Another year brought me (and approximately 1,500 others) to the quaint Danish town of Roskilde for Epic Fest 2026. If you're reading this, chances are you already have an idea what this festival is about. Silly power metal; people in every stripe of battle jacket/vest/pants assessing each other for shit taste; beers and ciders given florid descriptions and upcharged to borderline unreasonable prices; crowded merch lines and painful decisions about which bands to pick in a scheduling conflict-- all common fest things. All things we put up with for the sake of going to experience the music that we enjoy.
Something which you won't find at the average metal festival though is the genuine sense of fun and forthright commitment which permeated this year's edition of the festival. Epic Fest finally seems to have really found its feet. The stages ran well, the growing pains of the 2024 and 2025 editions were mostly worked out, and the atmosphere has become even more evocative of the fantastical realms of magic and heroism which the organisers seem to be aiming for. It is thanks to the hard work of the organisers that you can even manage to forget that the larger stage is located in a sports hall where two basketball courts provide the flooring for the many mosh/row/push pits.
Now, there are of course some gripes: wristband pickup, merch table management, and cloakroom efficiency are still poor; the bathrooms run far over capacity for the number of people at the fest; the afterparty venue is too small for the number of people who want to attend; set timings for later bands are brutal; sound quality in the middle stage is more variable than is really acceptable; the smaller venue lacks a security team to ensure safety for crowd surfers; and no doubt there's more I've forgotten in the time between the festival itself and this write-up, but I do recognise that it's not easy to organise something like this, and the core functions of the festival-- to have bands play music onstage-- run well.
Beyond the music and organisational set-dressing though, where the real core of the festival's magic can be found is in its attendees, who have truly seemed to embrace the spirit of the thing. I was not alone in noticing a significant uptick in the number of people dressing up this year. Costumes ranged from full-on medieval-fantasy getup to a simple a pair of elf ears and unusually fancy makeup, and throughout it all was a sense that Epic Fest is much more than just a way to see power metal bands. The spirit of the event has become one with a unique sense of community, which I think puts this fest head and shoulders above most. I happen to have a useful comparison point, having attended Inferno 2026 (a black metal festival hosted in Oslo) just the weekend before. There's no doubt that Inferno ran a tighter ship (they've been doing it for 25 years) and that the overall quality of bands was higher there, but there are no friendlier people at a festival than those at Epic Fest-- no vibe better than that of the wonderfully dumb and earnest fantasy trappings, which are presented without reservation or recrimination.
Vibes are a hard thing to quantify. It's easy to say that Epic Fest has a positive air to it. That's not necessarily surprising, given power metal's break from metal more broadly in its lyrical themes and musical construction. But for me, the festival goes beyond that. Epic Fest is the final chorus to Emerald Sword yelled as loudly as humanly possible, shoulder to shoulder with people dressed up in elf and dwarf and viking and knight outfits who-- just like you-- had the fortune of discovering that this is in fact the best form of music ever created. I cannot recommend this festival enough, and I will absolutely be back in the future at some point to experience more of this silly and special space.