Video shot by Fozz Gibson Photography
Wacken Open Air has been and gone, this year marking the 35th birthday of one of the worlds biggest and best metal festivals. HEAVY headed along this year for the first time to check out the four day metal marathon, with the goal of chatting with a few of the bands performing, and out of every band there number one on our list was Blood Command.
If you’ve been living under a rock, let me tell you right now Blood Command aren’t your standard punk-rock outfit. Led by the mastermind riff-lord Yngve Andersen and fronted by Aussie metal royalty Nikki Brumen, Blood Command has been systematically destroying boundaries since they first crashed onto the scene. They take the raw, visceral aggression of hardcore punk, smash it into the infectious hooks of pop music, and spit it back out with enough venom to strip the paint off a car. It is a sonic cocktail they proudly call ‘deathpop‘, and it is glorious chaos.
When the news dropped that they were locked in for a prime 1:00 PM slot on the W:E:T Stage, the metal community collectively lost its mind. Wacken is the absolute holy grail of heavy music festivals, a sprawling, (usually) muddy rite of passage in Germany where only the fiercest survive. Taking that stage isn’t just another gig on the touring calendar — it is a violent declaration of intent. For one hour, Blood Command did exactly what they do best: they brought the absolute noise and tore the place completely apart.
They unleashed a relentless barrage of fan favourites alongside new summer anthems like Flowers To A Knife Fight, ensuring that the packed-out stage area was transformed into a swirling, sweat-drenched pit from the very first note. Blood Command didn’t just play Wacken; they conquered it. They proved to tens of thousands of die-hard metalheads exactly why they are one of the most exciting, unpredictable, and fiercely original live bands on the planet today.
And HEAVY had the privelage of talking to Yngve and Nikki not long after they got off stage. Check it out above. Tickets for Wacken Open Air 2027 are on sale now and it’s a monster line-up! Get them early HERE.
