broken neck.

Happy birthday Copenhell! [\]

15 Years In Hell: the family party (with a regret)

This show came in to cover the gap left by the cancellation of Twisted Sister, and I approached it with high expectations. More than forty artists from the Danish scene, different generations and genres, guests like Joey Belladonna from Anthrax and Gus G, a concert in five acts for the festival’s fifteen years.
It was fun, great energy, a showcase of the biggest names in Denmark, and above all, the sign of a scene that historically didn’t collaborate much across genres and regions, but today stands united. The community looking inside itself, once again, but this time in its own home.

I want to highlight two things.
First: Søren Andersen, probably one of the most underrated guitar heroes around, the kind who makes complex things look entirely effortless. If you like real guitarists, go discover him.
Second: Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” sung as a duet by Ditte Krøyer and Emma Acs—one of the absolute high points of the evening. But then the regret, and I say this as a spectator: in my opinion, they missed an opportunity.

They could have handed the entire design of the fifteen-year celebration over to John Cxnnor, giving them a real budget and a massive stage for a definitive show, and it would have been a whole different story. Instead, we had fun, we sang along to all the historic hits from Black Sabbath to Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”, a nice social reunion. But the special opportunity, the real one, was left on the table. Whatever, I’m not the organizer, what the fuck do I know.

Violent Magic Orchestra: the midnight alcohol-induced epiphany

Once that finished, the classic dilemma of a good festival kicks in: too many great shows happening at the same time. Should we go to Anthrax, should we go here, should we go there? Then, struck by a midnight alcohol-induced epiphany, I said: “No, let’s go here.” And we ended up at Violent Magic Orchestra, from Japan, and it was a definitive show.
That is how you put on a midnight set: black metal, industrial techno, noise, stroboscopes, a wall of sound that amounts to an apocalyptic rave, bodies flying in crowdsurfing, a furious mosh pit, all in the nighttime woods of Gehenna. We came out sweaty and broken.

The return, and a scene straight out of The Warriors

And then, as any self-respecting night demands, off to the Biergarten to finish ourselves off with drinks, with the DJ blasting metal hits back-to-back, from Pantera to Guns N’ Roses, all of them, beautiful.
That’s how day three wraps up. On the way back, my girlfriend and I took a selfie I won’t be sharing. But on the metro, there were other people too, returning from completely different parties, much more elegant than ours, and right there I felt a bit like Swan in The Warriors, in that mythical scene where the gang, fresh off their night of battles, crosses paths with the well-dressed crowd returning from the prom.
Two worlds sharing the same carriage. And I was on the right side. Because in the end, it all comes down to this. Three days where metal took me halfway around the world while standing still in a forest, and where I saw a community capable of looking inward, recognizing its own bewilderment and its own prejudices, and tearing them down right then and there. This is the global nature of metal, and this is the tribe. The pack returns home.

Day three archived, and the final act is still to come. Three girls in hijabs, arriving from a village in West Java, asking in a song only for permission to make music. And a whole forest on the other side of the world granting it to them by opening up a circle of death. If metal is a prayer, “God, Allow Me (Please) to Play Music”, that night it was answered.