“Is that guy sporting some gnarly corpse paint or has he just gone overboard with the sunscreen?”

Walking down the Scarborough seafront on one of the hottest weekends of the year, it’s a genuine question, with tongues only partially in cheek. Now in its fourth year, Fortress Festival has established itself as a fixture in the UK metal calendar, bringing dozens of the world’s most evil black metal bands, and a couple of thousand fans, for a celebration of all things frostbitten in the North Yorkshire sunshine.

Evidently identified as a lucrative fixture by this old resort’s legion of landlords and innkeepers, the likes of Darkthrone and Immortal now blast across town from watering hole speaker systems more used to Chas & Dave. But the sheer weirdness of seeing bullet belts mixing with the buckets and spades remains a potently subversive delight.

Not that there’s any taking the piss once attendees step into the Scarborough Spa. Boasting headline sets from Norwegian legends Old Man’s Child (playing the UK for the first time in 25 years) and Salt Lake City’s Gallowbraid (playing for the first time ever as a band) this is a daringly curated celebration of niche extremity which perfectly understands its audience. Once again, 2026's edition sold out months in advance.

Chuck in cheap pints, amazing scenery, Friday’s sardine-can-packed pre-show and a range of lesser-spotted delights like Australia’s trance-infected Mesarthim or The Netherlands’ atmospheric Fluisteraars – not to mention Sunday’s sweaty theatre stage full of dungeon synth – and it really does feel like a sort of infernal paradise.

Dusting down our spikiest gauntlets and wiping last year’s beer from the old leather breastplate, K! headed back into the fray to bring you all the most diabolical moments from the essential black metal gathering in 2026...

Groza Main Stage

Fortress has shown a keen instinct for packing their venue early with opening sets from some of the festival’s hottest bands. It’s absolutely the case for Groza in 2026, the German misanthropists going on at high noon to a packed main stage, with pulsating ill will swelling to fill the space. Sporting a band name that translates as ‘horror’, ‘disgust’ of ‘lightning storm’ in a variety of European languages, they could be a touch too much early in the day. But despite leaving out the anthemic Deluge here, there’s something weirdly affirmative about how their elemental power is elevated in this grand old ballroom, and how the dedication to late bassist M.S. on titanic closer Daffodils weirdly leaves hearts on high.

Black Cilice Ocean Room

Armies of British tourists are flying out to Portugal in search of fun in the sun this time of year, but Black Cilice redress the balance spectacularly this afternoon with a voyage in the other direction seeking northern darkness. Absolutely crushing the oven-hot Ocean Room with Timeless Spectre and an aptly-titled Boiling Corpses, the veteran occultists do lean into extreme metal at its most one-dimensionally uncompromising. But with Saturday’s black mass still just getting started, this grand congregation are more than happy for a true Satanic racket to get their scowls into. Eeeeevil.

Mesarthim Main Stage

A chorus of laughs ring out around the Scarborough Spa’s main hall when Mesarthim first take the stage. Rather than corpsepaint or a more traditionally leathery mask, Mesarthim’s anonymous frontman goes on wearing an LED screen over his face, displaying a swirling constellation of stars. Faintly silly as it first looks, though – sort of ‘cosmic black metal via a shopping spree in Cyberdog’ – the Australian collective go on to deliver one of the most captivating sets Fortress has ever seen. Much like adding that mask to the traditional uniform of battle vests and black cowls, blending trance and EDM with atmospheric black metal shouldn’t really work. But compositions as bold and fully realised as The Great Filter function astonishingly, temporarily slingshotting today’s audience out of murky shadows and into the endless emptiness of the outer universe. Awesome.

Groza 1 13 FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT Acidolka

MESARTHIM FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT NECROSHORNS

BLACK CILICE FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT NECROSHORNS

Aeon Winds Ocean Room

Enraptured by the Carpathian wilderness rather than the sprawl of the cosmos, Aeon Winds still manage to pick up where Mesarthim leave off as we sink deeper into Saturday afternoon. Hitting UK shores for the first time ever, the Slovakian crew make the most of sharing a stage with Australia’s Midnight Odyssey (also excellent) to revive material from 2017’s superb Aeon Odyssey split EP. Indeed, welcoming MO’s frontman Dis Pater for the climax of their set elevates this performance well beyond the limits of black metal, threading in rich gothic and doom influences for one of the most unexpectedly sensual sets of Fortress 2026.

Akercocke Main Stage

Much like English weddings, funerals and car boot sales, you know what you’re getting with Akercocke. The London legends are playing their 2003 classic Choronzon in full this afternoon, even digging out the old white shirts and black ties for the occasion, but it’s very much crushing business as usual. Even the unexpected passing of bassist and compatriot Federico Benini a few weeks ago can’t derail them. “When we come together like this to play music, we celebrate life,” Jason Mendonça pays tribute their friend during the intro to Son Of The Morning, with low-end veteran Kieren Allan ably stepping in. “Today we want you to join us in celebrating a very bright life indeed.” It’s a stirring show of defiance in the face of the infinite void that awaits us all.

Dødheimsgard Main Stage

Clocking in at an expansive 80 minutes, Dødheimsgard’s set on Saturday’s main stage is substantially longer than that of the headliners, but the Norwegian avant-garde pioneers prove worth every minute of this awestruck audience’s attention. Working through 2023 masterpiece Black Medium Current in its unhinged entirety, there are no fewer than nine players onstage, with backing vocalists and a crack instrumentalists twisting in the orbit of incredibly charismatic mainman Vicotnik. It's captivating, as Interstellar Nexus and the vast Halow veer between black meta, prog rock, Stygian disco and disconsolate jazz. Accompanied by a dazzling production, it’s a rare chance to experience some of this genre’s most dazzling songs with the scale and intricate attention to detail they truly deserve. Mind-blowing, in more ways than one.

Aeon Winds 2 FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT Acidolka

Akercocke 20 FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT Acidolka

Dodheimsgard fortress 2026 credit necroshorns 1

Old Man’s Child Main Stage

To paraphrase The Office Christmas Special, ‘There’s nothing worse than an old dad.’ Reactions to the announcement of Old Man’s Child as a Fortress headliner were mixed last year. Many black metal die-hards wrote them off as a B-rate version of frontman Galder’s old band Dimmu Borgir, it seemed, not that bothered even for first British performance in a quarter-century. It’s an attitude that carries through to Saturday night. Even with doubters drifting in and out, and the bars doing surprisingly healthy business, though, their short, sweet 60 minutes packs in buckets of OTT evil with Galder clearly having the time of his life. Plus, spectacular closer The Millennium King is perfect to send a battalion of boozy ghouls chaotically off into the Yorkshire night.

OLD MANS CHILD FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT NECROSHORNS

OLD MANS CHILD FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT NECROSHORNS 1

A Forest Of Stars Main Stage

Bangovers are throbbing on Sunday morning, but emerging from shadowy silence there could be few bands better to salve the wounds than A Forest Of Stars. Originating just down the road in Leeds, the lesser-spotted, violin-infused collective might as well have dissolved in from a different realm of existence. Filling the video displays with gorgeous, colourfully abstract depictions of forest creatures with melting faces, and making music that channels the trippy agitation and melancholia of finding out you’ve lost your wallet on magic mushrooms, they are quite unlike anyone else at Fortress. With a big, big audience deep under their rustic spell, they’re all the better for it.

Abigail Williams Main Stage

Murmurings are circulating that Abigail Williams were unsure whether they’d still be an active band by the time this Fortress engagement rolled around on Sunday afternoon. It’s unsurprising, perhaps, from a gang who’ve always felt on the brink of breaking up, but thank goodness they’ve made it. Following on from vicious Stockholm savages This Gift Is A Curse over in the Ocean Room, the Arizona crew continue the pattern of stripped-down, no-nonsense, full-frontal assault, with fresh material from last year’s A Void Within Existence cutting delightfully close to the bone. Always good when a band attacks a festival set with violence that suggests it might be their last.

Fluisteraars Main Stage

The massive video screens in Fortress’ main stage are switched off for Fluisteraars. There can be no distraction from the Netherlands collective’s dense post-black metal, apparently, nothing to lift listeners out of the gravitational pull of their deceptively deep grooves. Music from 2024’s Manifestaties van de ontworteling (‘Manifestations Of Rootlessness’) and this year’s Jacht der Mysteriën (‘Hunt For The Mysteries’) have showcased a heavy intellectualism, with head-scratching ruminations on the interrelationship between mankind, nature, and societal decay. Unleashed in the live arena, however, they come on as a more untamed beast, breaking between mesmeric sonic texture and a far more dynamic brand of violence.

Emyn Muil Theatre

Scarborough Spa’s all-seated Theatre is used for a series of talks and Q&A sessions on Saturday, but come Sunday the space is handed over for a day-long showcase of dungeon synth. Named after The Dreary Hills from Tolkein’s Middle Earth, Emyn Muil normally deal in epic atmospheric black metal, but here they experiment with a stripped-back format – synth and booming percussion accompanied by just a touch of guitar – that draws an even bigger crowd than eventual headliner Mortiis later in the evening. Inherently sparse and repetitive, this configuration does sound at times like background music perhaps best suited playing over the ‘start screen’ in some medieval survival horror video game, but it’s sweet relief for eardrums pummelled by unending blastbeats.

Vespéral Ocean Room

Discourse on the Fortress Festival Facebook forum takes an interesting turn on Sunday morning, with one confused punter asking about the lack of mosh pits at this extreme metal gathering. Most here seem happy to stand back and experience music as a non-contact sport, but something changes during Vespéral, sort of like people remembering that black metal rose to infamy not through chin-stroking meditation but band members committing literal arson and murder. Clad in knowingly OTT battle-armour the Montreal collective are well up for it, too, only ramping up the intensity as crowdsurfers begin to surge and the circle-pit swirls.

Misþyrming Main Stage

Mischief is on the agenda again at Misþyrming as the Reykjavík troublemakers serve up a soundtrack for shit-kicking and a sizeable contingent of the crowd deliver. Beyond bodies bouncing off each other in the pit, though, there is a high drama about Algleymi and Engin miskunn far beyond ashen facepaint and hard-edged riffs that more than justifies sub-headline billing on this prestigious main stage. That band name translates roughly as ‘mistreatment’ in their native tongue, but there are few complaints from a wider audience here, even as they watch with the stunned awe of lost souls plunging face first into an active volcano. Which is nice.

Misthyrming fortress 2026 credit necroshorns

Misthyrming fortress 2026 credit necroshorns 1

Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult Ocean Room

Energy levels peak for the mighty Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult. Going up against black metal/dungeon synth royalty Mortiis over in the theatre may seem less than ideal on paper, but the outcome in reality is a distillation of the audience in the still-sweltering Ocean Room down to those looking for catharsis in its bloodthirsty basest form. Frontwoman Onielar obliges, not just spitting mouthfuls of the red stuff over the front rows and her trademark white burial robe, but unleashing absolute mayhem with The Eviscerator and Nocturnal March. Having battled cancer and undergone a double masectomy a few years ago, there’s a particular streak of defiance here, as one of modern black metal’s most terrifying bands somehow find a higher gear to shift into.

DARKENED NOCTURN SLAUGHTERCULT FORTRESS 2026 CREDIT NECROSHORNS

Gallowbraid Main Stage

“We’re Gallowbraid from the United States,” grins Jake Rogers to a packed main hall as Fortress 2026 reaches its strange, sublime climax. “We’ve never played a gig before, so, uh, we really appreciate you being here...”

Indeed, few bands with a sum total of zero gigs and just one 16-year-old, 40-minute EP to their name could hope to headline a festival of this scale. But the instantly sold-out merch on Sunday morning and rapt reception that evening are indicative of what’s so special about Fortress. Seeing the listenable, faintly folky mix of euphoria and melancholia in Ashen Eidolon and Oak And Aspen playing out in these surrounds raises a thousand chills.

Rather than the expected cover versions from Jake’s other bands Visigoth or Caladan Brood, their headline slot is filled out by two powerful new compositions, Leafdance and Stormcloud Memories, before Stone Of Remembrance plays out as a perfect farewell, a poignant reminder that what this crowd has just witnessed could truly be once-in-a-lifetime.

Fortress will mark its fifth anniversary in 12 months, welcoming its biggest headliners ever in Norwegian icons Emperor. But even the mighty Ihsahn and company could struggle to produce a moment quite as special as this. Unforgettable.

Fortress Festival takes place at Scarborough Spa, May 29 – 30, 2027.