Heavy Metal Music Festivals

Often considered the antithesis to popular mainstream music, fans of the heavy metal genre and particularly heavy metal festivals are the amongst the most religiously devoted and committed to their subculture.

Widely credited as the roots of the heavy metal genre, British rock bands Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin laid the blueprints for metal music as we know it today, focusing on loud, distorted, and amplified guitar riffs, incorporating mythological and historical themes that expanded beyond the generic love-song narrative in their lyrics.

Since then, metal has spawned various subgenres such as ‘glam-metal’ and ‘thrash metal’ made popular throughout the USA in the 80’s by Mötley Crüe, Megadeth, and notably Metallica, as well as more extreme versions such as ‘death metal’ and ‘black metal’ that came to fruition in Scandinavia during the 90’s.

Heavy metal festivals are a force unto themselves, frequently a sweat and beer-soaked occasion where head-banging, crowd-surfing, and flailing limbs in the mosh-pit is a rite of passage.

There are now so many legendary metal festivals, notably Download Festival in the UK (and Madrid), and Wacken Open Air in Germany that both have an illustrious heritage amongst their legions of dedicated fans.

Other Festicket metal favourites are Rock am Ring, it’s sibling festival Rock im Park, Hellfest, Blockstock Open Air, and Rock Fest where you’re likely to see artists like Metallica, Rammstein, Ozzy Osbourne, Guns ‘n Roses, and Judas Priest top the bill.