Ah! That feeling of being back in Tilburg just before Roadburn. You start seeing familiar faces, nodding around the streets to strangers with obscure taste in music, and you feel this particular atmosphere in the air, with the whole city getting ready to host a heap of music enthusiasts, as the various “offroad” and “roadburners welcome” signs here and there testify. After settling down to the accommodation and a good dinner on April 16th, 2025, it was already time to dive in the underground of 013, where people could share their stories and mementos from earlier editions in the Archiving heaviness project (for who is interested you can check out the project here), or enjoy this year’s festival beer – the Secret Show – once again in collaboration with Uiltje. Meeting up with the first friendly faces and some new ones is also part of the whole experience, as we slowly found our way in the Next Stage – formerly known as Green Room – hall waiting for TEMPLE FANG to officially open the traditional warm-up event of Roadburn, The Spark that sets it all in motion.
Returning to Roadburn after 6 years with their long-awaited second studio album, “Lifted From The Wind,” coming out a few days after the festival, this was the perfect occasion for the Amsterdam-based combo TEMPLE FANG to showcase their new material, creating a psychedelic, nearly-hypnotic soundscape that set the crowd into a really good groove from the get-go. In fact, this was a positive surprise both in terms of music and a good live performance, with the venue already quite full, a very good sign for the festival when the main event hasn’t even started yet. Carried away by the proggy riffs and mellow vocals echoing into the hall, we soon found ourselves mingling more with the early comers before the next band.
Another Amsterdam band, RATTENBURCHT displayed a completely different side of the Dutch capital’s music scene with their lo-fi raw black metal/punk, manifested in their recent debut “Vampyric Vessel.” The trio offered an intriguing set made of their really, really short songs, playing on a barely lit stage. Aggressive and unconventional, the trio came out as the weird one of the three bands tonight, proving once again the variety of the Dutch black metal landscape.
Roadburners-favorite THOU, certainly a good part of the reason tonight was already so full, joined the fray to conclude the warm up with their contagious energy and a set mostly focused on “Summit” and some more recent material, leaving of course out “Umbilical” as they play that record in full a couple of days later. From the moment Bryan took his usual stance on stage, people knew exactly what to expect, and the band delivered precisely what they wanted. Eventually, the venue started to feel as crowded as in the proper festival (although there was even more crowd in the following days, more on that in the later parts of this year’s report), with a controlled flow of people in and out, and eventually we needed to catch some fresh air.
Maybe not yet as intense as one could have expected, the show did work well to get the audience present into the proper festival mood. The overall atmosphere was, after all, still quite chill, and if most people were like us, having just arrived in town, they probably just wanted to have a good time with some nice music and catch up with fellow Roadburners. In fact, it was still fairly crowded long after the show ended, and it was then that we got that familiar feeling of being “at home.” Perfect start to a weekend that promised a lot of fun and excitement, as well as surprisingly nice weather, and not as much running as it looked like, despite our ever-hectic schedule. Micro-breaks can do wonders! Check our photo gallery here…
TEMPLE FANG
RATTENBURCHT
THOU
