Roadburn 2023: A Definitive Look Back (Festival Review + Photos)
The city of Tilburg is into Roadburn, and it’s not even trying to hide it. They’ve had a compellingly close relationship for years, but something definitely changed in the build-up to 2023’s edition of the highly respected heavy and experimental music festival, and now they’re practically inseparable.
See it in the Offroad program, pulled together by the festival organizers and local businesses to offer Roadburn-approved club nights, free gigs, and ice cream flavors(!). See it in the redeveloped Koepelhal area of the city, which sprang into life in 2019 as a skate park and stage-come-building site, now teeming with redeveloped spaces alive with social activity. See it even in the local businesses who don’t receive the official festival stamp of approval, but get in on it anyway—the city center bars mystifying local teenagers with playlists of Alice Cooper songs in a sort of “Are ya winning, Son?” display of solidarity and reassuring attendees that this is their weekend.
The to and fro discussion regarding the festival’s line up ahead of time restated the same phrase repeatedly: “new direction.” This was true of both the festival’s own announcements and social media posts, and those who bounded into the comments to respond to them. It was actually quite fun to try and work out what anyone meant, and on evidence one person’s excitement at broadening their musical palette is another person’s misery at being encouraged to do the same.
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The phrase remained, and remained open to interpretation until a Q&A four days into the festival in which Roadburn’s artistic director Walter Hoeijmakers passionately surmised the intent of the usage: in a post-pandemic world, touring is unavoidably more expensive at every point in the supply chain, and as a result, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to book one act playing music that the audience has potentially seen live a number of times prior, when they could instead use an equivalent investment to showcase five newer acts across a range of styles and give the audience a chance to explore something exciting. This leads to more acts across more stages and naturally creates room for greater diversity in the bill.
Hearing this felt less like the big splash of “new direction” and more like drifting into the current of “existing direction confirmed.” Part of the joy of attending the festival year on year is witnessing the shifting sands of taste and curation and seeing the huge majority of attendees coming along for the journey. Recent years have seen tentative toes dipped in new artistic directions and genres that the festival is now completely at home with, and it makes complete sense: you can’t un-have an adventure; you can’t un-feel an experience; and to reverse the clock on the expansion of Roadburn’s imagination and lineup would be an exercise in nostalgia that its key players have no interest in. In 2023, the tagline for the festival remains “Redefining Heaviness.”
It’s impossible to watch everything you want to see in a lineup like Roadburn’s by any metric, your voyage of discovery, your bucket list bands, and your old favorites all set off under the same starting pistol, and your lived experience ends up a cocktail of meticulous planning, snap decisions, and missing things because you forgot to check the time. Covering the event, therefore, should reflect this: to offer the experience of being there as a list of bands, stage times, and set lists would resemble a third grader’s ‘what I did on my summer holidays’ regurgitation of the facts. Instead, we’re going to begin by taking you through five of the most significant performances of Roadburn 2023.
Ashanti Mutinta, aka Backxwash had been a long time coming. Initially set to play last year’s festival before being denied a visa, the Polaris Music Prize-winning industrial hip hop legend’s European debut took the format of two career spanning sets, her first (MA NYIMBO YA GEHAN) leaning into metallic intensity and featuring an appearance from Pupil Slicer’s Kate Davies.T o command an audience the scale of which turned out for Ashanti is no mean feat, and over the course of the weekend her confidence first builds, then erupts, with syllable perfect renditions of “VIBANDA” and “Black Magic” during NINE HELLS, providing a crescendo for the whole of Saturday. Ashanti’s music is intense in every sense, yet the image everyone goes away with (sorry!) is the look of obvious joy on her face at the reception to the performances, and the realization of exactly what a big deal she is at the festival.
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The first set of the weekend that Spirit Possession played, they sounded a lot like Bo Ningen. This is because they played in the Hall of Fame, currently the smallest of the festival’s official venues, and does it ever fill up, in this case sending us back to the Terminal stage. Over the course of the weekend, people learned to be at the door ahead of time to ensure entry, meaning that getting into some of its most exciting prospects (Antichrist Siege Machine, SIERRA, the Chat Pile secret set) was a game of patience, and the numbers simply don’t favor everyone walking in—Bo Ningen nailed it though. The second set of the weekend that Spirit Possession played was riotous fun that tasted like victory because we actually saw it. In addition to simply being mesmerised at the pickless guitar acrobatics of S. Peacock as he and A. Spungin stomped through their songs of heavy metal marinated in blackened bile, the set was also a part of the previously mentioned Offroad programme, meaning it was free to anyone who happened to be in the area. As a result, it took place in a bar named Cul-de-sac, which several years ago was an official stage of the festival, and so returning to the fondly remembered “pit” in the back of the tiny venue held definite nostalgia value for many; sound problems and all, it was definitely a Cul-de-sac set.
If any one act crucially epitomized the personality of Roadburn 2023, it was Elizabeth Colour Wheel. Heavy in a way that slips through your fingers as soon as you pick it up to take a closer look, with the ability to seamlessly slip through musical cracks and between styles, they played twisted contortions of songs from 2019’s Nocebo that encompassed fun, love, and rage, with the opening verse of “23” becoming one of the dance-along highlights of the weekend and offering a glimpse of a new song titled “Alien With Extraordinary Ability” (the title of the visa singer Lane Shi Otayonii required to travel) as the set opened. For anyone who has only ever heard ECW on record, it was fun to bear witness to their unexpected metal chops: For a group who told us they’re not a metal band, they sure do sound like one at points in the show, with Lane parting the audience to scream at the crowd an inch away from their faces. The band would go on to leave ripples over the surface of the whole weekend, with Lane’s solo Otay:onii project fusing performance, costuming, and music in a way unlike any other act of the festival, and the band’s commissioned collaboration with Ethan Lee McCarthy of Primitive Man providing a simultaneously crushing and ecstatic mass to begin Sunday with.
Wayfarer’s frontier black metal feels fresh, in spite of spawning an entire sub genre in its wake, so the idea of their having enough of the road behind them to perform a retrospective seems out of this world (or Invisible Oranges is getting old, and it can’t be that)—but here they are, discussing their heritage and sharing a little of their future. Frontman Shane McCarthy talks us through the bands love of Western gothic and David Eugene Edwards, and how with the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that the “Denver sound” was always destined to be a part of their music, no matter which direction it ultimately took. Black metal is often obscured: awash with noise, feedback, musical as well as physical anonymity–This is not Wayfarer’s approach, their melodies are taught and defined, and a joy to follow. After a break in the set in which a short film is played—all rocky crevasses and drifter monologuing—the band returns to play a run of entirely new material from their forthcoming unannounced album. Premiering work live can be anticlimactic if the music doesn’t hook people immediately, but Wayfarer don’t face this problem, with the bright lead melody of the first song played in particular ringing through our minds on the train home the following day.
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Who is Mamaleek? At this point, you’re never going to know, and hey that’s fine. The path to the festival has been a convoluted one for the band who seldom play shows as it is. Scheduled to play the Flenser showcase at the cancelled 2020 festival (that showcase essentially took place this year in an unofficial capacity), they were subsequently booked for 2023’s show in light of Këkht Aräkh’s inability to travel, before suffering the death of band member, keyboard player, and multi instrumentalist Eric Alan Livingstone. The band had said in a statement that they would play to honor Livingstone, and his presence defines the set: He is represented on stage by an empty stool, and the space it leaves takes a visible toll on the band, to the point that cheering and clapping the songs feels like an unusual or trite reaction, but it’s the only lever the audience has access to, so we cheer and we clap in the intent that the band is assured the decision to play for Eric was the right one. The set is largely culled from Diner Coffee and Come & See, and on stage, the air that Mamaleek weave into their jazz-and-skronk black metal tales make so much sense, there is a dynamic range here that few other heavy bands are brave enough to attempt. The songs are delivered with conviction, and the room is transfixed. In the wake of the set, there was a sense that a subset of the audience had arrived Mamaleek-curious, and left as converts.
Elsewhere (huge intake of breath…), Chat Pile covered “Bulls on Parade” and you watched seven videos of it on Twitter; CROUCH played a refreshingly stripped-back take on sludge, John Cxnnor nailed their Godflesh-by-way-of-John-Wick vibe to open the festival; Predatory Void pulled in a huge crowd to debut their album; Esben & The Witch confidently said the loud parts quiet; Deathless Void made a case for best traditional black metal act of the weekend (plus points for four out of five band members in biker jackets and growling their between-song chat); Julie Christmas made everyone in the room cry with a beautiful look back at her work to date; Bell Witch debuted The Clandestine Gate; Storefront Church declared themselves the “Coldplay of the festival” but were so much more; Candy got a pit going from 30 yards away, Ad Nauseam showed us Krallice-esque black metal does actually go with brunch; Imperial Triumphant’s Metropolis esque visuals dressed their performace suitably, Oiseaux-Tempete played a string of apocalyptic arrangements, Boy Harsher literally told everyone to dance or gtfo, Giles Corey provided catharsis through sheer sadness, SIERRA was the most oversubcribed set of the weekend, and BIG|BRAVE pulled the equivalent of a pop-in part way through their tour to play to the biggest audience of their career and got straight back in the van (plus points for tour lifer energy).
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This year’s festival had decidedly fewer secret sets than 2022, and it worked. Presented initially as puzzles, posters appeared on site overnight simply stating lyrics or other clues, a stage name, and a time. People walked past these a number of times before it clicked, principally because no other announcement was forthcoming, but sure enough there we were in the Next Stage, with a room full of other people about 60% confident we were about to watch Have A Nice Life, and then we did. This continued throughout the weekend, with enough of a sense of treasure hunting and fun that you couldn’t really be sore about missing some of them. If you were lucky enough to catch Duma on the last night of the festival, you felt like you’d been a part of something cool. That’s what secret sets should do, not have people walking around in a state of semi permanent FOMO, checking their phones every five minutes.
Given shifting tour rosters, audiences, and festival priorities, it’s always worth examining the role nostalgia plays in drawing people to events like Roadburn. The key takeaway in 2023 was that nostalgia only works when it’s your nostalgia. It can be difficult to critically assess certain anniversary shows and retrospectives if you just weren’t there the first time around, and as a result, sometimes the crowd response is more apt than your own, a realization we had trying to reconcile the loving response to Burst’s set on the main stage (the notes here say “Converge dads playing Mastodon covers”), and Deafheaven’s full album set of Sunbather, which felt like an outpouring of emotion first, and series of songs second. It’s fun to take a detour into the past with a room of like-minded people, but it’s both impractical and limiting to stay there for too long. This year’s celebrations, anniversaries, and album sets seemed strategically targeted at different parts of the audience, and were spaced out enough that the focus remained instead largely on the present and future of heavy music. It’s a relief when the bands playing those sets don’t feel like hostages doing so at gunpoint, however, so the energy with which Deafheaven threw themselves into the songs from Sunbather was a pleasure to watch.
As a visitor, it’s difficult to measure where an event the size of Roadburn lands each year in terms of representation both on and off the bill, but it’s with happiness that we note the event seems more diverse with each passing year. New voices bring new ideas and new ideas are the lifeblood of experimental music, we hope that trend continues. It also still feels like one of the friendlier live music events in the calendar. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be making new connections in every room you enter, but it does mean someone will compliment your t-shirt, or you theirs, and that the pervading atmosphere is of respect, allowing people to get on with the real business of watching bands and eating frites with too much mayonnaise on.
Part way through the festival, taking a break in the newly renovated LOC brewery (which also hosted some free shows—Terzij de Horde played there!), we sat with some Tilburg residents who weren’t attending the festival, but had come along to soak up the vibe. They told us that the city takes on a new identity for one weekend every April, and that they enjoy being around the sense of creativity it brings. That a festival hosting some of the most hostile, abrasive music in the world can draw in not only fans of that music but other people entirely based purely on a reputation for inventiveness and artistry illustrates perfectly the appeal of the event the team has spent years defining and redefining. New direction? Sure, but the guiding philosophy is steadfast, for now we’re left to wonder just what that definition will include in 2024.
Keep scrolling for more photos.
Photo credit: Anne-Laure (@e.lu.lu)
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Roadburn 2023
