Every metalhead is going to remember where they were during Black Sabbath’s farewell show. For each person that saw the star-studded Back To The Beginning play out before them at Villa Park, there were more than a hundred glued to a TV watching the livestream, and probably another thousand seeing social media explode with every update in real time. As for me, I was 2,000 miles away, experiencing a different kind of British heavy metal milestone.
Because I have the greatest sense of timing in history, I scheduled a holiday to Istanbul on Black Sabbath weekend, and I decided to be a tourist by day, mosher by night. On the Saturday I saw Scottish groove metal brutes Bleed From Within play their first-ever date in Turkey yet be greeted like returning heroes. 10,000 people at the Headbangers Weekend festival moshed for an hour nonstop and sang along, in a country where only 17 percent of the population knows English.
As the dust settled, and I checked my phone to see news story after news story from Birmingham, I thought: has UK metal finally conquered the world again?
At the risk of spoiling the article you’ve just started reading, the answer is ‘yes’, and it’s a crescendo the scene has been building up to for quite some time. We’ve had the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and the 2000s metalcore explosion in the past, and during the pandemic a number of native bands released breakthrough hits that racked up an unexpectedly huge listenership: Bleed From Within’s The End Of All We Know, Malevolence’s Keep Your Distance, Architects’ Animals, Loathe’s Two-Way Mirror and so on. After the world returned from lockdown, the likes of Sleep Token, Heriot and Ithaca also began attracting international attention.
The first surefire signals that British metal was going to have a landmark summer came last year. In September, Iron Maiden announced the European leg of their 50th-anniversary tour, Run For Your Lives, and that it would include one of their biggest headline stops to date: playing to 68,000 people at London Stadium, a stone’s throw away from where founder Steve Harris grew up in Leytonstone. Then, in November, the UK rock/metal capital that is Download revealed that Sleep Token would be topping their 2025 lineup, marking the youngest band to headline the festival since Linkin Park.
For me, the summer proper kicked off with Southampton punks Creeper, wrapping up their hugely successful Sanguivore cycle by playing the album in full. London venue Koko quickly sold out for the extravaganza, where the band also announced their upcoming release Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death, but I was just as blown away by openers Lowen. The auditorium was heaving for the Londoners, who acknowledge singer Nina Saeidi’s Iranian roots with melodies inspired by Persian folk and lyrics about the country’s political throes. Over the next few weeks, they’d play the holy trinity of UK metal festivals – Download, Bloodstock and Arctangent – and I had the privilege of profiling them in national newspaper The Guardian in August.
Then, Download. By the time the biggest weekend on the heavy music calendar rolled around in mid-June, Sleep Token’s anointment to headliner status was one of the most talked-about happenings in this subculture. The fact that the performance would mark one of their first shows since putting out their much-debated fourth album, Even In Arcadia, only intensified the intrigue. They proceeded to win big, with Metal Hammer’s review calling the set “spellbinding”, and their debut headline sets at German weekenders Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park were similarly well-received. As a case study for the global domination of British metal right now, it was pretty unbeatable – especially when combined with the fact that a North American headline tour later this year sold out moments after tickets dropped.
Also at Download, we witnessed the first-ever set – or, excuse me, ‘the inaugural address’ – from UK enigmas President. As much as the band’s initial promotion positioned them as a leech on Sleep Token’s belly, relying on word-of-mouth buzz from the fact they shared the fellow masked men’s management and were debuting on the day of their headline set, the fact the Dogtooth tent overflowed for them signalled another win for British metal. That it was done by a band with two songs out at the time, regardless of how much or little you like them, should be respected.
Two weeks later, the Maiden machine charged into the capital, enrapturing tens of thousands of attendees, following a much-talked-about stretch across continental Europe. The setlist was overhauled, featuring material from the maximalists’ first nine albums, and there were new, snazzy video effects that catapulted them headfirst into the 2020s. It was a triumph so gigantic that the rest of the world is eagerly anticipating the announcement of extra dates for 2026.
Back To The Beginning followed the weekend afterwards, drawing the most eyes Birmingham has had on it since the Commonwealth Games. As well as Sabbath reuniting, such superstars as Metallica, Tool, Slayer and Mastodon appeared, giving it the most stacked lineup in heavy metal history.
On July 25, I saw Judas Priest join Iron Maiden in the ‘veteran band playing one of their biggest gigs’ club, as they co-headlined the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena in London with Alice Cooper. Two weekends later, Derbyshire’s Bloodstock Open Air enjoyed a similar high, hosting a weekend headlined by Trivium, Machine Head and Gojira that sold out 10 months in advance. Heriot, Orange Goblin and Creeper were among the homegrown talent to draw big crowds on the main stage, while the aforementioned Lowen were the best band to grace the Sophie Lancaster tent.
Arctangent – the best festival of the year, every year, do not fucking @ me – had must-see sets from a host of UK bands, as well. Lowen (yes, them again) were as shamanic as usual, Ithaca ended their career with a bittersweet main-stage set, Rolo Tomassi celebrated their 20th birthday backed by a string quartet, and Tesseract headlined in production-rich fashion on Saturday. The breakout, though, were stoner metal up-and-comers Green Lung. Endowed with a three-piece horn section and hot off playing their biggest headline dates ever earlier this year, they drew one of the largest crowds of the entire weekend. Such songs as One For Sorrow and Maxine (Witch Queen) had ‘infernal anthem’ written all over them, and singer Tom Templar only grows in confidence each time I catch him.
Bring Me The Horizon brought the summer to a close with a legitimate crossover moment. In headlining Reading & Leeds to 80,000 post-GCSE teenagers, they found themselves in the same calibre as Hozier, Chappell Roan and Travis Scott, continuing a rocket ride of a career that shows no sign of stalling.
I’m far from the type who’d paint a red cross onto a mini-roundabout, but between all these goings-on and some high-profile new albums from Sleep Token and Malevolence, I actually feel some semblance of national pride. It seems like the British scene is at the centre of the heavy metal universe right now, and the crop of incredible talent we have makes that status richly deserved. Long may it reign.
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