Fortress Festival 2026 – Day I
Updated: 5 days ago
Barnaby, Blast Beats and Being Emotionally Compromised
Well. This is awkward.
Over two months ago, I went to Fortress Festival.
I came home, wrote the prequel to this report almost immediately and ended it with the confident little promise "Continue reading…"
Then I did absolutely everything except write the live report. At this point, Fortress 2026 feels like a historical event, and I have to admit I am having some trouble reconstructing it from photographs and the notes I jotted down on my phone. Notes which, naturally, become increasingly sparse the later the evening gets. And my memory is no help whatsoever. Apparently, it checked out before I did.
But we are still doing this.
Now. Today.
I cannot leave a three-part series sitting here with only one part. I have standards. They are inconsistent, frequently delayed and apparently powerless against side quests, but they do exist.
And for the record, I did write the official live reports for Stormbringer.at within the first week. Both of them.
So I am not a total journalistic disappointment. My failure is strictly recreational.
Speaking of—as is custom, here is the disclaimer:
This is the personal blog. This is the Izzy-goes-to-England-survives-on-beans-on-toast-and-tea-and-somehow-ends-up-obsessing-over-men-with-great-hair-again side of the coverage.
If you want to read the semi-professional live report—the one that actually earned me the media pass—please head over to Stormbringer.at. That’s where I keep the rambling to a minimum. Mostly.
For the rest of you who decide to read on: yey. Let’s roll.
Back to the Beans
We started with breakfast at the same café as the day before. Because once I find something that works, I stick with it. There are enough variables at a festival without introducing an untested breakfast establishment.
So: tea. Beans on toast. Me sloshing said tea across the table and having a brief manic breakdown over it.
Excellent start. Very stable.
Afterwards, we headed towards the Spa, although "headed" might be generous. I was distracted by the sea again and kept stopping to take pictures as though it had changed dramatically overnight.
It had not.
The queue outside was already long—and confused. Half the people had collected their wristbands the day before, half had not, yet everyone was standing in the same line.
At eleven, my favourite woman from admission marched past us with the brisk authority of a kindergarten teacher and separated the class. Wristbands to the left. Everyone else stay put.
So we streamed past the queue and into the Sun Court, where people immediately began stocking up on beer, food and merch like civilisation might collapse before the first band.
The Grand Hall was still closed, so we sat down outside in the Sun Court.
And "sun" was very much the operative word. It was ridiculously sunny for a Saturday in May in England.
And then I saw it.
A guy wearing a bloody Midsomer Murders shirt.
With Joyce.
At a black metal festival.
Can't make this up.
I have mentioned my love for Inspector Barnaby on this blog at least three times. Possibly more. He has been an inspiration to my life, my writing and my general belief that every picturesque English village contains a minimum of four active murderers.
Naturally, I told the guy he was a legend and demanded photographic evidence.
Peak Fortress. Nothing had even started yet.
At ten to twelve, I finally decided I was press enough to walk past the barrier at the Grand Hall doors.
This is always a delicate moment.
There is a difference between having access and feeling like you have access. One is printed on the pass. The other requires walking towards a closed-off area with enough confidence that nobody stops you.
Nobody stopped me. I went up to the press room.
And something was different.
I was still a nervous wreck, obviously. Let’s not get carried away.
But this time, I knew faces. Recognised most of the people in there. Knew names in my head.
Did I actually talk to them?
Don’t be ridiculous. That would have been normal behaviour.
But I said hello. I even did some hugging.
Was I mortified about it immediately afterwards?
Naturally.
Still. There we were.
Bag down. Camera out. Lens checked. Minor internal panic disguised as efficiency.
At noon sharp, I was back in the pit that had changed my life in 2025.
Ready for Groza.
Groza: Rust, Riffs and Radiating Fury
And just like that, we were off. Or rather—Groza were off.
I was still trying to remember how to be a photographer.
The first set is always the hardest. It does not matter how often you have done this before—somehow, the moment you step back into the pit, you feel slightly rusty. Like everyone else has arrived warmed up and competent while your hands have quietly forgotten their job.
This time, I was also fighting a new lens, a pit considerably fuller than the year before and, naturally, the light. Always the light.
So while Groza launched Fortress Festival 2026 with cold, melodic black metal and the Grand Hall filled up around them, I was down there radiating frustration.
I may even have fumed a little.
Musically, the set did exactly what it needed to do. There was no gentle opening, no polite easing into the weekend. Just drive, frost and enough familiar DNA to make the usual comparisons impossible to ignore. At moments, Groza sounded like an extremely competent cover band that had accidentally written its own material. And yet—it worked.
The hall was full, the riffs were hypnotic, and by the end of the set the whole room had been dragged firmly into festival mode, even if I was still privately considering throwing my camera into the North Sea.
Black Cilice: No Pit, No Air, No Problem
From Groza, we moved straight to the Ocean Room.
Or tried to.
This year, getting in involved bag checks, scanners and significantly more security than before. Most of the men in yellow vests looked as though they had been handed a radio ten minutes earlier and were still waiting for the rest of the instructions.
The queue stretched along the balcony almost all the way back to the Grand Hall.
So I did what any sensible, accredited adult would do.
I ignored it and went looking for the one man who clearly knew what was happening.
You know the type. Black shirt. Headset. Sweating. Swearing. Simultaneously directing traffic, solving crises and reconsidering every career choice that had led him here. I asked whether I could bring my camera inside, even though only the house photographers were allowed into the pit this year.
He waved me through. Whoop.
I already knew I would not be photographing the Ocean Room sets, so the plan was simple: take notes and tell you what happened instead. Then I got inside and realised the Ocean Room and I were not going to be friends this weekend.
It was hot. I could not see. People were constantly pushing past, and getting anywhere near the front meant queueing while something else was still happening on the Main Stage.
Black Cilice were already waiting in red light, black robes and enough fog to make breathing feel ambitious. Chains hung from their hands. The room was packed. Clearly, people had come prepared for raw Portuguese misery.
And honestly? The sound was much better than I had feared. The drums had actual weight. The vocals made it through the mix. It was raw, abrasive and unpleasant in all the intended ways—not quite the ear-splitting endurance I had expected. Except for one burst of amplifier feedback that very nearly removed my hearing from the equation altogether.
Did they win me over? No.
But they delivered exactly what it said on the tin, and the crowd was very much there for it.
In general, Fortress felt noticeably fuller from the very beginning this year. Around 200 extra people make a difference.
Or perhaps it only felt that way because the weather outside was absurdly good and a surprising number of people had voluntarily chosen to spend it crammed into dark rooms full of fog and blast beats.
Over the weekend, I increasingly chose the Theatre instead.
Cooler. Calmer. Better sightline. Camera access.
I am, it turns out, extremely purchasable.
All it takes is oxygen and visibility.
Fine. Space Wins.
Back to the Main Stage. And next came Mesarthim.
I had not been excited.
Cosmic atmospheric black metal. Space. Existence. Interstellar artwork. All the things that make my brain quietly reach for the off switch. I do not even have a good reason for this. Apparently, I just see a nebula and become difficult.
I had listened beforehand and found parts I liked. Floating melodies. Big atmosphere. Very little vocal clutter. But through headphones, some of it felt a little too soft. Too pretty.
I had thought it might work live if they committed to the theatrics.
They committed.
Holy hell, did they commit.
Vocalist . appeared completely hidden beneath black layers, face covered by an LED mask glowing like a small private galaxy. Capes. UV light. Purple. Green. Pink. Fog everywhere. Geometric shapes moving across the screen behind them.
It was perfect!
Everything I had found slightly tame at home suddenly made sense with volume, pressure and a full stage around it. The synths stopped floating politely and started carrying the room. The black metal drive underneath gave it weight. The visuals gave it scale.
And the crowd lost it. People were clapping. Dancing. Cheering. Actually bouncing around to cosmic atmospheric black metal in the middle of the afternoon. Black metal happiness.
I stood there grinning, fully corrected.
Mesarthim became one of my three favourite sets of the entire weekend and easily the biggest surprise.
I had not seen that coming.
Not in a million light-years.
Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival. Mesarthim performing at Fortress Festival.
Ossaert: Challenge Accepted
Ossaert is the solo black metal project of Dödsrit guitarist Peter "Rebel" Myatezhnik.
So I had assumed at least some familiar faces might turn up on stage.
And when Georgios walked out, I actually chuckled.
Right. Here we go again.
Last year, during Dödsrit, I had watched him climb onto the amps, strike heroic poses and generally hand me every photograph I could possibly want.
I got none of them.
Fog. Backlight. Failure.
This year, I was ready. And determined. Challenge accepted.
Musically, Ossaert were not exactly an easy ride. The songs were long. The intros were even longer. There were stretches of dark stage, turned backs and everyone waiting for something to finally happen. It dragged a little.
But when it moved, it was grand. The sound was sweeping, forceful and deeply dissonant. Hypnotically repetitive. Great shrieks cutting through the whole thing. Bass and guitar constantly twisting around each other in sync, like some grim little dance. Groovy dissonance. A siren blaring somewhere just this side of bearable.
Not always comfortable. Definitely effective.
Around me, plenty of people looked completely locked in.
Me? I was busy beating the light gods.
And this time? I got the shots.
Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival. Ossaert performing at Fortress Festival.
Akercocke: Business Casual Obliteration
Before Fortress, Akercocke had never been on my radar. At all.
They released Choronzon in 2003, when I was not listening to metal. And by the time I eventually found my way into extreme metal, I had wandered towards black metal rather than the death-metal side of things. So this band had somehow passed me by completely.
Then Fortress announced a full Choronzon playthrough, people kept mentioning the album with suspicious reverence, and there was a Forum Talk beforehand. So I went.
The Forum Talks had already become one of my favourite features of Fortress. The year before, Agalloch had walked into the Theatre as a band I loved and somehow left as people I’d grown fond of. This time, Akercocke managed the same thing from the other direction. I went in knowing almost nothing about them. An hour later, I had faces to put to the name and had upgraded their set from "might watch" to "now I actually want to see this".
David Gray, Jason Mendonça and Sam Loynes were funny, dry, very British and immediately likeable. They talked about Satanism and whether it had lost some of its shock value over the past twenty years. About people being desperate to find something to be offended by. About recording Choronzon on an old PC, burning files onto CDs and FedExing them across the Atlantic. They talked amps. Recording processes. Guitar sounds. Influences well outside metal. How difficult the album still is to play. How its audience was never enormous, but scattered everywhere—people tucked away in all sorts of scenes, quietly carrying this record with them.
A few hours later, I stood in the pit while the intro from Guardian of the Abyss played on the screen in full, oversized Hammer Horror glory.
Those intros are easy to dismiss on a record. Atmospheric filler. The bit before the actual song starts.
Less so when it is towering over you in a dark hall and somebody steps out of the shadows in a suit, face barely visible except for a pair of UV-lit eyes staring directly through the room.
Then the music hit. And flattened me. The contrast was perfect: suits, ties and inverted crosses against music that sounded vicious enough to remove structural supports. Business casual abyss.
Jason Mendonça growled, rasped and screamed his way through the set like he had several different demons on rotation. The drums blasted without ever feeling frantic. They did not rush you. They steamrolled you.
There were guitar solos. There was a synth and a laptop somewhere on stage, technically, although I barely heard either of them. At one point, Loynes appeared to have nothing left to do and simply stood there pointing, glaring and pumping his fist. Honestly, fair.
Scapegoat? Holy hell. That was just sheer force rolling through the hall. Tempo changes, strange little turns, ridiculous solos, enough going on to keep me alert even though this is not really my kind of music.
We got the first mosh pit of the festival I think. The room heated up. Sonic obliteration, pretty much.
It was the most brutal set of the day so far, and by the end of it I was completely exhausted.
Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival. Akercocke performing at Fortress Festival.
Dødheimsgard: A Lot. Possibly Too Much.
The second Forum Talk I saw that day was Dødheimsgard.
This time, the magic did not happen.
Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez talked about Black Medium Current, about bringing nine people onto the stage to recreate its layers—names apparently optional—and about black metal as culture rather than a fixed musical formula.
At one point, he shrugged: "I am black metal."
Which certainly cleared up any concerns about confidence.
He spoke about the Norwegian scene, about how the genre had grown into something almost unrecognisable from the days when releasing a demo felt like the grandest possible ambition. About not labelling his music anymore. About vulnerability, immersion and letting the listener’s mind go wherever it needed to go.
I understood what he meant.
I just did not particularly warm to him.
It happens.
A few hours later, Dødheimsgard took over the Main Stage with the full Black Medium Current performance.
Psychedelic projections. Synths. Choirs. Tambourine. Electronic beats. Aggressive black metal. Sections that suddenly became playful, theatrical or weirdly rock-like.
It was a lot.
Vicotnik grimaced, crawled across the stage, threw himself onto his knees and seemed completely consumed by whatever private universe the album had opened around him. The music changed direction constantly. Every time I thought I had found the thread, it slipped loose and twisted itself into something else.
This was easily one of the most polarising performances of the weekend. Some people were completely enthralled. Others looked just as lost as I felt. There was very little middle ground. Black Medium Current seems built to inspire devotion or rejection, not a polite little "that was nice". I am not ashamed to say I landed firmly on the side of not getting it.
I was still trying to organise my thoughts and pin down something useful about the music when Vicotnik came to the edge of the stage, leaned down and grinned straight into my lens.
Always strange as a photographer. From behind the camera, it feels oddly private. The artist comes close, looks straight at you—except they are not really looking at you. They cannot see your eyes. They cannot read your face. The camera hides all of that. All they see is the lens.
It is a peculiar kind of closeness—intimate from one side, almost anonymous from the other.
Sometimes I love it.
Sometimes it makes me deeply uncomfortable.
This time, it did the latter.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Not creepy in the slightest.
I decided it was time for one last adventure in the Ocean Room.
Whoredom Rife were headlining there, and I was ready for something more feral—and creepy in a way I understood.
Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Dødheimsgard performing at Fortress Festival 2026
Whoredom Rife: Threatening, but Make It Traditional
Whoredom Rife were headlining the Ocean Room, and after Dødheimsgard’s art-school fever dream, the sheer directness felt almost medicinal. No tambourine. Just blast beats, icy riffs, corpse paint and menace.
A lot of menace.
K.R. spent half the set getting as close to the audience as physically possible. On the barrier. In people’s faces. Beating his chest. Screaming directly at whoever happened to be nearest.
So if being personally threatened by a Norwegian black-metal vocalist is your idea of audience participation, congratulations. This was your set.
What stayed with me most was the microphone-stand incident. At some point, he threw it into the photo pit, where it landed just inches from Aleksandra (@acidolka.photo).
I watched it happen and felt appalled on her behalf. Also extremely grateful I was not in there myself. Still. She got the shots. And frankly, that is the most photographer thing imaginable: narrowly avoid blunt-force trauma, check the frame, carry on. I do admire her work (check it out here).
Musically, it was relentless. The drums blasted almost without pause, the guitars cut through with that cold, dissonant second-wave bite, and the whole band moved with real force. Synchronised headbanging. Pounding rhythms. Hoarse rasps. Nothing subtle survived.
Crude. Direct. Effective.
I stayed for a couple of songs, let Whoredom Rife sandblast the inside of my skull and, once I was breathing normally again, headed back to the Grand Hall.
Headliner time.
Old Man’s Child.
Galder.
Good Lord.
Old Man’s Child: Galder Walked On and That Was That
Old Man’s Child.
I knew the name carried weight. I knew people were really looking forward to this. I knew Mike loved them. You know, Mike. My unofficial black metal hotline. The man I text whenever I encounter a Norwegian in corpse paint and need immediate identification. According to him, The Pagan Prosperity was the best metal album of the Nineties. I had still never got around to listening to it. Look, I can only do so much.
Old Man’s Child had been dormant for what felt like an age, Galder had left Dimmu Borgir, and Fortress had announced this set first for a reason. So yes. I understood the weight of the occasion. Mostly through other people’s emotional investment.
Standing in that pit, bouncing on my heels while the front row grinned back at me, I could feel the anticipation vibrating through my whole body.
The lights dropped. Galder walked out. And I was hit by a wave of recognition so fiercely it nearly knocked me off my feet. It was ridiculous. The moustache. The corpse paint. Every vein of it instantly familiar.
Only now he was not a photograph. He was right in front of me.
Alive. Grinning. Prowling across the stage with enough energy to set the entire room off.
And it did.
Fucking hell.
The gait alone.
I do not know how else to describe it. He did not simply walk. He stalked. He strutted. He sort of bounced through the set with the confidence of a man who had been doing this for thirty years and had absolutely nothing left to prove.
And he was having fun. That was what got me.
He grimaced. Cackled. Threw his fists into the air. Barked "Fortress!" at the room. Grinned at the crowd like there was nowhere else he would rather be. All while playing those melodic guitar harmonies and enormous hooks as though none of it required effort.
The music itself was everything I wanted it to be.
Melodic. Immersive. Epic. Symphonic without tipping into cheese. Riff-heavy enough to keep it grounded and catchy enough to sweep the whole room up with it. You could feel it happen. One moment people were watching; the next, the entire hall was moving.
I was having the best time. I wasn't analysing, I wasn't taking notes anymore, I wasn't trying to find clever sentences.
These are my actual notes from the set:
Omg // Honestly // This is the best set I‘ve ever seen This is so much fun // I don’t have words for this // It is just perfect The way he moves // The way he talks // The way he grins and cackles I love this // It is melodic, immersive, perfect.
So let’s just end it here. No polishing. No puns. No attempt to make it sound more profound than it was.
This was just me being as happy as I could possibly be.
At half past eleven, the doors opened and Scarborough swallowed us back into the night.
Warm air. Sea somewhere beyond the dark. Hundreds of people spilling out of the Spa looking just as overjoyed and slightly stunned as I felt.
Twelve hours of Fortress Festival were over.
I was completely, absurdly alive.
Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026 Old Man's Child performing at Fortress Festival 2026
(for real this time)