We’ve been coming to Dong Open Air for almost 20 years now, and it’s strange to think back to what it used to be: a tiny beer tent, two Dixies, and not much else. Watching it grow into the well-organised festival it is today has been part of the appeal for a long time; it’s not just the bands, it’s watching the thing itself mature year after year while somehow keeping the reunion feeling intact. So, yours truly made the pilgrimage to the Dong Mountain yet again, and you can read all about it here.
Wednesday
The festival proper doesn’t start until Thursday, but the party tent never waits for anyone, and this year that meant karaoke night. For whoever ended up behind the mic, it was clearly the time of their lives. For everyone else within earshot, it was something closer to an endurance test, though to be fair, karaoke was never supposed to sound good, and nobody in that tent seemed to care whether it did. A fitting, slightly chaotic way to ease into a weekend that only gets louder from here.
Thursday
Thursday opened in brutal afternoon heat, with Duisburg’s Aereum handed the unenviable job of playing to a crowd that mostly just wanted shade. Their “heroic folk metal,” melodic death metal with folk flourishes somewhere in Ensiferum/Wintersun territory, mixes German and English lyrics and refreshingly doesn’t lean on Viking clichés alone. The frontman’s voice carried the set well, even if the interaction with the audience stayed minimal; under that sun, nobody could really blame either side for keeping their energy in reserve.
Things picked up with Homecoming, a French post-metal/prog/sludge/grunge outfit who ended up being the real surprise of the afternoon. Tight, well-mixed, heavy without ever losing precision, they deserved a considerably bigger crowd than the heat allowed for. Octoploid followed and somehow made their first show outside Finland look like their hundredth: Oppu Laine‘s “classic death prog” project came across experienced and relaxed, with one genuinely tasteful guitar solo and a new song, “Call Me a River,” that sounded promising on a first listen. Between the early slot and the heat, both bands were playing to far fewer people than they deserved, and that pattern kept repeating throughout the weekend, good sets thinning out the moment the sun took over.
By the time Non Est Deus came on, that finally started to shift. Noise’s black metal project, this time aimed at religion rather than the war themes of his main band Kanonenfieber, turned the show into something closer to a dark liturgy than a concert: monk’s habits, a staged sacrament, the whole theatrical package. More than one person nearby called it “zombie Batushka,” which isn’t wrong. The grounds had properly filled in by then, and Thursday’s first crowd surfers appeared right on cue.
The evening belonged to nostalgia first and then to spectacle. Subway to Sally took the pre-headliner slot ahead of Amorphis, and few bands pull that particular kind of nostalgia out of a German festival crowd. The Potsdam veterans have been around since the early ’90s and more or less built the medieval folk-metal scene in this country, and it showed. It was the same set they’ve been playing all season, Eisblumen, Kleid aus Rosen, Sieben, Veitstanz, closing with Julia und die Räuber, no surprises and none expected. This wasn’t really about hearing something new, it was about an old friend showing up on schedule, tight as ever, with the crowd knowing every word from start to finish.
(Ingrid) Amorphis then closed out the night, opening with “Bones,” the standout from their latest album Borderland, and the crowd went with it instantly. It never really let up until the predictable but satisfying “House of Sleep,” with “The Bee” as the encore. Crowdsurfers kept coming over the barrier the whole set, and the performance itself was powerful and full of energy. This isn’t Amorphis‘s first time headlining Dong, and by now it’s obvious why: they know exactly how to close out a night here.
Friday
Friday opened for us with Vorga, whose alien-costumed, sci-fi-tinged black metal is a genuinely odd match for blazing afternoon sun. The stage design did a lot of the work, though, and briefly it actually felt cold and cosmic rather than like a sweaty hillside in July. Vansind kept the momentum going with Danish folk metal that didn’t reinvent anything but didn’t need to, carried by a vocalist whose voice sounded refreshingly natural and unforced. Goldsmith, from Freiburg, brought Western and cowboy-flavoured heavy metal, a strange pitch on paper, but the groove won people over and the crowd visibly grew as the set went on.
Somewhere in among all this, at various points across the weekend, there was a genuinely talented pianist working metal songs into something else entirely between sets, and it turned out to be one of the nicer surprises of the whole festival, the kind of small addition that easily could have felt gimmicky but instead just worked.
Grailknights are basically the house band at Dong at this point: superhero-themed power metal, deliberately ridiculous, with the Dong Choir singing along like it was scripture. It works here in a way it probably wouldn’t anywhere else, helped along by water hoses turning the front rows into an impromptu water park and what was quite possibly the longest conga line in the history of the festival. Then, as the light started fading, Satyricon took the stage and became the highlight of the weekend for me. Satyr remarked at one point that he remembered the eighties, when moshpits were still properly aggressive rather than just twelve friends dancing around, and challenged the crowd to show him a real one. Whether it was that or just the band, the pit did pick up noticeably from there. Satyr commanding as ever, Frost‘s drumming relentless, the whole thing sounding massive, this genuinely felt like the set that should have closed the night rather than sit in the penultimate slot.
Skindred closed things out to an enormous, enthusiastic crowd, reggae, punk, metal and alt-rock blended together with singalongs everywhere. Credit where it’s due, they know exactly how to work a festival audience. It just isn’t for me; none of it ever quite landed as “metal,” and the set felt longer than it was. That said, it’s worth remembering Dong was never really an extreme metal festival to begin with, whatever the black metal names on the bill might suggest. It’s much more of a party festival, and the crowd makes that obvious on its own, colourful, costumed, up for anything. That’s probably exactly why bands like Skindred work so well here even for someone who doesn’t connect with them personally; they fit the mood of the place, even if they’re not what I’d put on at home.
Saturday
Saturday eased in with Snakebite, or at least that’s where my own day started; four days into a festival in your late thirties, getting up in time for the actual opening act is more of an aspiration than a plan. Glam and hard rock, fun and unsurprising, and exactly the right pace to ease back into things before Bonded delivered proper Ruhrpott thrash: direct, aggressive, pits going constantly. Gaerea kept the intensity up in their own way, masked and hypnotic as always, relying on atmosphere over spectacle and pulling it off without much trouble.
(Nanette) Impureza started late, immediately making it clear that mañana, mañana also applies in Germany. Armed with brute force, crushing riffs, and the deep, all-telling grunts of the bearded “caballero,” they whipped the German crowd into their story, entirely in Spanish. An arsenal of stage props, each one tracing back to the Iberian Peninsula, transformed Mount Moshmore into one grand Spanish Inquisition. The secret weapon, known as “La Cécilia,” showed no mercy. The eye contact between Lionel and the flamenco dancer was seductively sensual and dangerously provocative; I could have watched that dynamic unfold for much longer. Combined with the sound of classical Spanish instruments, crushing Hispanic extreme metal, red-and-yellow lighting, and bullfighters, the only thing missing was the scent of azahar. The combination was surprisingly and devastatingly beautiful. The audience was left powerless on the mountain, only to recover later that day when Alestorm took over.
Overkill were the other band, alongside Satyricon, that made me question the running order. Blitz Ellsworth remains an excellent frontman, and the band sounded as sharp as ever; another “should’ve headlined” moment in a weekend that had a few of those. Alestorm closed the festival out to a huge crowd, inflatable ducks, endless crowd surfers, a foam party elsewhere on the grounds, the whole works. It’s a great party band if that’s what you’re after. The tongue-in-cheek shtick just isn’t my thing, though judging by the reaction around me, that says more about me than the band, and fits the same “Dong is a party festival first” logic as Skindred did on Friday.
Just when it seemed the weekend was finally over, Brazil’s Gangrena Gasosa turned up unannounced in the party tent for a secret set, thrash and hardcore and crossover built around Afro-Brazilian percussion and religious themes. The dark atmosphere, enhanced with (fake) candles, suited their set way better than their show earlier today in the bright sunlight, which was also very impressive, but less intimate. Nobody in that tent was ready to go to bed, and this is exactly why.
Overall
Dong Open Air still doesn’t feel like a festival so much as a reunion: familiar faces everywhere, newcomers absorbed instantly. Organisation was smooth despite the heat, a wandering stork somehow became the unofficial mascot of the weekend, and DJ Benne’s after-party made sure nobody left the dance floor at a reasonable hour. Same as every year, and hopefully for a good few more.
Full galleries will follow soon
