The big review: Fortress Festival 2025

“So, are you going to the festival, then?”

It’s unclear whether Scarborough’s legion of landlords and shopkeepers are actively on the wind-up as they repeatedly ask clientele in bullet belts and corpsepaint whether they’re in town for a bit of casual sunbathing or to partake of Fortress, the UK’s biggest dedicated black metal event. But it is patently obvious that the unholy communion happening in the darkened halls of the historic Scarborough Spa has begun to reverberate into the quaint cafes and bucket-and-spade shops on the North Yorkshire coast. Everyone’s intrigued.

Not that casuals could even dream of gaining entry to a 2025 event that has been sold out for months. Quickly gaining a reputation as one of the world’s premiere black metal fests – with the bonus of cheap pints and a scenic backdrop – the 1,750-strong capacity crowd reportedly includes punters from over 60 different countries. All of them are outrageously psyched to take in everyone from fast-rising English firestarters Devastator and Abduction, to Norwegian icons 1349 and the return of reclusive Portland legends Agalloch.

We packed our suncream and made the drive out east for the most soul-scourging weekend of the year…

Formed from the oaken ashes of defunct British black metal favourites Wodensthrone, there’s big buzz and an even bigger turnout as Nemorous get Fortress’ massive main stage underway. Kudos to the festival organisers for the decision to make wristbands available early, meaning that no-one is stuck waiting outside, and it's rammed from the get-go. At high noon, cracks of sunshine are seeping through the otherwise blacked-out windows, but everything else blots out any hint of light. From their legitimately menacing onstage presence and largely monochrome light show, to atmospheric black metal bangers as cruel and twisted as The Crucible Of Being and The Wind That Cracks The Leaves, it's a suitably shadowy start to the weekend.

Probably Barcelona’s bleakest band, Perennial Isolation are one of those outfits that take the desolation, suffering and despair of black metal to its logical conclusion. But like restless spirits haunting this grand old space, they feel oddly at home kicking off between the creaky floors and the wide low ceiling of the Ocean Room. Even for those looking to get the party started, there is enough melancholic power and dark melody in their music – with a compelling mix up of spoken word passages and traditional screams in songs like Autumn Legacy Underlying The Cold’s Caress – to ensure that everyone is suitably moved.

Fortress delivers in abundance in most departments, but those who like to mosh can be a little frustrated by the staid standing around of this none-more-grim-and-frostbitten crowd. Thank fuck, then, for Derby’s Devastator. A gang of blackened-thrash brutes who do exactly what they say on the tin, they whip up absolute chaos in the Ocean Room with a circle-pit spinning for pretty much the entire duration of their set. It’s hard to resist, with stone cold bangers Black Witchery and Baptised In Blasphemy leaving little option but to jump in the pit. Hailz…

There isn’t enough Lovecraftian influence in black metal these days, but Bordeaux collective The Great Old Ones pack all the malignant heft of Cthulhu emerging from the depths. There’s an uncanny, almost proggy lightness of touch that connects In The Mouth Of Madness impressively to its unhinged subject matter, and the vast Antarctica crashes through with all the unstoppable weight of a toppling ice shelf. It’s colossal closer Under The Sign Of Koth that levels the main stage, however, suggesting headline-standard capabilities if they maintain this trajectory. R’lyeh, r’lyeh good!

The Spa’s Theatre venue isn’t one of the core stages used at Fortress. Instead, it’s normally reserved for conferences, band talks and niche acoustic sets that wouldn’t really work in the other rooms. It’s almost overrun for Norwegian-American songstress Kathrine Shepard – aka Sylvaine – with the queue snaking around the upper hallway and down the stairs. It’s more than worth the wait, as she delivers a glorious folky salve after a long day of blastbeats, reminding us all that there’s plenty of room for beauty alongside the brutality out in the deepest darkness.

Saturday subheadliners RUÏM attack their set with a sense of shadowy pomp that sees them exceed even the lofty expectations of the assembled throng. Frontman Blasphemer might be better known as a guitarist for Mayhem and Aura Noir – they even chuck in a cover of the former’s I Am Thy Labyrinth, featuring 1349 singer Ravn – but he commands the stage with staggering assuredness. Coming on to Coven’s Coven In Charing Cross and embracing more offbeat, avant-garde tendencies in songs like Blood.Sacrifice.Enthronement and Black Royal Spiritism, there is an argument they’re the weirdest thing on offer. Unless you happened to stumble across the ghouls still roaming the streets at 4am.

Given the fanfare around the booking of lesser-spotted Sunday headliner Agalloch, there’s a sense that 1349 might be a little underwhelming on Saturday night. Fortunately, the Norwegian legends are in no mood to be upstaged. Mainstays of the black metal scene for the past couple of decades, there are few in attendance who won’t have seen frontman Ravn, Satyricon drummer Frost and the boys playing somewhere before, but they’re on another level, adding cultish fire to their frosty attack. There are technical difficulties early in the set, but they embrace the frustration as further fuel, ending up with a horde of beery bruisers smashing each other to bits down the front.

Twelve months ago, masked Abduction overlord A|V cropped up on this same stage in the early slot alongside fellow British black metal hotshots Ante-Inferno. A year down the line, it’s hard not to feel that the mysterious English collective should be farther up the bill. Culling a fair amount of their set from the outstanding Existentialismus, there is a real sense of purpose and vision – and a truly impressive video production – on display amongst the crusty bones, leather jackets and black masks. Razors Of Occam in particular feels like the work of a project with no limits on its potential.

Massive numbers have packed into the main dancefloor and creaking balcony by the time Swedish terrors Dödsrit swoop in for a disgustingly heavy display that seems far harsher than their sweeping recorded output. Two-day bangovers are throbbing by this point, and several of the crowd visibly worse for wear end up scuttling away from the skull rattling racket, but those who do stick around for Celestial Will, Nocturnal Fire and Apathetic Tongues find themselves lost amongst grandiose nightmares and dreamscapes.

This afternoon marks the first-ever overseas show for Finnish symphonic black metallers Moonlight Sorcery, and they go about their business like they’re worried there might not be another. The blend of legitimately scathing misanthropic black metal with the kind of blaring synths and shred-heavy guitars that you’d normally expect in a power metal outfit mean that To Withhold The Day, In Coldest Embrace and The Secret Of Streaming Blood initially take a little getting used to. But as they race on Into The Silvery Shadows Of Night and Wolven Hour it’s hard to deny they’re wielding the most vibrant and exciting sounds of the whole festival.

Judging by the race for merch earlier in the day, Auckland extremists Ulcerate are the ‘coolest’ band of the weekend. They’re also probably the best. Transforming Fortress’ packed main hall into a suffocating cathedral of technical metal, songs about suffering, death and the downfall of man have surely never felt so life-affirming. Dealing in complex, titanic compositions like To Flow Through Ashen Hearts, The Dawn Is Hollow and To See Death Just Once, it’s impossible to single out individual moments of brilliance, but the sense of charred black consistency and inescapable levels of elemental dread ensure their 45 minutes will not soon be forgotten.

We’re unmistakably on the lead in to Agalloch as Swedish folk-black metallers Grift crop up in the Ocean Room. Rather than the work of imitators, this wrenching 10th anniversary run-through of their debut album Syner easily stands on its own. Challenged on the philosophical basis for their music, they’d probably give you an abstract explanation about ‘breaking the chains of everyday norms’ and ‘getting lost in uncertainty’, but the reality of songs like Aftonlandet (confoundingly, named after a Stockholm daily paper) and Eremiten Esaias is a sense of gut-wrenching grief. Gloriously so.

East Anglian post-black metallers Fen continue to crank the atmosphere with their 2009 debut The Malediction Fields. Like Agalloch’s English counterparts, you can hear the bleakness and windswept textures of their swampy homeland writ large in songs like A Witness To The Passing Of Aeons, Colossal Voids and As Buried Spirits Stir. And although they don’t have the swagger of tonight’s headliners, the closing onslaught of Lashed By Storm and Bereft more than compensates by sheer weight of heartbreak, with a packed room feverishly roaring them on.

“It’s only been, eh, a few thousand days since we were here last,” smiles Agalloch mainman John Haughm. “It doesn’t sound so long when you put it like that. It’s good to be back!”

Named after the resinous agarwood, the Oregon icons’ rustic blend of folk and progressive black metal is unequivocally epic and melancholic on record and in the memories of those old enough to remember seeing them last time round. It’s initially a little disconcerting, then, to take in the sheer glee with which they gallop through Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony and Dark Matter Gods like some sort of extra-evil Iron Maiden, and literally throw themselves across the stage. Having only played a handful of shows in the past 10 years, they’ve clearly not yet gotten tired of classics like You Were But A Ghost In My Arms and Fire Above, Ice Below, and by the time they close out with an apt salvo of Our Fortress Is Burning Parts II and III it feels like everyone crammed into an increasingly sweaty main stage is having the time of their lives.

It’s a headline set for the ages which will take an awful lot to top in 2026. But you wouldn’t bet against the freshly-announced headliners Old Man’s Child giving it a hell of a shot. Don’t hang around on getting tickets if you want to see for yourselves…

Fortress Festival 2026 takes place at Scarborough Spa, May 30 – 31. Early bird tickets are available now. See Fortressfestival.co.uk for more info.

• “None of this is contrived, or just bones from KFC”: How Abduction are facing down the horrors of reality
• Blood Incantation: “You don’t need to have drugs to take a trip with our music. But if you do, it’ll be even crazier”
• Tom G Warrior: “We put so much fanaticism into Hellhammer, it’s nice to know it wasn’t wasted”