Love at first riff: welcome to Damnation... in Trafford Park.
Updated: 4 days ago
Extreme metal. It’s a broad - but not exclusively Satanic - church. But its nexus, if you will, isn’t Oslo or Copenhagen… it’s Trafford Park industrial estate in Manchester, home to the annual Damnation Festival. Next month, thousands of disciples will worship at the altar of the genre at the BEC Arena. Stuart Wright is a screenwriter and host of the Britflicks podcast. He’s also a massive fan. Here, he previews the event for Cult Manchester and helps the extreme metal-curious to separate their cybergrind from their doomgaze. Photos by Jake Owens and Em Coulter.
Twenty-one years ago, a Glaswegian metal fan, Gavin McInally, came down to Manchester in search of a venue to host an extreme metal all-dayer. He found it in the city centre's much-missed club Jilly’s Rockworld. He called it Damnation Festival. Now, it’s the world’s biggest indoor metal festival.
Damnation didn’t last long at Jilly’s - in just two years, it outgrew the 1,300-capacity venue and hopped over the Pennines to Leeds University Union. In this new, 4,000- capacity home, Damnation had room to grow. By 2008, two stages had grown to three. In 2013, they were packing out the place with four stages. This winning formula lasted until 2022, when Damnation returned to its spiritual home of Manchester and the much bigger (6,000 capacity) - BEC Arena. In this completely self-contained site, they could spread out and make as much racket as they wanted late into the night. Which is exactly what they’ve been doing ever since.
2022 at the BEC Arena was my first Damnation Festival and it was love at first riff. Night of Salvation (NOS) kicked off proceeding at the new home. Introduced in 2010, this Friday night pre-show tradition was only ever meant to be a low key get together on the eve of Damnation. Held at much smaller Leeds venues like Temple Of Boom or The Well, the emphasis was on emerging local acts until the final Leeds NOS in 2021. This time Gavin upgraded NOS to the same venue as the main event and secured four exclusive sets. These included English death metallers Akercoke’s suited and booted performance of their second studio album - 2001’s Goat Of Mendes.
Hull’s Mastiff started off this new chapter with their aggressive, hardcore-tinged, sludge metal, but highlight of the night for me was witnessing We Lost the Sea perform their 2015 album Departure Songs. This was a band I knew nothing about beyond their alluring name, but straight after experiencing their cinematic sound, tense builds and climactic explosions of gigantic, orchestrated rock, I headed for their merch stand. It was made even more special to learn my Damnation Festival debut was this Australian post-metal band’s first ever live show in the UK.
By November 2024, the NOS opened its doors on day one at the earlier time of 3pm, making it less of a pre-show event and more like the first day of Damnation. That year also saw Manchester’s Pijn (pronounced 'pigeon', apparently) propping up the smaller of the three stages with their emotionally charged, dynamic instrumental compositions, bringing the kind of energy you wouldn’t normally expect to find a midday slot. All of which highlights a huge benefit of an indoor festival - even the bands at the bottom of the bill get to play like it’s the middle of the night, with a light show and visuals that ensure they make their mark long before the headliners have even woken up.
Damnation 2025 was the festival’s 20th anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, there was a full weekend of extreme metal and Friday’s NOS was moved to The Bread Shed in the city centre.
Grindcore progenitors Napalm Death headlined this birthday party in front of their biggest crowd yet. Belgian black metallers Wiegedood pleased and punished everyone in equal measure with a two-hour set - playing their The Dead Have It Good trilogy of albums in full. US riff-lords Corrosion of Conformity also joined the mega-amplified fun, as did Damnation regulars Anaal Nathrakh, who first headlined with their explosive blend of blackened and industrial death metal back in 2007. Younger guns making their Damnation debuts - Irish krautrock groovers Overhead, The Albatross and Switzerland’s noise rockers Coilguns, channelling their Iggy Pop and At the Drive In influences to the max.
‘Whose idea was it to go to two days?’ co-organiser Paul Farrington joked at the time on the 2 Promoters, 1 Pod show. ‘That was a stupid fucking idea, wasn't it?’
But there was no going back. Extreme metal had well and truly returned to Manchester. Gavin McInally rode that wave of enthusiasm by announcing 2026’s blind sale while the dust was still settling on 2025. I was one of the 2,000 people who bought weekend tickets without a single band being announced. To put that in perspective, that’s probably more people than attended Jilly’s in 2005 and 2006 combined. This rush of advanced interest made booking the bands like being the proverbial kid in a metal sweet shop. ‘I went for six bands, looking for the top four slots,’ Gavin told me. ‘I made offers to all six, expecting to maybe get two or three. And I ended up getting all six.’
Those six bands on their own read like a metallic league of nations: Sweden’s Cult of Luna (post-metal), Norway’s Satyricon (black metal), France’s Igorrr (experimental metal/Baroque), UK’s Carcass (death metal), USA’s Crowbar (sludge/doom metal) and Switzerland’s Triptykon (avant-garde metal).
Crowbar and Tryptykon were the final two of the six to confirm. The other band Gavin bagged because of the early enthusiasm was the long-dormant, but talking-about-making-a-comeback The Berzerker (industrial death metal/cybergrind from Australia) Gavin McInally: ‘I said [to The Berzerker], “if you’re going to come back then the first show in Europe needs to be Damnation”. They agreed.’
Over the following 12 months, 46 bands were announced, all booked via Gavin interacting with the 12,000-strong Damnation Festival Facebook forum. Even concerns and hiccups in the journey are documented. The infamous Damnation ticket tracker - showing how sales are going - charts the emotional rollercoaster of putting on such an event, from ‘Waaaaaaaa…’ through ‘No need to re-mortgage’, ‘Covered by bank loan’, ‘Safe to start planning NEXT YEAR’ and finally ‘Break even’. At the time of writing, Saturday is 99% sold and Sunday is 75%.
It’s a scary prospect putting on a festival - and unusual for promoters to be so transparent. Not for Gavin, though. And it’s all the more refreshing when you learn it’s not the least bit cynical. It’s how business should be done, according to him. ‘There was no marketing plan or anything behind it,’ he says. ‘Just, year by year, I got more comfortable being honest. And as the honesty came, people appreciated it. And now, here we are. It gets mentioned a lot with Damnation… It being transparent or me being available to answer questions. But to be honest, it should be the bare minimum.’
The result of all that honesty and willingness to listen? A music festival crowd that is more of a community than just punters through the door. ‘At Damnation, everyone is like…. this is a good space, for good people…and I want to be a part of it. That’s led to a real sense of ownership because people recognise what it is.’
Finally... side-stepping the heavy hitters listed above, here’s six more acts that Cult Manchester is excited to welcome to town.
Gorerotted - British purveyors of relentless, lyrically gross, no-compromise death metal. They played the very first Damnation Festival and disbanded in 2008, but Gavin has got them back together for 2026. They’re doing two sets included a NOS performance of the 2003 album Only Tools and Corpses in full. As the band themselves put it: ‘Public health warning! Gorerotted are back from the dead.’
Wolves in the Throne Room - if Pacific Northwest atmospheric, nature-themed black metal, seething gothic guitars and noisy textures are what you need, then look no further that these guys from Washington, USA. Expect a set drawing heavily on their eighth, just-released studio album Estuary.
Pelican - with their recently released Ascending EP still ringing in my delicate ears, this instrumental post-metal is where I’m most happy, and Pelican’s blend of cinematic heaviness and melodic textures - with expansive and immersive soundscapes - ensures that this Chicago four-piece cook up one hell of an amplified storm.
Sugar Horse - midway through 2026, this Bristol-based outfit released their third studio album, Not a Sound in Heaven. This exploration of raw, live-recorded arrangements cements their reputation as one the UK’s premier post-metal/doomgaze bands.
Ultha - a contemporary German black metal band, steeped in a dark sound that’s simultaneously dense and spacious, intimate and yet vast, but always never far from being intense as fuck.
John Cxnnor - this doom rave collective from Denmark, formed by the two Sejersen brothers of LLNN fame, promises great visuals, dark beats, dystopian sci-fi, industrial soundscapes and a guest vocal or two.
The 2026 edition of Damnation Festival rocks up - pun intended - to Manchester’s BEC Arena on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 November, 2026. More information and tickets here.
More on Stuart’s writing and his Britflicks podcast can be found here.
