Three nights at Eindhoven Metal Meeting

By now the Effenaar’s stairwell feels like muscle memory. I’ve shot this festival enough times that I know which corner of the main hall the light falls right, which stage door the smokers prop open, and roughly how the weekend will dismantle me. The warm-up night is supposed to be the gentle one. It never is.

Groza opened to a room still shaking off the cold, and within twenty minutes the careful distance I keep behind the barrier had collapsed into the usual thing — half photographer, half congregation. That’s the trouble with EMM. It books bands you came to document and then makes you forget the camera’s in your hands. The Spirit, Ante-Inferno and Antikvlt swept the rest of the warm-up into one long dark exhale.

Friday

Triptykon

Tom G. Warrior doesn’t perform so much as preside. There’s a stillness to how he holds the stage that the photos kept wanting to flatten — I shot two hundred frames chasing the one where the weight of it actually reads. This is the one. The red wash on Friday’s main stage did half the work; I just had to not get in its way.

Early doors belonged to Sinister and Massacre, all blunt force and no ceremony. By the time Hypocrisy hit the main stage the room had filled to the back wall, and …And Oceans, Ancient and Endstille carried the second stage deep into the night while I rationed what was left of my legs.

Thirty-one bands in, the line between devotion and exhaustion stops mattering.

Saturday

Possessed & the ghost of ‘85

You don’t get many chances to photograph the people who literally named the genre. Becerra held court from the chair, voice intact, and the crowd treated every song like scripture. A few feet to my left a kid who couldn’t have been twenty was mouthing every word to The Exorcist. That’s the photo I’ll remember even if it isn’t the sharpest.

Terrorizer — World Downfall in full

Terrorizer stepped in for the night’s billed slot and played World Downfall end to end — the kind of substitution that turns into the story of the weekend rather than a footnote. By the time it ended, Saturday’s beer math had stopped being math.

Gorgoroth took the centerpiece slot exactly as you’d want them to: lit in nothing but red, framed like an altarpiece. Batushka, Tribulation, Absu, Mörk Gryning and the deeper undercard filled every gap until last chord — all of them in the gallery below, because I shoot every band, and they all earned the frame.