WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK
No apologies here.
Words: Ali Shutler.
Cover photo: Adamross Williams.
Last week, Knocked Loose and Poppy took to family-friendly late-night TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live to perform their ferocious collab ‘Suffocate’. Sure, some viewers found the screaming vocals and aggressive breakdowns shocking, with certain tabloids gleefully running sensational stories about people “demanding a formal apology”, but for most fans, it was just really fun to see a song that heavy in the spotlight.
It was the same when Spiritbox teamed up with Megan Thee Stallion for ‘TYG’, an unapologetic highlight from the recently released Megan: Act 2, and when Gojira stole the show during the summer Olympic opening ceremony in Paris. Metal in non-metal places? Brilliant.
That belief in their vision is why there’s so much excitement around heavy music at the moment. Scowl are a hardcore band, but they don’t only make hardcore music. Militarie Gun aren’t afraid of writing choruses either, while Turnover completely flipped the script on what a punk band could do with 2021’s ‘Glow On’, which took as much influence from indie-rock and R&B as it did from the scene.
Bambie Thug, who brings together industrial rock and radio-friendly singalongs under the banner of ouija-pop, knows a thing or toy about toying with genre. It made as much sense for them to play Download Festival’s mainstage earlier this summer as it did for them to represent Ireland at Eurovision. “Doing Eurovision never felt like a risk,” they told us earlier this year. “It’s just an incredible platform and opened a lot of doors for me.”
“I’ve also had messages from people saying that me being so outwardly, unashamedly myself has helped them come out. Growing up, I didn’t have anyone to look up to that looked like me. If I can be that for those kids now, that’s really gorgeous. Sure, Eurovision helped boost my streams and has expanded my coven of fans, but the reason I do this is for the change it makes to people’s lives.”
They believe heavy music needs to really embrace its pop influences. “Music is a fusion of different things, and the real beauty of that is having different people come together. It’s a chance to reach people who have only listened to mainstream music before. Maybe they’ll like what they hear and want to dive deeper. That’s something that benefits the whole community.”
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Next summer, Bambie Thug will join Poppy in opening for Babymetal on their first-ever European arena tour. Formed in 2010 as the mid-point between heavy metal and Japanese Idol culture, Babymetal were seen as a bit of a gimmick when they first started touring over here. “To be honest, we had no idea what Download was that first year, so playing it didn’t feel like a risk,” Moametal told Dork. “It felt like more of a risk for the bookers because no one knew who we were.”
The band takes inspiration from the way pop “moves everything about you, from your heart to your body” and the sheer “power” of metal, but Babymetal has evolved beyond simply being a hybrid of the two. “I feel very confident with where we are now and our place in metal. After 14 years together, it feels like we’ve formed a new genre that is just called Babymetal,” says Su-metal. “It’s no longer about pop or metal; it’s about continuing to explore what Babymetal can be.”
And part of that exploration included a team-up with German electronicore band Electric Callboy for RATATA, a song that’s got big Brat energy. “If you’d asked me ten years ago if I was worried about playing Download, I would have said yes,” vocalist Kevin Ratajczak told Dork earlier this summer after the band put in one of the most talked about performances at the 2023 event. “Over the years, though, people have got more and more comfortable with bands mixing sounds and styles from different genres, so why should we worry now?” Next summer, they play their biggest-ever UK show at Alexandra Palace.
Busted had a similar outlook ahead of their performance at the spiritual home of metal this summer. “It 100% just felt like the right thing to do,” says Charlie Simpson after the band met the Download team and they had all grown up with Busted’s music. “There are so many kids out there that started off listening to Busted and went on to become fans of metal and rock. We’re so proud we could be that entry point,”
“If this conversation had happened 20 years ago, it would be very different. But I don’t think Busted playing Download is even that much of a risk in 2024. The musical landscape has just changed so much.”
Which brings us to Sleep Token. The mysterious masked band are just about to wrap up a sold-out UK arena tour and have confirmed a headline slot at Download 2025, alongside safe festival bets Green Day and Korn. Sleep Token are 100% big enough to headline the event, but there are plenty of questions about how the band, who pull from Trap, R&B, pop and post-hardcore, will actually go down. They’re not known for their crowd-friendly singalongs, and vocalist Vessel is unlikely to waste a second of their set gushing about how much the festival means to him, so the whole thing will rely on the music and the energy the crowd brings. But isn’t that uncertainty exciting?
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