Bloodstock Festival Countdown : 24 Bands Not To Miss

So if you are heading out for the Wednesday you will currently be looking at ONE MORE SLEEP till bloodstock. It has arrived or at least it is currently pulling up outside. So let’s have the third to last in our little countdown. The next band to watch. And we warn you now it will be one of the most bonkers and genre shredding things you have ever witnessed.

3. Shining – Sophie Stage – Friday, eight pm sharp.

Shining (the Norwegian one as opposed to the Swedish Black Metal outfit) are one of the most experimental and avant-garde acts currently orbiting our world. In 2010’s “Black Jazz” they are responsible for an album that bent the parameters of extreme metal in directions it never knew it could go. Interestingly, they started life in the late nineties as an acoustic Jazz collective, but it was Jørgen Munkeby love of black metal that pulled them into the gravitational pull of our music. Their first four albums saw them drift in a rock direction, but it was the aforementioned “Black Jazz” that upset the apple cart in a way that is still causing reverberations to this day.

Any subsequent extreme metal release that has used sax owes a massive debt to this seminal and peerless record. Since then Shining have continued to experiment by leaning into the avant-garde with “One One One” and” International Blackjazz Society” but also ditching it completely with the heavy rock-centric “Animal”. It has been eight years since that latter release however we are promised new material in the autumn in the shape of “North // South”, which will allegedly see them once again balance experimental jazz with metal. If you are willing to have your mind stretched this is where you need to be.