After a road trip of 10 hours, we arrived in Wacken safe and sound, and we were so ready!!

THURSDAY

GENERAL INFO – THURSDAY – FRIDAY – SATURDAY – SUNDAY – AFTERMOVIE / NEWS

PREPARTY

After we got settled on the campgrounds we set out to explore the town a bit more, as the streets surrounding the Wacken Open Air festival in the summer are crowded and atmosferical. With streets and houses covered in merch, drinkstands and foodtrucks there’s nothing of these things going on during the Wacken Winter Nights, the streets around Wacken feel rather eery and sleepy. Understandable of course because there are a lot less people in Wacken this time of year.

After a bit of a walk (the festival, campground and the “Wacken Street” are a bit far from each other) we went to the Landgast Hof were the preparty would take place that night, it was a cosy bar/restaurant when we arrived at 20h but soon the place got way to crowded to enjoy the bar and get drinks. The first time we waited to order it lasted 20 minutes, but after an hour it was going up to 40 minutes which is not ideal for the atmosphere at the beginning of a festival.

A big suggestion for us to Wacken Winter Nights is to give more options of things to do the night before the festival, a small bar at the camp site would be awesome.

FORGOTTEN NORTH

The preparty hosted the Forgotten North as the only band for the evening, they seemed to have a big group supporters from the region and a lot of fans were clearly looking forward to see the band and support them during this concert. As a local symphonic viking metal bands we did not suspect the that the high majority of people knew the songs and could sing them by heart.

The show started off quite spectacularly with pyrotechnics and an enjoyable and very recognisable tune, the musicians gave a good representation of viking metal as it supposed to be but the vocals got predictable after a few minutes and some riffs or tunes were almost covers from acts like Eluveitie, Alestorm and other more popular bands. Still quiet enjoyable but not enough for us to fill our hunger for live music at this Preparty.

Here is the review of the evening from the perspective of the band:

Pictures & videos by Wacken Winter Nights and Forgotten North.