As one of the first bands to play at this year’s edition of Alcatraz, and the ones to kick off all the extreme music that was going to get served on the Swamp Stage, the death metal outfit Serial Butcher was the perfect choice here! The guys pummeled us with some proper old school sounding death metal and brought some proper high energy to the tent already with a decent sized crowd that turned up this early to see them in action! With classic sounding songs like for instance ‘Brute Force Lobotomy’, you immediately know what’s up and subtlety isn’t it. Great start to the weekend!

While being on a musical discovery in preparation of this year’s edition of Alcatraz, the stoner rock outfit from Antwerp, Gnome, really caught our attention. So we went and took up shop as close as we could get to the stage to enjoy some good rockin’ tunes early in the first day at the more club-like La Morgue stage. Clearly, these guys already have a quite dedicated fanbase, because quite some people showed up wearing the same kind of pointy garden gnome hats you see the whole band have on their heads every show. And we really were not disappointed at all of our choice to go and check these guys out. We feel that Gnome makes fantastic music (‘Ambrosius‘ is a top tier track), and we see big things happening for them soon in the nearby future if they continue this way. If you’re any bit into stoner rock, you simply NEED to check out their music!

The first day of Alcatraz 2023, the Helldorado stage was the place to be if you were any bit of a hardcore fan. And quite early in the day, we got served an excellent show by legends of the Belgian scene with Do Or Die. From the early 2000s till a handful of years ago, they continuously released some of the best hardcore around, mixing just enough of thrash and groove metal in to give it a bit of that crossover vibe, and it was an absolute pleasure to see them in action again on stage. The two vocalists brought quite the energy to the performance, riling up the crowd gathered in front of them, and they relentlessly went from classic track to track, perfectly fitting in the massive line-up of hardcore bands that day!

Just a couple of months ago, we had Kludde with us in Asgaard Gentbrugge for their record presentation. On the first day of the festival weekend, they played Alcatraz Metal Festival and they really rocked it. What an energy, what a sound! Even though it was a small crowd, they absolutely succeeded in unleashing a mean mosh. It demonstrates how strong our local scene is.

A more recently formed band, but put together of some of the top of the Belgian music scene with members of bands like Amenra, Carnation, Living Gate, Oathbreaker, Cross Bringer, Doodseskader, Every Stranger Looks Like You and Cobra the Impaler, Predatory Void released an exceptional debut album earlier this year and was most definitely a performance we had been looking forward to hard! So Saturday afternoon, we made sure we made it in time for their show on the Swamp Stage where they played most of the track of their ‘Seven Keys to the Discomfort of Being’. Getting to see and hear tracks like ‘*(struggling..)’, ‘Endless Return to the Kingdom of Sleep’ or ‘The Well Within’ live was an absolutely unforgettable experience, and we can’t wait to get to see them on stage again asap! If your bread and butter is anything in the direction of black, sludge and death metal, or even better, a mix of those, Predatory Void should be an obligatory part of your regular music intake!

Despite having had already 2 really long days behind us, we put some extra effort in getting to the festival ground early enough to catch Serpents Oath on the Swamp Stage by noon. These guys have been somewhat of a revelation within the Belgian (black) metal scene and could easily be described as a Belgian version of Watain both in music and aesthetics. But they’re not a mere clone, they have their own identity, and do what they do incredibly well. We haven’t seen another black metal show this weekend that radiated as much of an occult ritual vibe as this one! After 2 already excellent albums, they’re gearing up to release their third full-length with ‘Revelation‘, and we couldn’t be more excited about it! Keep your eyes out for these guys, they’re going to get big!

It was early day, but with a quite big amount of local or Belgian acts on the bill for the Sunday, tons of people showed up early to show their support for their locals. So the La Morgue tent was filled up really nicely to enjoy the groovy modern metal from Aeveris, a band that is quickly growing to be a crowd favorite. Having had them visiting our very own venue Asgaard Gentbrugge, we knew that we were in for a solid slab of headbanging-inducing metal! Good way to get that hangover of the day before properly kicked out of our system!

Ever since their ‘Unfold the God Man’ album, we’ve been huge fans of what Psychonaut does musically. And with last year’s ‘Violate Consensus Reality’ they managed to make us fall in love with them even more. So their performance on the Helldorado stage on a very strong post-metal line-up at that stage had been marked in our planning as an absolute must straight from the beginning. And what a blessing it was to see these 3 guys bring their music live! It grabbed us all the way deep in our souls and got us drifting away from the hot Sunday afternoon into some dreamy, magical realms for the time they played. What a band!

The crowd was excited to welcome Mantah to their first time on the prison grounds on the La Morgue stage. From the first note till the last, it sounded amazing. The crowd warmed up during the show and people were crowdsurfing to the stage, dancing with the band on stage and jumping back in. Mantah brought their mix of late 90s nu metal, modern metal and metalcore to perfection and steadily the tent got absolutely packed with people trying to catch a bit of the band. Mantah made sure we all had a great time and were clearly very grateful for being able to play Alcatraz Festival.

Evil Invaders jumped in at the last moment on Sunday to fill in for Overkill. Despite the that obviously it would have been awesome to catch Overkill, no one will deny they were an excellent replacement to take the stage Prison stage by storm. They may still be a bunch of youngsters compared to the veteran thrashers we got to see over the weekend, but their albums can already be considered as modern classics and the crowd welcomed them with open arms and fists raised!

Melodeath/metalcore outfit Reject The Sickness is also a quite familiar appearance for us, having had them popping by to play a show at our Asgaard Gentbrugge venue regularly, so we of course knew we were in for a real good time when these guys took over the La Morgue stage. There’s just something about their music that is catchy as fuck without giving in any bit on the heaviness, and their stage presence is always topnotch, especially with vocalist Guy leading the charge. We saw a crowd that was really into it and we wouldn’t have expected anything else. Killer show yet again!

Last Belgian band to mount the La Morgue stage for this edition of Alcatraz, and they definitely kept one of the best for last! Brutal Sphincter guarantees a real good time every time they take over a stage, and it was no different this time. The brutal death/goregrind outfit doesn’t take itself serious one bit, and similarly to bands like Gutalax, their shows always end up being a chaotic, energetic mess of a party. A tent that couldn’t fit any more people if you’d have tried, and every single body in there was moving to the music and having the time of their lives! Stagediving, crowdsurfing, proper mosphits going on throughout, fists pumping in the air,… it had it all!

Probably one of Belgium’s more popular heavy bands right now, when STAKE set up shop on the Helldorado Stage on Sunday, they were met with a pretty full tent and a crowd that was out of their minds straight away. Since the whole day this stage featured mostly post-metal acts, we had expected it to be somewhat of a haven of calmness for most of the day, but not with STAKE… Suddenly there was a humongous moshpit in the middle of the crowd, and you started seeing crowdsurfers pop up like little mushrooms everywhere, with at some point even a little girl, much to the delight of the crowd. Brent and his buddies kicked off with an incredibly high energy and never took the foot off the throttle throughout the whole show, what a rush it was!

Probably one of the hottest bands in Belgium right now would be Brutus. The 3-piece manages to create such gorgeous, emotion-laden compositions, it’s truly something special. And on top of that, they have the unique setup where the vocalist, Stefanie, is also the drummer. A mixture of post-hardcore, post-rock and post-metal, they constantly flow between captivating and trance-inducing heaviness and mesmerizingly gorgeous melodies. And live that’s exactly what you get, just a bit more pure and raw even than on record. Sure, they may not play everything absolutely perfectly, but those little live imperfections just take things to another level. This was really food for the soul and we had the impression that the huge crowd showing up for Brutus, came here to get that same fix. Pure magic!