Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
If Day 1 was a cosmic trip into the most introspective places of the human soul, Day 2 of Fortress Festival took us somewhere different — but just as deep. Souls left wandering in a realm closer to home, some lost and some found, perhaps still hangover from the night before: the festival’s second chapter unfolded with a different kind of weight and a different kind of beauty. There was no better place to begin that journey than with A Forest of Stars.
A Forest of Stars are one of Britain’s most singular acts — a Victorian gentlemen’s club turned black metal collective, a Leeds outfit building hypnotic and ghostly music since 2007. Violin, flutes, synthesizers, male and female vocals woven into something simultaneously psychedelic and brutally heavy: there’s nothing else quite like them on the UK scene, and their long-awaited return to the Fortress stage made that clear from the first note.
The projections were almost distracting — I say almost, because in practice they became part of the atmosphere rather than a competition for attention. At certain points you found yourself so deep inside the music that you barely registered a band was playing at all. That’s a rare thing to say, and it’s a compliment.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
Then came Abigail Williams — and with them, one of the weekend’s most urgent bookings. Ken Sorceron’s American atmospheric black metal project had not played the UK in eight years, and for many in the room this was billed as a potentially final UK appearance altogether. That weight was palpable before a note had been played.
There were some technical issues during the set, but the band absorbed them and delivered something astonishing regardless. The video effects were far more contained than what we’d seen from other acts across the weekend — the band logo shifting slowly from icy to inflamed as the set moved through the catalogue, a simple but effective visual thread. The new album “A Void Within Existence” gave the set a fresh anchor, and the mood in the room shifted from the opener — more atmospheric, more still, more inward.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
By the time Fluisteraars arrived, the room was still settling — a handful of hardy souls who had survived the after-party, drawn back in by a near-constant pink light and the kind of smoke that swallows a stage whole. You could barely see the band, and after a while you stopped trying.
What initially felt like a return to pure Norwegian black metal quickly revealed itself as something more layered. The drumming had a colour and warmth to it that caught me off guard, and those tremolo guitars — classic in a 1990s sense — took the set somewhere between the underground and the hypnotic. We weren’t there to see faces. We were there for the music, and the music was more than enough.
This was their second Fortress appearance after 2024, this time with a 60-minute UK exclusive slot. They filled every second of it.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
This Sunday had more than one shiver in store — but Vinterland, my personal highlight of the day, delivered the first. The moment they stepped on stage it became ice cold, and that was exactly as it should be. Their sole full-length, “Welcome My Last Chapter” (1996), is a cult classic of melodic Swedish black metal, a record deeply rooted in the Dissection lineage, and thirty years on from its release they were here to perform it in full.
Pure bliss — that’s the only way I can describe jumping back into one of the most iconic albums to have shaped generations since. For a band that essentially never played live during their original run, this anniversary performance was a genuine historic occasion. There were some errors along the way, but we didn’t mind. We were there to witness a great album, and that’s exactly what we got.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
This was the band that didn’t make me stop for a single second to bang my head. Misþyrming‘s delivery is always strong — it punches you right in the face, and you thank them for it.
Their tight set turned the room on fire, sweeping away any trace of melody the previous acts had left behind. The precision, the brutality — with them it’s always a raw and intense experience, no joking and no time to waste.
Their legacy precedes them wherever they go. Part of the wave of Icelandic black metal artists — alongside Sinmara, Naðra, Svartidauði — who emerged in the 2010s and earned serious international attention, Misþyrming remain one of the most important acts in black metal today. They don’t play the UK often, so a UK exclusive at Fortress is always a significant booking — and this summer they’ll also be collaborating with Nergal on a full live performance of Behemoth‘s debut album “Sventevith“, which tells you everything about where they sit in the current extreme metal landscape.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
When it was time for Mortiis to take the theatre stage, something shifted. After the intensity of the Grand Hall, stepping into what felt closer to a trance was exactly what we needed – a moment to breathe, to reset, before the night’s final act.
The care that has gone into the sound on his recent releases is impeccable, with so much story to tell through beautiful, repetitive sequences layered across fascinating synth work. Mortiis is the project of Norwegian musician Håvard Ellefsen, former bassist of Emperor and one of the founding pioneers of dungeon synth — and thirty years of output sit behind every note he plays.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
We couldn’t have ended the night on a better note. Closing the day was the moment the whole weekend had been building toward: Gallowbraid — the black/folk metal project of Jake Rogers, better known as the frontman of Visigoth — making its worldwide live debut sixteen years after the “Ashen Eidolon” EP first appeared.
The first ever Gallowbraid show hit some bumps along the way, but none of that mattered. The projections on the backdrop — nature, mystical forests, and imagery that felt made for this music — matched perfectly with the sound Rogers and his assembled musicians brought to the stage: guitar tremolo and flutes, beautiful and unhurried, every note given space to breathe. Every track from “Ashen Eidolon” — all five of them — landed with a weight that belied the EP’s short runtime.
Honestly? I was speechless. Rogers always said the project was never intended for the live setting — but here it was, and it was spectacular. For everyone in that room, this felt genuinely once-in-a-lifetime. And in the end, that’s exactly what it was.
Photo: Peterson Marti.
