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.

Full Festival tickets cost 1,165 DKK including fees and are on sale now. Single-day tickets go on sale in December.

The final schedule will follow. The first names we can present are:

Russian Circles (US)
Chicago’s Russian Circles have earned their place as one of the most influential post-metal trios of the past two decades. Their name — borrowed from a childhood ice-hockey drill — hints at the discipline and circular motion that define their music. Albums like the latest Gnosis (2023) showcase their ability to pair heaviness with subtlety, crafting soundscapes that are simultaneously crushing and delicate. Their music flows from cinematic calm to overwhelming intensity, threading intricate bass lines, searing guitars, and punishing drums into immersive instrumental narratives.

Cult of Luna (SE)
Cult of Luna have spent more than two decades shaping and often defining the global post-metal landscape. Emerging in 1998 from the hardcore band Eclipse, they set a bold tone with their self-titled debut (Rage of Achilles, 2001), beginning a discography built on ambition and visceral emotional weight. Records such as Salvation (2004), Vertikal (I2013), and The Long Road North (2022) have secured their status as one of heavy music’s most forward-thinking forces: authors of a sound where earth-shaking power meets stark cinematic beauty.

Pelican (US)
Hailing from Chicago, Pelican are a band intrinsically tied to their city’s underground, forming in 2000 with guitarists Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec alongside brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg on bass and drums. Their sound grew from the rule-free, genre-agnostic creativity of the Fireside Bowl scene, a space where heavy riffs and expansive atmospheres coexisted without restriction. With Schroeder-Lebec’s return in 2022, Pelican tapped back into the spirit of their formative era for Flickering Resonance, creating music that honours their roots while embracing subtlety, human warmth, and expansive post-rock soundscapes.

Pain Magazine (FR)
Emerging from France’s underground, Pain Magazine fuse noise rock, hardcore, and avant-garde tendencies into a volatile, unpredictable sound. Their name, an ironic nod to consumer culture, reflects a music built on distortion and chaos. The 2024 album Violent God (Humus Records) was recorded in just sixteen days, capturing a raw snapshot of intensity, exhaustion, and catharsis. Their lineage includes ties to Birds in Row and Maelstrom, infusing their music with a blend of rage and precision. Guitars slice like razors, drums pound relentlessly, and electronics buzz like exposed wires.

Hyper Gal (JP)
From Tokyo, Hyper Gal are a whirlwind of punk, math-rock, and unfiltered DIY energy. Their music is fast, jagged, and bristling with nervy intensity, sitting at the crossroads of Japanese underground hardcore and experimental rock. The 2023 release Pure fuses experimental rock, warped electronics, and fractured rhythms into a soundworld that is simultaneously playful, terrifying, and hypnotic.

Feral Nature (NO)
From Oslo, Feral Nature strike with sharp intensity and urgent energy. Rooted in hardcore, their music is both ferocious and precise, blending punk’s raw power with metallic discipline. The result is a sound that balances rage and control, transforming aggression into poetry rather than destruction.

Shearling (US)
Shearling emerge from the US with a sound that blends slowcore melancholy, shoegaze textures, and weighty post-rock sensibilities. Their music is lush yet fragile, layering guitars and vocals into a dreamy haze that is both tender and crushing. The 2022 record Motherfucker, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah” incorporates banjos, dulcimers, and electronics, creating a surreal sonic palette that challenges and enchants.

Truckfighters (SE)
From Örebro, Sweden, Truckfighters channel desert rock through thick layers of fuzz and groove. Their sound is steeped in stoner rock, fuzz pedals pushed to the limit, and playful swagger reminiscent of Kyuss yet distinctly Scandinavian. The 2021 album V (Fuzzorama Records) captures their love of wide-open riffs, hypnotic grooves, and psychedelic melodies that stretch like sun-drenched highways.

Blackwater Holylight (US) 
Since emerging from Portland, Oregon in 2016, Blackwater Holylight have shaped a singular vision of heavy psychedelia — where doom’s gravity intertwines with shoegaze’s blurred melancholy and stoner-rock’s hypnotic thrum. Their self-titled debut (2018) introduced a sound rooted as much in introspection as distortion. With Silence/Motion (2021), they reached a new creative peak: an emotionally charged record born from personal upheaval, balancing shimmering vulnerability against riffs that hit like ocean waves in slow motion. Their most recent EP, If You Only Knew (2025), pushes further into that tension — sorrow wrapped in reverb, power carried by breath.

King Buffalo (US)
King Buffalo from Rochester, New York, are a heavy psychedelic rock trio who have crafted their own path in the psych underground since 2013. Comprising Sean McVay (vocals/guitar), Dan Reynolds (bass), and Scott Donaldson (drums), they operate fully independently — recording, producing, and releasing their music themselves, while working with Stickman Records for EU vinyl editions. Across acclaimed releases including Orion (2016), Longing to Be the Mountain (2018), and their ambitious 2021–2022 album trilogy — The Burden of Restlessness, Acheron, and Regenerator — the band continue to push into deeper, more expansive terrain.

Svalbard (UK)
Svalbard have become one of the most vital voices in modern heavy music, a band where rage and vulnerability, beauty and brutality coexist without contradiction. Formed in 2011, they weave post-hardcore, blackgaze, and atmospheric post-metal into a sound that is both urgently political and deeply personal. Across albums including One Day All This Will End (2015), It’s Hard to Have Hope (2018), and their latest full-length The Weight of the Mask (2023), they explore identity, grief, misogyny, and survival – refusing to look away from the world’s harshness, yet always reaching for light.

THOT (BE)
THOT are a Belgian art-rock collective known for their dynamic, genre-defying sound, merging post-rock, industrial tension and art-rock experimentalism into something both visceral and poetic. Founded by visionary Grégoire Fray, THOT grew from a solitary spark into a full band operating like a single artistic organism. Their latest album Δelta (2023) is a raw and reflective work — a fundamentally organic, uncompromising meditation on where art and love find room to breathe in a fractured world. Earlier releases such as Fleuve (2017) established their darkly cinematic style, where machinery and emotion grind against each other until they ignite.

HEATHE (DK)
HEATHE emerge from Aalborg’s experimental underground with a sound that turns despair into something vast, communal, and strangely uplifting — reshaping the idea of what heavy music can be: not just performed, but experienced. What began as a solitary vision has evolved into a large, rotating ensemble — often more than ten musicians united in one cathartic swell of drone, post-metal, and noise. Their latest double album Control Your Soul’s Desire for Freedom (2025) stands as a colossal feat: an album of overwhelming emotional scope, praised for their physical force and the way they transform despair into shared release. It is music that feels like carrying the weight of the world together — bone-deep heaviness threaded with the faint but stubborn glow of hope.

Hudsult (DK)
Hudsult are a queer post-hardcore collective who channel vulnerability and fury with rare, unguarded honesty. Their name Hudsult – the Danish word for a state of longing for physical touch or skin-to-skin closeness – sets the emotional tone for a band drawn to the rawest edges of human need. Emerging in 2023, they carved out space for voices that refuse to be softened or sanitised, fusing the urgency of screamo with poetic introspection and a distinctly Scandinavian emotional intensity. 

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.