Festival season is well and truly back! After Florida's Welcome To Rockville kicked off the seasonal calendar – with a few weather hitches – it's delightful to report that Ohio’s Sonic Temple has no such issues...on day one, at least. Returning for its fifth instalment, 2026 looks to be ST’s biggest year yet, promising over 185,000 visitors over the weekend.
So how better to start than with a bunch of feral goblins? Before Nekrogoblikon even take to the stage there’s a giant inflatable goblin face, and things only get weirder from there. There’s a cognitive disconnect in seeing a singer in hardcore garb – black hoodie, trucker cap – unleashing hyperactive snarls and squeals like a, well, goblin, while the actual honest-to-god vocalist dressed as an actual goblin croons and belts out power metal style melodies. It all ultimately adds to a sense of surreal fun that takes us nicely into the weekend.
Las Vegas’s The Pretty Wild have been generating some serious buzz over the past 12 months, and we’re pleased to report it’s more than just hype. For all the baddiecore leanings of their recorded output, live they take on a much more vicious, metalcore-coded heft, Jyl and Jules Wylde trading vocals with all the bloody-minded intensity of prizefighters locked in a battle to the death.
If you took a shot every time JT Woodruff says ‘Ohio’, you’d be on the way to a stomach pump by the second song of their set. You can’t blame the Hawthorne Heights vocalist for being excited about playing in his home state though, and for all the variety on-show for day one of Sonic Temple – deathcore, melodeath, nu metal, alt. metal, take your pick – there's no denying that emo is the genre with the most obvious hold on the day, a colossal singalong for closer Ohio Is For Lovers suggesting a big emo revival can’t be too far behind the current nu metal renaissance.
From the crashing stomp of opener Chasm, it’s obvious Flyleaf are having the time of their lives. Bounding around the stage with an irrepressible excitement, the return of Lacey Sturm winds the clock back 20 years to remind us why the band were so exciting in the first place. A guest appearance from Breaking Benjamin’s Benjamin Burnley is a cherry on the top of a buzzy set..
Coheed And Cambria have always existed between worlds. Equally as happy popping up with Avenged Sevenfold as they were playing with My Chemical Romance back in the day, that diversity is on full display in their main stage appearance. There’s big, infectious pop-punk style choruses (The Suffering, The Liars Club) glorious prog metal fretwork (Gravemakers And Gunslingers, Welcome Home) and a pervasive sense that the Sci-Fi coded band can do just about anything.
“We are The Used and we’ve been emo for over 25 years!” Bert McCracken’s veterans come out swinging with a colossal Pretty Handsome Awkward, the bounding riff setting them up for a hale, oh-so-excitable set. There’s no shortage of massive singalongs – Take It Away, I Caught Fire and Taste Of Ink take care of that, but there’s also a heaviness to their sound that reminds us that their brand of screamo was always more metal-adjacent than some of the more commercially minded acts of the era.
Rise Against are almost perfectly suited to festival crowds now. Songs like Prayer Of The Refugee, Give It All and Savior are exactly the kind of full-chested singalongs that get crowds rabid, and the Chicagoan punks have honed their performance into a one-size-fits-all expression of unity. Given the state of the world, you might want a bit more fiery invective, but good vibes abound throughout their set.
Whitechapel might’ve been passed by when it comes to taking deathcore’s commercial and populist crown, but they certainly aren’t being left in the dust. From the ungodly bellow of “I bear the number 666” that kicks their set off proper, they unleash utter bedlam with ferocious glee. It says a lot about the quality of the band’s new material that last year’s Hymns In Dissonance dominates the set, the inclusion of a few cuts from their 2007 debut highlighting just how far they’ve come from their more trad DM roots to make music that is undeniably extreme but impossibly anthemic.
Speaking of anthemic – Breaking Benjamin bring their radio-friendly alt. metal to its full logical conclusion in front of a massive Sonic Temple crowd. Kicking off with I Will Not Bow, their set is slick and polished to deliver all the mores of a Big Rock Gig, right down to the jets of pyro flanking the band. After Benjamin Burley’s earlier appearance with Flyleaf, it’s now Lacey Sturm’s turn to jump on for big ballad Dear Agony, but for all the passionate zeal of the crowd there’s no escaping the fact Diary Of Jane is the big tune everyone’s been waiting for.
My Chemical Romance might be the headliners of Sonic Temple’s Thursday night, but they’re not the last band of the day. Barely beating the rush from the crowd as the buzz settles, across town death metal legends Deicide are settling in for a night of infernal delight. Glen Benton might not be sporting the infamous inverted crucifix scar on his forehead these days, but their set feels no less blasphemous, his eyes cast to the heavens like each track is being directly spat at a deity.
“Want a bedtime story?” Benton asks with a menacing grin. “Get off your parents’ couch and get a fucking job.” Kicking off with When Satan Rules His World, venue King Of Clubs becomes a sweaty miasma of crashing bodies, the band sounding absolutely colossal as they bring the night to a fittingly brutal close. Same again tomorrow?
