Super Mega Big Review : Bloodstock Festival on August 10th 2025

With that is Sunday, the weekend has flown past and we are in the final furlong. But what fantastic final furlong it is. Apathy UK are anything but apathetic. They are incredibly young, vigilantly angry and astonishingly well versed in their instruments. They boil with righteous indignity, and they prove to be highly competent in screaming at the injustices of this world.

On the main stage, Ghost of Atlantis are bringing the pomp and ceremony. This is big anthemic widescreen melodic death metal, with plenty of role-playing and world building. They do it awfully well and the guitars brim with majestic melody.

Back on Sophie, Barbarian Hermit are in their death throws. It is this and then one final show in October in Manchester and then they are gone from our lives. It is a real shame as they ply us with some extraordinarily heavy and pulsating riffs that rumble through the entire tent. There are traces of sludge but in the main, they are clean and crisp and absolutely divine.

One Machine bring the trad, this is metal as mother used to make it. It is lusciously melodic and full of hooks you could hang a chandelier on. It is blisteringly entertaining for a late Sunday morning and the singalong sections land well with the ever-increasing crowd that gathers to gwap at them. Back at Sophie one of the most interesting and introspective bands of the weekend are making their Bloodstock debut. 

Frayle are so fragile in their approach they are barely there. It is all very ethereal and nonchalant. The sound drift across the tent in a ghostly manner and Gwyn Strang has a wraith like presence. Her vocals are subdued and rarely move beyond a whisper. A Spine-chillingly minimal performance that leaves everyone wanting more.

This is the earliest show Rivers of Nihil have ever played, nevertheless they call up a highly impressive audience desperate to bath in their highly unique version of death metal. Aside from set closer, ‘Where Owls Know My Name’ everything is drawn from this year's rather wonderful and blisteringly heavy self-titled effort. This means we get the less introspective and more gargantuan riff-oriented version of Rivers of Nihil. There are two distinct pieces of uniqueness about this band. The first is the way that they pepper corrosive death metal with astonishing tempo changes and shifts in time signatures. Nothing is constant and instead, we are strapped to a musical rollercoaster with the velocity altering on a continual basis. Their other significant USP is Patrick Corona on Sax. Rather than be seen as a gimmicky afterthought, the use of saxophone is remarkable and provides an additional texture to their already complex palette. It maybe darn early, but Rivers Of Nihil manage to make an astonishing impression.

Back on Sophie, Wall are bringing claustrophobic heaviness to the party. Consisting of half of Desert Storm they take the brittle and brutal nihilistic doom of their day jobs and just accelerate with it. It's like sticking your head into a blender (Editor disclaimer: ROCKFLESH will not be held responsible for the effects of sticking your head into a blender), a wall (pun intended) of unrepentant and unswerving noise. The crowd is sadly thin but those of us who are there reveal in the monolithic minimalism of this exercise in route 101 noise.

August Burns Red have a unique way of starting a show and ensuring that they are playing to a pumped up audience. That is to start each and every set with a cover of the immortal ‘Chop Suey’ by System Of A Down.  They don't just pump it out over the PA as Maiden and Metallica do respectively with ‘Doctor Doctor’ and ‘It's a Long Way to The Top’, they actually play the bugger. It turns out to be an extraordinary clever way of making sure they begin on a high. What becomes clear is that the packed field also know quite a lot of the bands other material. August Burns Red turn out to be an astonishingly interesting litmus test for where metal is today. You can hear in their stuff the ghosts of the past but also the echoes of where metal wants to go in the future. It's heavy but we also have a playful element. This is not just doom and gloom. Jake Luhrs and his pals want to entertain, and they prove very effective in that manner.

Dogma want to be Ghost but a Ghost with sexy, semi-clad sensual nuns as opposed to nameless ghouls. Musically it also borrows massively from the unstoppable Swedish Titans. It is full of big choruses and plenty of sing-along moments. Whilst it may feel a little bit like replication, they are interesting enough to keep a very full tent occupied for 40 minutes.

This is Feuerschwanz's first trip to the UK, and boy do they make an impression. For a festival that has seemingly grown out of power metal, they capture the imagination and the heart of an awful lot of people. They bring the fun and frolics in a way that no other act has done this weekend. Like All for Metal before them, they revel in the utter daftness of what they are doing. The tinkle in their eyes as they teach us to scream rude words in German is palpable. It’s all very stupid, but it is blissfully entertaining.

Back on Sophie, it's not quite clear what Lowen are doing. Nina Saeidi vocals are highly impressive but the music behind it doesn’t seem to deviate or fluctuate. It's just there gurgling along with no conceivable feeling of texture or girth. There is so much that should be of interest with Lowen and their merging of Middle Eastern influences with progressive metal, but it feels rather disappointing as in the flesh it comes across flat and directionless.

The return of  The Black Dahlia Murder is a big thing. This new post-Trevor variation played Download last year but as Brian Eschbach makes it clear, the return to Bloodstock is the big one. Having put aside his guitar and picked up the mic, Brian fills Trevor Strnad’s shoes extraordinarily well. They share the same dry and irreverent delivery style. Trevor’s genius was that there was no airs and graces about it. He was an ordinary dude who just so happened to be the lead singer of a well-respected metal outfit. Brian shares that down-to-earth mannerism. He stomps around the stage howling along and pleasing himself immensely. Whilst they are theoretically still promoting “Servitude” we actually get an eclectic bounce around twenty three years of The Black Dahlia Murder. We even go back to the beginning (to steal a phrase) with ’Contagion’  in all its raw and visceral majesty. A stupendous return for a band that are already part of the Bloodstock lexicon.

Siglos take all the trappings of heavy metal, all of its many status symbols and obvious quirks. They take all them and throw them in a blender but fail to get the mixing right. It wants to be so many different things but fails to be any of them. The visuals aim to shock but instead, it just feels half-baked and uninspired. Musically, it trends a well-trodden path that frankly has been done much better elsewhere. It's not even disappointing. It just feels sympathetic and insipid.

Back on main, Lords of The Lost are bringing the glamour and glitter. They are evidently very proud of their new album and make a number of visits to it. What becomes very apparent is that there is a hell of a lot more to Lords of The Lost than just that Eurovision failure. They are like a bunch of frenzied peacocks rushing around the stage in a blur of Lycra and neon. They seem hellbent on entertaining, and their cover of ‘Smalltown Boy’ becomes the field-wide singalong we never realised we needed. It might be Sunday and we might all smell a bit but Lords of The Lost know that we need glitz in our lives. Yes the whole thing is a pantomime of fizzs and bangs but it is jolly entertaining.

Thrown are on the way somewhere big, They draw a massive crowd and have a palpable feel of self-assurance. They up the stage craft massively and banter playfully with the crowd. In other hands this type of angry evangelical metalcore could come across as functional and faceless, but Thrown have found a way to make it feel fresh and incisive. It bounces along full of righteous energy, and if they are not on the main stage in the next couple of years then there is something wrong with the world.

Mastodon are on the main stage and the world is now a better place. When they headlined in 2016 it just felt a bit detached and “Pink Floyd”. Even the most firmament Mastodon fan would be hard-pressed not to have found it a little dull. Tonight it's a completely different Mastodon. They have elected to leave at home all the long meandering tracks and instead we get an insightful, quick fire show that fires out 14 tracks in just over an hour. Mastodon are at their best when it mixes inordinate heaviness with mind-bending progressive elements. We get a fantastic blur of those approaches as they plough through their back catalogue. The departure of Brent Hinds and the arrival of Joao Nogueira and Nick Johnston within their touring party seems to have rejuvenated them and there is a spring in the band step that has been absent in the last few years. Troy Sanders comes across as incredibly affable this evening as he continually bestows the virtues of Bloodstock and talks about this being one of their last few stops before they return to a new album recording duties. More shows are promised next year and the vim and vigor that now seems to flow through the band makes us all look forward to their sharp return.

3 Inches of Blood have been missed. If you want pure unadulterated balls to the wall metal then 3 Inches of Blood are the band. There is no subtlety at play here and they do not mess around with different levels. Everything is upfront, heavy but also simultaneously melodic. The bottom line is they know how to craft a tune that gets the heads banging and the arms waving. It is beautiful in its simplicity, there is no splicing the genre with something else, it is just metal and sometimes that is all you need.

We had been warned that Gojira were planning something special. The staging is extraordinary. White hot strobes curve round the sides of the stage creating an enclosed performance space. It is multilayered allowing Joe Duplantier to go wandering and the lights continually immerse the band in a flashing cacophony of shadows and half-seen silhouettes. It is just incredible to observe and feels an absolute world away from the stripped down version of the band we saw when they last headlined. Musically Gojira are indescribable. We love to play around with our genres in metal but the truth is you cannot place Gojira within a specific pigeonhole. There are unassailably heavy but at many points they are not metal. They have evolved beyond any ability to connect what they are doing with anything else. You spend most of the set in awe trying to work out how they are making the sounds that they do and how it exists in the same linear world as anything else we've heard this weekend.

Tonight they are in incredible and incendiary form. The sound is actually stunningly simple. There is so little here but it is produced in such an astonishing manner. There is so much brevity and minimalism at play. Joe takes one refrain and just lets it out to build and breathe. They resist the urge to pack their sound and instead the silence and absence of noise does the work. This is astoundingly different to anything else because they have confidence that they don't need to show off, they don't need to grandstand. All they need to do is let the incredible sounds that they are making breathe. It is a tour de force of conviction. They are stadium bound and tonight will go down in the history books as the moment that they transitioned into the world beater that we know they can be. Breathtaking.

Gojira may well have rewritten the rulebook's on what a headline show should be but there is ONE more band to go. Obituary have been around long enough to know how not to come across as an anti-climax. Our heads may still be coming down from a mind-blowing experience we have just been part of, but Obituary do what they do so well, we soon are quite happily screaming along with ‘Body Bag’ and ‘Cause of Death’. Obituary are no strangers to these shores but they avoid any feeling of familiarity by throwing in interesting morsels such as a cover of Celtic Frost's ‘Circle Of The Tyrants’. It's all a little bit stop and start and the darkness that envelopes the stage between tracks does minimise the momentum. But as we scream along with ‘I'm in Pain’ and ‘Slowly We Rot’ it doesn't actually matter. Obituary are the Masters at nasty penetrating death metal and they provide a fitting finale to the weekend.

And that's it. As the last notes of ‘Slowly We Rot’ rattle around the tent. We bid adieu to Catton Hall for another year. Yes there is been a hell of a lot more people this year but it is still essentially and unquestionably Bloodstock. The 'simple truth is that over the years the organisers have got it so right that they are now in the enviable position where everybody with a penchant for metal wants in on the act. They have gone from the best kept secret to the party that everybody wants to be at. We should applaud the success stories that they are. Bloodstock will change but that’s the point. It needs to evolve as our music and the world is evolving. The important point is keeping it real and they proved time and time again that no matter the alterations and no matter the amount of people, the Bloodstock secret sauce is safe. See you next year!

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Obituary + Gojira + 3 Inches Of Blood + Mastodon + Thrown + Lord Of The Lost + Siglos + The Black Dahlia Murder + Lowen + Feuerschwanz + Dogma + August Burns Red + Wall + Rivers Of NIhil + Frayle + One Machine + Barbarian Hermit + Ghosts Of Atlantis + Apathy UK