The European festival circuit is the reason a substantial number of these bands still have careers. It kept booking thrash bills throughout the decade when the American club circuit disappeared, and it is where the reunions happened.
Why Europe
Structural rather than cultural. European festivals are large, outdoor, multi day and booked a year ahead, which means the bill is assembled from a wide range of styles and eras rather than reflecting what is currently on the radio.
An American club promoter in 1995 booked what would sell tickets that month. A German festival booked a bill that would sell a weekend pass to forty thousand people, and a heritage thrash band on a Friday afternoon was a perfectly good reason for several thousand of them to buy one.
Dynamo
Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, and the most important of the early ones. It began as a club and grew into an open air festival, and through the second half of the 1980s it was the event that took American thrash bands and put them in front of European crowds who knew every word.
Several of the best live recordings of the period were made there, and for a band who had been playing to five hundred people in Ohio the shock of eight thousand Dutch teenagers is audible on them.
Wacken
Began in 1990 in a village in northern Germany with a few hundred people and grew into the largest metal festival in the world. Its importance for this genre is that it never stopped booking thrash, through the entire period when nobody else would.
A band who could fill a tent at Wacken in 1996 had an income. That sentence explains most of why the German bands came through the decade in better condition than the American ones.
Hellfest, Party.San and the rest
Hellfest in Clisson, France, from 2006, which arrived at exactly the right moment for the reunion wave. Party.San in Germany, smaller and more extreme. Graspop in Belgium. Bloodstock in England. Maryland Deathfest in America, which is the closest thing the United States has to the European model.
| Festival | Where | From | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamo | Eindhoven, Netherlands | 1980s | Took American thrash to Europe |
| Wacken | Wacken, Germany | 1990 | Never stopped booking thrash |
| Graspop | Dessel, Belgium | 1986 | The Benelux anchor |
| Party.San | Schlotheim, Germany | 1996 | The extreme end |
| Maryland Deathfest | Baltimore, United States | 2003 | The American exception |
| Hellfest | Clisson, France | 2006 | Arrived for the reunion wave |
| Bloodstock | Derbyshire, England | 2001 | Britain, finally |
The reunion circuit
From about 2001 onwards the festivals became the mechanism by which the reformations happened, and the logic is straightforward. A band who had not played for eight years could not book a tour, because no promoter would take the risk on unsold clubs. A festival could offer one guaranteed fee for one afternoon in front of a crowd who were already there.
That made reforming financially possible, and once a band had played three festivals and found that people turned up, a tour became bookable. Almost every reunion in this genre followed that sequence.
What it is like now
The circuit is the primary economy for heritage thrash and a significant one for the modern bands. A European summer contains enough festivals that a band can tour the continent playing almost nothing but them, and the fees are the difference between a viable career and a hobby.
The cost is a certain flattening. A band playing forty five minutes at four in the afternoon on a shared stage plays the same nine songs everywhere, and the deep catalogue disappears. That is a real complaint and it is considerably better than the alternative, which for fifteen years was nothing at all.
What those festivals made possible band by band is in The Best Thrash Albums of the 2020s, and the wider account is in The Fall and the Revival.
What a festival set does to a band
Worth describing, because it shapes how these bands sound now.
Forty five minutes, in daylight, on a shared backline, to a crowd where a substantial proportion are waiting for somebody else. That format rewards a specific kind of set: the famous songs, played fast, with minimal talking and no deep cuts, and every band who works the circuit has one.
The consequence is that a listener who has only seen these bands at festivals has heard the same nine songs from each. The club shows, where they exist, are a different proposition entirely, and anybody who cares about a particular band should try to catch one.
The American problem
The United States never developed an equivalent circuit at anything like the same scale, and the reasons are structural: distances, licensing, insurance costs and a live industry organised around touring rather than around destinations.
Maryland Deathfest is the closest analogue and it is a fraction of the size of a European festival. The practical result is that an American thrash band's income comes from touring clubs, which is harder, less lucrative and considerably more work than flying to Europe for a weekend in July.
That imbalance is now permanent, and it is why an American band from this genre will play more shows in Germany over a career than in most of their own country.
The reunion mechanism, spelled out
It is worth stating precisely, because it explains the shape of the last twenty five years of this genre.
A band who has not played for eight years cannot book a tour: no promoter will risk a month of unsold clubs on an unknown demand. A festival can offer a single guaranteed fee for a single afternoon in front of a crowd who have already bought their tickets for other reasons, which means the risk is zero for everybody.
So a reformed band plays three festivals, discovers whether anybody cares, and only then approaches a promoter about a tour with evidence in hand. Almost every reformation in this history followed exactly that sequence, and none of them would have been possible in a live economy built purely on clubs.
Sources and notes
Founding dates refer to the festivals' first editions under their current names; several have complicated histories as club events beforehand.
