Progressive/post-metal label Pelagic Records has announced Pelagic Fest 2024 as a celebration of its 15th anniversary.
The two-day festival will take place at the Muziekgieterij venue in Maastricht, Netherlands, on August 24 and 25, 2024. Headlining will be international prog metal act The Ocean, who founded Pelagic Records and will be playing a set to celebrate the belated 10th anniversary of their 2013 album, Pelagial.
Also headlining will be Norwegian prog/black metal maverick and Emperor frontman Ihsahn, plus Northern Irish post-rockers And So I Watch You From Afar.
Acts further down the bill include Swedish post-rockers Oh Hiroshima, Belgian psych-metal trio Psychonaut, French post-metal band Year Of No Light, Norwegian instrumental project Spurv and Norwegian noise/post-punks Årabrot. The full list of performers can be found on the poster below.
Tickets to Pelagic Fest will go on sale at 12pm CET on Friday, March 15.
According to marketing materials, Pelagic Records hope for the festival to become an annual event from 2024 onwards.
Ihsahn will be performing at Pelagic Fest as part of his touring to promote his self-titled solo album, which came out in February. Metal Hammer’s Dom Lawson gave the record a glowing 4.5-star review upon release.
“A concept piece devoted to some hazily defined hero’s epic journey, Ihsahn is a game of two distinct halves,” Lawson wrote.
“The first presents an astonishing splurge of new songs: still firmly within the Norwegian’s self-created wheelhouse of artful, restless black metal, but with full and florid orchestral elements throughout. Ihsahn has been mixing strings with metallic bombast for more than 30 years, but never with quite this much unabashed ingenuity and flair. Here, metal band and orchestra are woven seamlessly together, each surge of violins or brass adding colour, definition and extra muscle to these intricate songs’ wayward momentum.”
The Ocean’s latest album, Holocene, came out last year via Pelagic, while And So I Watch You From Afar’s, Jettison, was released in 2022 via Equal Vision and Velocity.
