In June 1995 a hundred and eighteen thousand people went to a metal festival on a former military airfield outside Eindhoven. It remains the largest multi day open air festival ever held in the Netherlands, of any kind, in any genre. The traffic on the approach roads stopped moving for long enough that people got out and cooked sausages on the carriageway.
That figure explains the Dutch scene better than any record does. A country of fifteen million people, with one significant metal label inside its borders and a domestic audience too small to support a full time band, nevertheless assembled the biggest gathering of this music in Europe, and it did so in the same years its own groups were making their first albums for German companies. The Netherlands did not build a scene and then attract a festival. It had the festival first, and the bands grew up standing on it.
One throat and four bands
The one thing every account of Dutch death metal agrees on is that the country's export was a voice. Martin van Drunen took over the microphone in Pestilence in 1988 and made Consuming Impulse; he left, and Oldenzaal got a band out of it, because Asphyx, formed in 1987 by Bob Bagchus and Tony Brookhuis, had him singing and playing bass on The Rack in 1991 and Last One on Earth in 1992. He left again. What the story usually stops short of is where he went next, which is the part that matters, since the whole European scene is visible in his passport.
He went to Coventry. Van Drunen replaced Karl Willetts in Bolt Thrower in 1994, stayed until 1997, and so the defining English band spent three years fronted by a Dutchman, which is a fair measure of how thoroughly the borders had stopped mattering by then, and the rest of that traffic is set out in the European chapter. He came back to Asphyx when the band reformed in 2007 and has been there ever since. Bagchus, the founder, left in March 2014, which left the group with no original members and the singer who had twice walked out of it as its longest serving voice.
Goes, and the band that walked out of the genre
Gorefest assembled in Goes in 1989 around Jan-Chris de Koeijer, Frank Harthoorn, Alex van Schaik and Marc Hoogendoorn, had a demo out within months, and made Mindloss for Foundation 2000 in 1991. Then came the part that everybody argues about. Erase in 1994 pulled the tempos back towards rock, Soul Survivor in 1996 finished the job, Chapter 13 followed in 1998, and the band broke up that year with poor sales and an audience that had gone somewhere else. The reunion in 2004 produced La Muerte in 2005 and Rise to Ruin in 2007, with Ed Warby behind the drums and Boudewijn Bonebakker on second guitar, and in June 2009 they stopped for good on the grounds that they had gone as far as the band could go.
A band that leaves its own genre in public and then comes back to it a decade later has told you something no discography can: that the exit was a decision, not a decline.
The ones who never changed a thing
Against that, three careers of pure obstinacy. Sinister formed in Schiedam in 1988 with Aad Kloosterwaard on drums, Ron van de Polder on guitar, Mike van Mastrigt on vocals and Corzas on bass, put out the Perpetual Damnation demo in 1990, and have run for the better part of forty years with Kloosterwaard as the only constant, a man who came off the drum stool and picked up the microphone after the hiatus of 2003 to 2005 rather than let the name stop. Thanatos had formed in Rotterdam in 1984 around Stephan Gebedi, older than nearly everyone in this history, split in 1992 and came back in 1999 to carry on as though nothing had happened.
God Dethroned is the third and the most methodical. Henri Sattler started it in Beilen in 1990 with Hans Leegstra and Ard de Weerd, released The Christhunt on Shark in 1992, reached Metal Blade by way of Bloody Blasphemy in 1999, and then did something almost nobody in the genre attempts, which was to build three albums into a single argument: Passiondale in 2009, Under the Sign of the Iron Cross in 2010 and The World Ablaze in 2017, all of them about the First World War, fought in the fields immediately south of the band's own country. Sattler announced the end in 2011, played the floating festival 70000 Tons of Metal in January 2012, disbanded, reappeared in 2015 and issued The Judas Paradox in September 2024.
The festival was the industry
Return to the airfield, because the numbers are the argument. Dynamo Open Air began in 1986 as a party for the fifth birthday of the Dynamo club in Eindhoven, five thousand people in a car park. It moved to the local ice rink for 1988 to 1992, capacity twenty two thousand, then to the military airport from 1993, and by 1995 it had reached a hundred and eighteen thousand. The town had had enough by then: the council capped it at sixty thousand in 1996 and halved that to thirty thousand in 1998. It ran until 2005 with gaps in 2001 and 2003, returned as Dynamo Outdoor from 2008 to 2010, and came back again as Dynamo Metal Fest from 2015.
| Years | Site | Ceiling or attendance |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | Dynamo club car park, Eindhoven | 5,000 |
| 1988–1992 | Eindhoven ice rink | 22,000 capacity |
| 1993 onward | Eindhoven military airport | 118,000 in 1995 |
| 1996 | Council imposed limit | 60,000 |
| 1998 | Council imposed limit | 30,000 |
What that gave Dutch bands was the one thing money cannot easily buy in a small country, which is a stage in front of an audience assembled from six nations at once. A band from Schiedam could be seen in one afternoon by more people than lived in Schiedam. Bands from countries with no festival of their own came to play it, and the traffic that ran through Eindhoven every June did more for the continental scene than any label press release.
A second generation drawn from the same twenty people
Everything after 1993 in the Netherlands runs through a small number of names and a small number of labels, and the closeness of it is the most Dutch fact in the story. Altar came out of Hardenberg in the early nineties after passing through two other band names, put out Youth Against Christ in 1994 and four more albums for Displeased Records before stopping in 2001, and the original line-up still surfaces occasionally under a different name to play a handful of shows. Displeased also carried Houwitser, which was built by Vincent Dijkers of Sinister and functions as the other half of the same address book.
The old guard reassembles
The final Dutch contribution is a piece of deliberate archaeology. In late 2006 Stephan Gebedi called round the survivors and put together Hail of Bullets out of Asphyx, Gorefest, Thanatos and Houwitser: van Drunen singing, Ed Warby on drums, Theo van Eekelen on bass, Paul Baayens on guitar. Three albums followed on Metal Blade, all of them about the Second World War, with van Drunen doing the reading. Van Drunen left in late 2015 for personal reasons, Dave Ingram of Bolt Thrower and Benediction took over in 2016, and the band ended in March 2017.
Hung over, we decided to bring back the old school values that we felt were sorely missing from modern day death metal.
Hail of Bullets, on the band's formation in 2006
Pestilence, meanwhile, had done the same thing from the other direction: Patrick Mameli restarted the band in 2008 and has released seven albums since, up to Levels of Perception in 2024, having spent the nineties trying to leave death metal and the last two decades refusing to. Four bands, one voice, one festival and a great deal of stubbornness. The country to the east had none of the advantages and produced a scene anyway, which is the subject of polish Death Metal.
