PRESS RELEASE:
10 more bands have been confirmed for the 2023 edition of the Wacken Open Air festival. Here are the details:
Amaranthe
At the latest when a third voice enriches the track, you can be sure: You have entered the house of Amaranthe. The Swedish-Danish co-production has long been at the forefront of the new wave of melodic death metal, which also likes to flirt with electronic hooks. Here hip shakers unite with headbangers singing along loudly in the front row!
Uriah Heep
Two words: Uriah Heep - that's all you really need to announce these superstars. That's why we can also take responsibility for welcoming them back on stage after their demolition in 2019. Anyone who was there knows: Every performance is a gift and with his 54 (!) years of stage experience, Mick Box is a guarantee to deliver stronger as a rock!
Bloodbath
Opeth, Katatonia, Hypocrisy and Paradise Lost? You can hardly do more name dropping on the casting couch of a band. And even though Mikael Åkerfeldt finally gave up the microphone to the no less prominent Nick Holmes, Bloodbath consistently kept their promise to destroy the humble stages in the name of darkness. To underline this, a new album was finally released this year, which they will present to us live.
Caliban
Germany - the land of poets, thinkers and metalcore! Caliban have been one of our favorite heavy metal exports for the past 25 years and do justice to us as mosh pit initiators worldwide. But even if the pioneer status of the Dörner and Co. team cannot be denied, they also would like to show us that they grew their branches firmly in other genres and styles. The current album Dystopia underlines this again with a thick, dark black line.
Drain
Summer, sun, mosh pit. As direct heirs to legendary Californian bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks or Fear, Drain will make hair and feet fly at WOA 23. This import from Hardcore Beach Santa Cruz was founded in 2016 and is currently the absolute "hot shit". With a pinch of thrash on top, they should even warm the blackest true-metal-heart!
Faun
The band Faun, which is legendary in the truest sense of the word, is actually more of a union of seven magical musicians who conjure up the spirit of bygone, fairytale or mythological times with a multitude of different instruments. Their last album Pagan led them and us into pagan worlds and therefore they should feel very comfortable with the WOA Vikings!
JBO
Is this still art? JBO are not for everyone - but in order to please everyone, the two main characters G.Laber and Vita C. did not lay the foundation for the terribly beautiful musical project in 1989, which wildly covers and charmingly poaches. Since then, eyebrows have been raised from time to time, be it from moral guardians or other music colleagues, which, however, rightly earned them a kind of cult status. Nowadays you can say that JBO are something like the forefathers of fun metal and their show is definitely not to be missed -best enjoyed with a “Beer for breakfast” as they will be doing a special morning show.
Jag Panzer
Jag Panzer have been doing their thing as hard as a tank and saying “Eff the Haters” for 43 years. This gave them a cult status set in stone, which they regularly cemented with solid albums until the Colorado team took a small creative hiatus in the early 2000s. You don't know exactly what happened there, but since 2017 they've been back on stage stronger than ever. With a new album out on Nuclear Blast in their luggage, they'll take over our stages in a storm again.
Battle Beast
Hot sauna, vodka and the happiest people in the world. Battle Beast also seem to have the same cornerstones as their home country: Here people sweat, celebrate and laugh, it's not for nothing that singer Noora describes the steam engine sound of her band as Party Power Metal. With the winning laurels from our in-house talent factory "Metal Battle", Battle Beast are now at home on the big stages. We are glad that they still remember us.
While She Sleeps
Irgendwann passierte es, dass nicht mehr nur die Kollegen über den großen Teich uns ihren satten Metalcore um die Ohren schlugen, sondern auch die braven Briten sich verstärkt auf das Genre einschossen und Hammer-Bands in die Umlaufbahn schossen. Eine dieser Bands ist While She Sleeps. Hier wird durchaus auch mal die politische Keule rausgeholt und via Sänger Loz Lawrence eisernere Röhre den Leuten um die Ohren gehauen. Stark!
