Hoots! The warriors of Gloryhammer were ready to battle! They are always in style, which is great. They dress like the heroes or anti hero that they tell stories about in their albums. The setlist does change a little, but very little. Which leads to always the same stuff. The opening track is always Delilah by Tom Jones with a cardboard cut-out of Tom Jones on stage, which is very funny the first time, but not the 5th time. It just gets a bit repetitive. So even though they are one of my top favourite bands and I love seeing them live, this performance didn’t do it for me. They played great but it was the same again. This time, Zargothrax played the guitar instead of the keyboard though.

Falling in Reverse has so many different sides. They have songs that lean heavy into the rap genre, they have heavy metal songs, country metal, breakdowns, poppy sounding songs, they have it all. I’m more a fan of the heavy metal songs, where they also played some of, but also a lot of other songs which were less of my cup of tea. Nevertheless, their show was great quality and I’m sure that all the people in the front row loved it. I didn’t watch all of it and went to Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

This was great fun, really. More than I expected. Me First & The Gimme Gimmes are a punk rock supergroup and cover band that play well known songs in a rock or metal style. It’s just funny when you are going to get a beer and all of a sudden you end up singing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads‘ together with everybody in line. Me First & The Gimme Gimmes play the songs that you know but it’s never your genre. They take those well known songs and create one big party in the punk/rock/metal genre we love!

Skillet returned once again to the holy metal grounds of Graspop, but lead singer John Cooper seemed to be loosing his voice. Normally, his voice sounds clean and pure, but this time, it sounded very raspy. I almost dare to say unhealthy. It’s great that they want to bring their music to us and don’t want to cancel their show, but I hope he is okay and doing well. Drummer Jen Ledger sounded great. This created a bigger contrast between the two vocalist then when John‘s voice sounds clean too. Skillet mostly brought their greatest hits which were great to jump and scream along too. They played ‘Ash in the Wind‘ and ‘Showtime‘ for us from their latest album Revolution. It was the first time I heard these live which was nice, but again, John‘s voice really didn’t sound healthy. Skillet and Slipknot right after another was a very funny thing, as in Skillet is a religious band, and Slipknot definitely isn’t.

Slipknot always gets the crowd along and gives a great show, so was this show. They played all the classics you want to hear and other songs that we usually get to hear from them. It was the ninth time that Slipknot entered the festival grounds of Graspop. They were wearing new versions of old masks they had during different time periods. Even though we have heard their songs many times, Slipknot always gets everybody moving up and down. We know how the songs sound, and how the shows are, but subtle elements change and keep it entertaining, making the band always a worthy closer of the stage.