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Since its founding in 2016, the Copenhagen festival A COLOSSAL WEEKEND has been an artistic platform for boundary-crossing, heavy and experimental music. It is a festival where representation, inclusion and aesthetic radicalism go hand in hand, just as it is a free space where audiences and artists can meet in safety, openness and musical exploration.

Next year, the festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary, taking place May 7-9, 2026 with VEGA and Basement in Vesterbro in Copenhagen as the permanent location.

The festival places diversity as a foundation for artistic quality and presents a strong presence of female, non-binary and queer artists. Music and exploration are intertwined with existential and sometimes political themes – from furious punk to ritualistic ambient and poetic doom.

The names you can expect to see on Friday are:

Cult of Luna (SE)
Cult of Luna have shaped – and often defined – the global post-metal scene for more than two decades. The band emerged in 1998 from the hardcore project Eclipse and immediately set an uncompromising standard with their self-titled debut from 2001. From there grew a catalogue borne of ambition, intensity and an almost physical emotional weight. With albums such as Salvation, Vertical and latest The Long Road North Cult of Luna has cemented itself as one of the post-metal scene's most visionary forces – as architects of a sound universe where earthquake-like power meets chilling cinematic beauty.

Thot (BE)
THOT is a Belgian art-rock collective, known for their dynamic and genre-defying sound, fusing post-rock, industrial tension and art-rock experimentalism into something both corporeal and poetic. Founded by visionary Grégoire Fray, THOT grew from a lone spark into a full band that functions as one unified artistic organism. Their latest album Delta is a raw and reflective work. A fundamentally organic and uncompromising meditation on where art and love can breathe in a shattered world.

Backengrillen (SE)
Backengrillen is not just a band – it’s a sonic anti-fascist and anti-racist riot. This highly explosive ensemble featuring members of Refused, TEXT, INVSN, Fire! Orchestra, and the jazz-rock collective Nirvana unleashes a sound that is equal parts punk defiance, jazz anarchy, and doom metal weight. Their self-titled debut (2026) – written, performed live, and recorded in just 72 hours – is a manifesto of raw, unfiltered creation: A brutal, beautiful collision of saxophones, bass, drums, and vocals that refuses to be confined by genre or expectation.

Hyper Crazy (JP)
From Tokyo, Hyper Gal emerges as a whirlwind of punk, math rock and unfiltered DIY energy. The music is fast, edgy and quivering with nervous intensity – a meeting point between Japan's underground hardcore and experimental rock. On release Pure (2023) fuses experimental rock, distorted electronics and broken rhythms into a universe that is at once playful, frightening and hypnotic.

Shearling (US)
Shearling draws inspiration from the American underground, creating a sound that fuses the melancholy of slowcore, the hazy soundscapes of shoegaze, and the weight of post-rock. It's music that's both rich and fragile – guitars and vocals lie like a dreamy veil, tender and crushing at the same time. On the album Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah” (2022) they expand the palette with banjo, dulcimer and electronics and open up a surreal universe that both challenges and enchants.

Truckfighters (SE)
Truckfighters channel the sound of the desert from the heart of Örebro, where stoner rock meets Scandinavian attitude. Their music channels desert rock through dense layers of fuzz and hypnotic grooves. The sound is deeply rooted in stoner rock with fuzz pedals turned up all the way and a playful confidence reminiscent of Kyuss, but with a distinctly Scandinavian touch. The album V (Fuzzorama Records, 2021) captures their love of open riffs, hypnotic grooves, and psychedelic melodies that spread like sunlit highways.

Blackwater Holylight (US)
Since their humble beginnings in Portland, Oregon in 2016, Blackwater Holylight have shaped their very own vision of heavy psychedelic rock, where the heaviness of doom is intertwined with the hazy melancholy of shoegaze and the hypnotic pulse of stoner rock. With the album Silence/Exercise reached a new creative peak – an emotional work born of personal upheaval, where shimmering vulnerability balances against riffs that crash like slow waves against the shore. On their latest EP, If You Only Knew, they further tighten their grip on the tension between strength and fragility – sorrow wrapped in reverberation.

Eyes (DK)
EYES arrive like an impact. Their music snaps, jerks, and detonates with the kind of force that feels closer to a reflex than a plan. Formed in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the late 2010s, the band emerged from a tightly knit heavy underground where members have long been active across adjacent projects and scenes. That background feeds directly into EYES’ sound: compact, abrasive, and wired for confrontation. Across their releases, culminating with Spinner (2025), the band have sh arpened a language built on repetition, pressure, and sudden violence, earning attention well beyond Denmark for music that refuses to soften its edges.

Throwe (DK)
THROWE arrive with no interest in softening the blow. Based in Copenhagen and formed in 2018 from the remains of Justinhate, the band carried years of shared experience straight into a new project defined by severity and resolve. They quickly became known in the Danish underground for a pitch - black, Danish - language form of hardcore focused on torment, powerlessness, and confrontation with inner demons. This approach was set in place with the critically acclaimed debut album Forfald (2022). Shortly after its release, THROWE dissolved, before returning with a new lineup and continuing along the same line through the split release Splittelse (2024) with Sloevsind.

ZAHN (DE)
ZAHN sound like infrastructure waking up — a humming, pressure-driven force shaped by Berlin’s underground. Formed by Chris Breuer (HEADS., ex–The Ocean Collective), Nic Stockmann (HEADS., ex–Eisenvater) and Felix Gebhard (Muff Potter, live Einstürzende Neubauten, live Tocotronic), the trio channel decades of experimentation into something both industrial and instinctive. Their debut ZAHN (2021) carved out a vocabulary of propulsion and abrasion, while Adria (2023) expanded that blueprint into starker, more cinematic terrain where krautrock momentum, dark jazz atmosphere, noise-rock grit, post-punk pulse and electronic undercurrents collide.

Pthumulhu (IS)
Pthumulhu move through the outer edges of sound, where doom, drone, and black metal dissolve into something wordless. The Icelandic duo channel repetition and resolve into vast, drawn out forms that feel less composed than conjured. Their debut Tungumál Svarthola  (2024) emerges as both dirge and invocation – an exploration of gravity, language, and the point where meaning collapses under weight. It is music that builds slowly, as if unearthed by pressure rather than performance.

Reveal Party (DK)
Reveal Party is the project of Copenhagen based songwriter Emily Holm Nyhuus – a voice that turns confession into clarity. Across two albums and early EPs, the band have used vulnerable storytelling as a way to navigate identity, intimacy, and renewal. Their songs trace small moments with the precision of memories: a shift in light, a single repeated phrase, the weight of saying too much or not enough. What emerges is a sound that feels disarmingly open – soft in tone but unflinching in honesty.

A COLOSSAL WEEKEND is a non-profit, independent festival organized by VEGA in collaboration with a number of local actors.

The concert is supported by Liveurope. Liveurope is the first pan-European initiative supporting concert venues in their efforts to promote emerging European artists. Liveurope is co-funded by the EU's Creative Europe programme.