Our editor Sander van den Driesche is at Core. in Glasgow this weekend, and on the first day he saw some impressive sets from Show Me The Body and more.

Following on from last year’s successful launch, Core. Festival has returned to make Glasgow Great Again. David Bowes looks at the line-up of next weekend’s second edition.

An impression of the 3rd day at Bear Stone Festival, including more hot weather, AcidSitter, Nemeček, 1000mods, Colour Haze, Kadavar and more.

Here are some highlights of Bear Stone Festival’s second day, including Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, High on Fire and many more.

Day 1 impressions at Bear Stone Festival, including A Gram Trip, Jantar, Entropist and Slowtorch.

Hidden in the Croatian outback Bear Stone Festival is about to take place for the 3rd time. With a focus on the stoner, doom and psychedelic rock genres, Sander van den Driesche has a look at this year’s line-up.

Portals has exactly the atmosphere that I always want from a music festival: of walking through, well, a portal and into a nerdy utopia where everyone “gets” you. Every interaction throughout the weekend – between other fans, venue staff, security, volunteers, vendors, musicians, photographers – was friendly, warm and convivial. So at the start and the end of the day, it’s the people who make the atmosphere..

As summer rapidly approaches with the arrival of the second bank holiday in May, the sunshine blazes down on Leicester, a city that has once again got a positive vibe about it. With the city’s football team having just been promoted to the Premier Leag …

It’s true that the burning bowl at the core of Desertfest’s pipe will always be a fuggy mélange of stoner, psych, doom, drone, and all that good stuff.  But – having been lucky enough to attend Desertfest almost every year since its inauguration in 2012 -– I’ve seen it move on from predictable flavours to a more diverse, heady smoke. . . We all got gloriously high on the pungent sounds and the phenomenal atmosphere of Desertfest 2024.  

Our metal editor Sander van den Driesche went to Roadburn Festival last April, and was happy to report that after last year’s experimental line-up this year’s festival had a great balance between traditional heaviness and more experimental artists.

Portals 2024 is set to be the biggest and best year yet for this incredible underground, DIY festival. We’re talking guitar music of all stripes: post-, alt-, math-, prog-, psych-, shoegaze, blackgaze, metal-adjacent, all along the spectrum up to metal. I really hope to meet some of our readers there!

Uprising Festival, the East Midlands metal extravaganza makes a welcome return  to the O2 Academy in Leicester on Saturday May 25 and this year’s bill, the seventh incarnation of the festival, could easily be the greatest in its history.

Seattle’s Michael Freiberger (owner of Satanik Royalty Records and director/booker for Disemboweled God Fest) pulled off an incredible feat for the second consecutive year: packing an intimate venue with top-notch national and regional purveyors of death metal to celebrate the genre in all its glorious forms.

The joyous 2-day showcase of Satanik Royalty Records artists was a testament to the vibrancy of the Seattle music scene and the importance of one of its most important members, Michael Freiburger.

The final ever gigs of LINGUA IGNOTA were in London. Sinner, get ready to cry.

Simon Mernagh went to the inaugural festival edition of underground heavy music festival Sonic Dissonance in Edinburgh.

I went to Supersonic and I had a really great time. You know I did, of course I did, because it’s a brilliant festival with a packed bill of excellent bands. “It’s not an accident, it’s a choice.” 

Rather than give a play-by-play review of ArcTanGent, I want to write about a few of my personal highlights of the festival. The beauty of the setup is that you can dip in and out of sets; nothing is more than a few minutes’ walk away. . .

So was the first instalment of Core. Festival a success? In almost every respect, yes.

ArcTanGent, the Bristol-based, independent festival starts tomorrow, with a variety of over 50 acts. Jody Dunstan steers carefully through the clash-finder and picks out his personal favourites.

Rejoice friends! If the endless rain doesn’t wash us all into the filthy sea then Supersonic festival will be upon us in less than a month’s time. An undoubted pinnacle of underground music’s calendar, this year it will be celebrating its twentieth birthday. . . It’s going to be quite a party, come ready. If you’re still dithering about that now is the time to commit.