You know the drill by now. This is the Thrash Hits Festival Splash Page and this is where you’ll find some of the most comprehensive photo galleries of Bloodstock Open Air 2014 that you don’t have to pay for. It’s here!

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Dimmu Borgir’s set at Bloodstock Open Air 2014 was cut short due to technical difficulties. They even had the crowd chanting “technical bullshit!” after Dimmu claimed the faults were caused by the Bloodstock stage crew. Then again, Dimmu were also using a backing tape with former member ICS Vortex’s backing vocals on, so you could say that the “technical bullshit” was being propagated by people on stage as well as behind it…

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There’s less than a week to go until the Midlands once again plays host to the UK’s biggest outdoor unabashed metal festival. Make no mistake – Bloodstock Open Air carries no caveats about being a “rock” festival. It is about being the heaviest fully-camping festival the UK has to offer, and their 2014 line-up – stuffed to the guts with death, black, and extreme metal – sets the festival apart from the larger Download and Sonisphere Festivals. That’s not a bad thing – a little variety goes a long way in the saturated UK festival market – so naturally this week’s Sunday Spotify Slaylist is all about the Bloodstock 2014 line-up.

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Is there anything better than a Thrash Hits Festival Splash Page? Yeah, loads of things but you won’t find the best online festival coverage on any of them. You’ll find that right here. All our work from Bloodstock Open 2012 is going be linked to from this page (eventually), so give it a bookmark or just don’t close it, because it’s all you’re going to need. Interviews, photos, setlists, rumours, and who knows? – maybe even some tiny reviews – it’s all here. [Read more →]

We’re not sure at what point the “tasselled leather trenchcoat” and “black metal corpsepaint” looks decided to get together and give birth to Shagrath’s on-stage outfit for Bloodstock Open Air 2012, but we are forever thankful to Satan that we didn’t have to watch the car-crash of stylistic congress that led to this most unholy union of fashion-decisions.

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All this week, Tom Dare has been guiding you through how Black Metal has evolved over the course of the last two decades (check out parts one, two, three and four if you haven’t already). Now, as the week draws to a close, we’ve asked Tom to put together the songs that have made it happen into a Spotify Slaylist, and in doing to to lovingly cobble them together in an order that somehow tries to make sense of the wildly differing styles that constitute the genre these days. Wish him luck….

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In the final part of his look at the Black Metal evolution over the past 20 years, today Tom Dare is examining the murkier and more indistinct realms of “post”-Black Metal band, as well as those bands who might’ve moved beyond the boundaries of Black Metal musically, still remain within the genre in spirit, at least….

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Just like the headline says – Bloodstock Open Air have announced another four names for their 2012 bill. New to the bill are the symphonic face of Norwegian black metal, Dimmu Borgir, Jamey Jasta’s beatdown crew, Hatebreed, the reformed Animosity-era line-up Corrosion of Conformity, and Birmingham blackened-grinders, Anaal Nathrakh.

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Do I really need to write very much here? The title pretty much says it all. Our no.1 bunch of Bristol-based renegades, Turbowolf, spent much of October and November tearing around the continent in support of Korn and Dimmu Borgir on their European tour. With it being their first significant jaunt outside of the UK, of course they took  a video camera to record some of the hi-jinks they got up to while on the road with two of the world’s biggest metal bands.

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Dimmu Borgir
Abrahadabra
Nuclear Blast Records
27 September 2010

by Tom Dare

The ever-divisive Dimmu Borgir have, with no small fanfare, finally released Abrahadabra. Whatever else may be said about them, their ability to construct albums of grandiose darkness is very clearly undimmed. Shagrath, Silenoz, Galder and their associates have delivered on their promises with this, their ninth album. [Read more →]