With Metallica returning to play unprecedented double headline shows after a decade away, this 20th anniversary edition of Britain’s biggest heavy rock festival was specially extended to four days for the first time ever. Indeed, as 100,000 headbangers converged on Donington Park over the sweltering heatwave weekend, everything about Download 2023 felt bigger than usual: interminable traffic jams entering the site, marathon hikes from car park to arena, long queues for drinking water, overinflated food prices, and more.
That said, once underway, Download again proved itself one of the most reliably fun and friendly gatherings in the summer rock calendar: a rowdy holiday from reality and fabulous fancy dress party for audience and bands alike.
As ever, this year’s bill was overstuffed with testosterone-heavy grunters who confused performative aggression for creative self-expression. Heavy rock is, after all, a fairly conservative genre dominated by middle-aged white men. So it was heartening to see so many younger female performers, and artists of colour, playing Download 2023. Including London’s very own Nova Twins, who transformed their early afternoon slot on the main stage into a swaggering glamazon rap-metal celebration as they blasted away like some glorious mash-up of Beyoncé and Rage Against the Machine.
Rising Manchester quartet Witch Fever also proved riveting, channelling the pent-up feminist anger of previous grunge and riot-grrl generations into potent 21st century goth-rock howls. Meanwhile, MOBO-winning grime-punk duo Bob Vylan unleashed moshpit explosions with their fiery, funky, politically charged Download debut. Another thrilling outlier was Irish-born, London-based electro-rapper Bambie Thug, whose confrontational performance-art set had a genderqueer, occult-tinged, strikingly theatrical edge.
The weekend’s only British headliners, long-time Download veterans Bring Me The Horizon, made the most of finally snagging the top slot with a cinematic spectacle involving pyrotechnics, giant video walls, and a dystopian science-fiction back story. Kudos is also due to these Sheffield emo-rockers for inviting Nova Twins and Evanescence singer Amy Lee onstage to duet with their charismatic singer Olly Sykes. Since both artists drew huge crowds in their own right, these high-profile cameos were hopefully a hint of things to come.
Metallica’s double whammy rounded up their total appearances at Download and its precursor festival, Monsters of Rock, to 10. Next to this reporter, a 12-times Donington veteran, they look like work-shy lightweights. Even so, these black-clad thrash metal pioneers sounded admirably fierce and focussed durng both sets, relentlessly pummelling through almost four hours of crunchy riffs and booming baritone growls, from new album standouts Lux Æterna and Screaming Suicide to classic doom anthems including Nothing Else Matters, One and Enter Sandman.
Aside from IMAX-sized screens that magnified the band members to Mount Rushmore dimensions, this was also an impressively lean stage production, minimalism on a maximalist scale, in marked contrast to fellow headliners Slipknot and Bring Me The Horizon. Despite being old and rich enough to coast complacently through their autumn years, Metallica still play like hungry heavyweight champions, raging hard against the dying of the light. This was a triumphant return to the band’s spiritual British home, and a vintage Download for the ages.
