Saturday arrives, and the morning bathing options are either queuing up for 3-5 business days to take a shower, or deciding you don’t have all day to wait and instead opting for the lite version; baby wipes and prayers. A festival classic. Breakfast is continental – a selection of leftover barbecue food with a side of dust. There is so much dust. It’s impossible to avoid ingesting even a little bit completely. But no matter – everyone’s fuelled up and raring to go for a full day of tunes. Oh, and it’s absolutely roasting. SPF 50 is strongly advised.
Words: Kathryn Edwards // Photos: Ryan Hildrew
The Scratch
“We’re from Ireland”, shouts vocalist and percussionist Daniel (‘Lango’) Lang, as if that wasn’t already clear from thick Dublin accents and the strong presence of the trad Irish folk music, which, along with heavy metal, makes up their distinct sound. This is a relatively new band, with their first EP only being released in 2018, but they’ve grafted hard over the past 8 years, with their current discography containing three albums, two EPs, and two features on Dropkick Murphys’ 2015 record ‘For the People’; though 2026’s ‘Pull Like a Dog’ makes up the bulk of today’s setlist. It’s 1pm and beers are flying, and the arena has filled up by the time they come on. No sight of people trickling in and out as is often the case with sets scheduled for earlier in the day. There’s a good reason for that: this set is the standout of the weekend, and the crowd is ready and willing to come and get weird. Everyone is dancing from the first second of the first note. It feels impossible not to. There are clear metal elements to this band’s sound; the guitar tones they use, and some pretty tasty riffs throughout, but this set is a bit of a curveball in comparison to everything else on the lineup. That’s in no way a bad thing – this performance fills you with a kind of energy that’s really hard to put into words. By way of an attempt, though; there’s someone in the middle of the circle pit dressed as a banana. Also, it’s not really a circle pit, everyone is just skipping in a circle. Some people have linked arms and are skipping in pairs. Lovely, really. Acoustic guitars and a cajon at a metal festival shouldn’t work, and yet here we are, jumping around with hands in the air for four lads from Dublin who used to be in an actual metal band before they swapped amps for wood and strings. Lango, Conor Dockery, Cathal McKenna, and Gary Regan turn the field into a hooley within thirty seconds, trad runs colliding with riffs that smack just as hard unplugged as anything with a Marshall stack behind it. It’s pure chaos laced with unbridled joy, and it’s the closest thing Bloodstock has to a session in the corner of a Dublin pub, if that pub also had several thousand people crowd-surfing in it.
Urne
Urne don’t so much play a set as build a slow-burning storm. Joe Nally, Angus Neyra and Richard Wiltshire’s sludge-thrash-prog hybrid is dense and unhurried, riffs stacking up like weather fronts before they finally break. Nally’s vocals sit somewhere between a growl and a lament, giving even the heaviest passages an odd, aching kind of melancholy, while Neyra’s guitar work twists through tempo changes that never feel showy for the sake of it. It’s a set for the patient, no easy hooks, no crowd-pleasing shortcuts, and there’s a stretch in the middle where it would be easy for a festival crowd’s attention to drift. It doesn’t, though. By the time the heaviest passages land, the tent’s gone quiet in the way it only does when a band’s earned real attention rather than demanded it, and there’s a small crowd near the front who look like they’ve just found something they’ll be obsessing over for months.
Vended
There’s a very obvious question hanging over the tent before Vended even plug in, and to their credit, they spend the whole set trying to answer it on their own terms, even though, yes – they sound exactly like early Slipknot, even down to the vocals – no prizes for guessing who Griffin Taylor learnt from. He prowls the stage like he’s got something to prove, which, fair enough, he probably has, while Simon Crahan pounds away behind him with a similar point to make. ‘Asylum’ lands early and sets the tone, all hard rock riffing and doom-y breakdowns, before ‘Nihilism’ whips the crowd into its most frantic state of the whole set. Guitarists Cole Espeland and Connor Grodzicki keep things tight throughout, and bassist Jeremiah Pugh anchors the low end with consistent weight. Whether all this is enough to shake off the shadow of the Iowa Nine is still up for debate, but nobody in this crowd looks like they care either way, they’re just here for the racket.
Northlane
Slick, heavy, and precision-tooled, Northlane’s brand of progressive metalcore feels like it was built in a lab specifically for festival main stages, in the best way. Marcus Bridge switches from full-throat roar to soaring clean vocals without breaking stride, and when ‘Quantum Flux’ arrives, the whole tent seems to know every word, turning it into one giant, chest-thumping singalong. Jon Deiley, Josh Smith and Nic Pettersen layer in industrial textures that make the whole thing feel bigger than your average breakdown-and-blast-beat crowd-pleaser, and ‘Echo Chamber’ shows off just how far the band have pushed their sound into electronic territory without losing any of the heaviness. Polished doesn’t mean safe here; it means a band who know exactly what they’re doing.
Nevermore
There’s a lump in more than one throat as Nevermore take the stage for the first time in over a decade, and the first time ever without Warrel Dane, who died in 2017 and whose shoes new vocalist Berzan Önen has been handed the near-impossible task of filling. Somehow, though, it works; Jeff Loomis’s guitar lines are as serrated and technical as they’ve ever been, Van Williams still hits like a train behind the kit, and when ‘Enemies of Reality’ kicks in, Önen sings the old material with real reverence rather than imitation, clearly aware of exactly what this performance means to the people watching. New recruits Jack Cattoi and Semir Özerkan slot in like they’ve been there for years, and by the time ‘The River Dragon Has Come’ rolls around, the tent has gone from cautious curiosity to full-throated devotion. It’s a moving second life for one of prog metal’s most missed bands, and by the end there isn’t a dry eye in the tent.
Death Angel
Thrash royalty, and they know it. Formed by teenagers back in 1982 and still going strong more than forty years later, Rob Cavestany and co. play with a speed and precision that shame bands half their age. Mark Osegueda works the whole width of the stage like a man half his years, all wide-eyed energy and constant motion, and ‘Seemingly Endless Time’ proves the old material has lost none of its bite. Ted Aguilar and Cavestany trade off riffs with the kind of chemistry that only decades of playing together can build, while Will Carroll and Damien Sisson keep the rhythm section locked in tight even as ‘Thrown to the Wolves’ pushes the tempo into genuinely dizzying territory. The pit response to the old-school Bay Area riffing is a reminder that thrash this pure never really goes out of fashion, it just waits for the right festival to bring it back round.
Bleed From Within
Glasgow’s finest export a wall of sound that’s part groove, part melody, and entirely relentless. Scott Kennedy’s screams trade off with Steven Jones’s soaring cleans to anthemic effect, and opener ‘Violent Nature’ sets an suitably furious tone from the first note. Craig Gowans and Davie Provan lock in behind them while Ali Richardson drives it all forward from the kit with real precision, while ‘In Place of Your Halo’ draws one of the biggest reactions of the set, its surprise bagpipe breakdown sending the whole tent into a frenzy. Kennedy prowls the front of the stage and pulls the crowd into every chorus like he’s done this a thousand times before, which, at this point, he probably has. Funny to think this all started as a bunch of kids covering Lamb of God at a youth club; now they’re doing the genre just as much justice as their heroes, who happen to be headlining this very festival.
As Saturday draws to a close, we prepare ourselves for our busiest (and hottest) day so far to round off the weekend, after what will probably be an uncomfortably warm night’s sleep. But not before checking out the bin jousting, which is exactly what it sounds like. Can’t forget the bin jousting.
