Since its inception in 2013, ArcTanGent has gained a reputation as one of the best festivals on the UK circuit and a celebration of heavy music’s more idiosyncratic, esoteric corners.
With a line-up this stacked, it was tough to whittle this down to just ten bands, but read on for the essential metal bands appearing over the course of the weekend that you can’t afford to miss.
Swans
Perhaps ArcTanGent’s biggest booking yet, Swans have defied genre classification for almost four decades. Founded by New York pioneer Michael Gira in 1982, since then the band have traversed the weighty worlds of abrasive post-punk, noise rock and throbbing industrial, pioneering sounds that range from compelling to downright unlistenable. Swans aren’t a metal band per se, but back in 2017, Hammer called them “the heaviest band in the world”, while their live shows are borderline religious experiences, frequently terrifying as they are beautiful. Trust us when we say this will be THE moment of the weekend.
Opeth
There are few bands in our world who have confounded expectations like Opeth. Over their 31-year career, the Swedish quintet have transformed themselves from growling, yet elegant, death metallers to progressive luminaries, dabbling in gothic, jazz and blackened textures along the way, creating one of the most eclectic sounds on the planet. They’re the kind of band who will never stop surprising us, and last year, we coined their thirteenth album, In Cauda Venenum (translation: the sting in the tail), “a lavish, meticulously layered feast for the senses”, that will only further elevate their magical live show.
Tesseract
Tech-metallers Tesseract have spent the last 17 years evolving into one of the most innovative and special bands in the UK. Now finally, the slog has paid off – the progressive trailblazers have found themselves at the top of a festival bill that appreciates and celebrates their appetite for adventurous experimentation. Tesseract have never stood still and have never made the same record twice and, on their last album, 2018’s Sonder, they nailed that tricky middle ground between immediacy and shape-shifting technicality, with monstrous riffs, deep grooves and shimmering melodies, topped by vocalist Dan Tompkins’ glorious vocals. Go get your brain brilliantly boggled.
Curse These Metal Hands
Two years ago, two of metal’s most acclaimed, promising bands, Conjurer and Pijn, joined forces for crossover project, Curse These Metal Hands. Initially envisioned as a one-off performance at this very festival in 2018, both bands quickly realised that what they were cooking up was too special to waste on one show and headed into the studio to record their self-titled, four-track EP. The result was one of Metal Hammer’s favourite releases of 2019, a triumphant fusion of brutal, low-end metal and cathartic, post-metal sprawl that captured the best of two bands approaching modern metal from two equally exciting angles.
Svalbard
With their destructive blend of extreme metal, punk and post-hardcore, Svalbard are one of the most exciting bands to emerge from in a frothing underground scene in recent years. Their eviscerating assault, led by vocalist Serena Cherry, goes for the jugular, tackling topics that other bands simply aren’t talking about right now – the elitism of unpaid internships, revenge porn, abortion and even the cruelty of brachycephalic animal breeding. It’s all executed with lung bursting levels of passion, a meaningful band who are looking to inspire change rather than bellow into a helpless void.
A.A. Williams
Like Emma Ruth Rundle, who is also on this year’s bill, death gospel queen A.A. Williams has proven that you don’t need to deal in crushing riffs to be classified as “brutal”. So far, the Holy Roar signee only has one EP to her name, last year’s self-titled release, and a couple of singles, but on tracks like Belong and Terrible Friends, she’s nailed the art of creating dark, hushed tracks that cultivate an atmosphere so thick, it can suck the air out of a room. Exposing vulnerability on record is one thing, onstage it’s quite another. Yet live too, A.A excels at weaving cold, claustrophobic spaces that threaten to swallow you whole.
Car Bomb
With a sound that cites djent, math and mercurial metal, these NY bruisers will resonate with fans of Gojira, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Meshuggah. Eagle-eared critics have been onboard with Car Bomb’s colossal sound since 2012’s W^W^^W^W, but their 2019 album, Mordial, still took many by surprise. A hypnotic, mathy maze of choppy rhythms, meaty grooves and brooding Mastodon-esque passages, it cropped up on many an album of the year list. Don’t miss your chance to see these guys while they’re still a band on the rise.
Elephant Tree
Elephant Tree specialise in frazzled, thunderous psych-induced stomp fests and riffs you feel deep in your bones, but on their upcoming third album, Habits, they’re set to update their own doom-laden template. February single Sails hinted at a more anthemic, dreamy direction while maintaining the band’s customary fire power and now with new label Holy Roar (seriously this label are unstoppable at the moment) at their back, expect to be seeing a lot more of these guys in the months to come.
Oathbreaker
For the last 12 years, Belgium’s Oathbreaker have been turning bleak and blackened post-metal into searing, beautiful portraits of human fragility. Led by mercurial vocalist Caro Tanghe, on their breakthrough album, 2016’s Rheia, the band crafted a tormented maelstrom of sound, balancing devastating brutality and crushing lows with ethereal highs and sleight of hand elegance. If you’re a fan of Deafheaven, Alcest or Converge, these guys are a must see.
AmenRa
Another Belgian band who are intent on pushing metal’s boundaries, Amenra’s bleak post-metal was born from hardcore roots, but since those early days, their sound has developed into something far more expansive and emotionally all-encompassing. Soaked in an agonising Neurosis-meets-Converge desperation that’s straight from the gut of enigmatic vocalist Colin H Van Eeckhout, on record, AmenRa are an intense listen. But it’s their transformative, ritualistic live shows, which aim to induce an out-of-body experience, and have included Van Eeckhout piercing and bloodying his own body with weighted hooks, that have lifted the band to almost mythical status.
More info and tickets at ArcTanGent's official site.
