It says everything about the breadth of artists that Bloodstock are open to nowadays that Architects have been invited to headline the Ronnie James Dio Stage on the festival’s Saturday night. The Brighton metalcore innovators have been exploring far more melodic, mainstream sounds over the last few years: something that would have been in direct opposition to Bloodstock’s interests in the not-too-distant past. But, with the Derbyshire weekender openly embracing the likes of Parkway Drive and Killswitch Engage in recent times, Architects certainly don’t feel like a wildcard booking as they surge into bouncy 2023 single Seeing Red.
Although some online grumblers have bemoaned Architects now having the gall to sound different to how they did in 2009, the truth is that the songs from their divisive 2022 album The Classic Symptoms Of A Broken Spirit sound huge here. The likes of Deep Fake and When We Were Young do the exact thing that they were designed to do when the band wrote them: inspire mass singalongs in a packed festival field. And, if those anthems aren’t for you, Architects dipping back into Doomsday, Royal Beggars and a savage Nihilist (all unquestionably classics in the band’s canon at this point) would surely have been enough to make this set a triumph.
