Month: March 2019

The scrappy upstarts from Warrnambool – a country town about 3 hours from Melbourne, announced their arrival with 2007’s ‘Runnin’ Wild’, one of the most talked-about and best-reviewed debuts in recent hard rock history. Metal Hammer handed them a Golden Gods Award for Best Debut Album and Classic Rock rightly hailed them Best New Band. Airbourne further marked their territory with the jaw-dropping follow up ‘No Guts. No Glory’ cracking the Top 40 in the UK, the Top 20 in Australia and Billboard’s Top 200.

Since first bursting out of the UK pub scene in 2012, Slaves have gone onto become of the UK’s most ferocious live bands, and their brand of high-energy punk rock has won them fans worldwide everywhere from Melbourne to Moscow. Fresh from the release of their critically acclaimed third album, Acts of Fear and Love, Isaac Holman (drums, vocals) and Laurie Vincent (guitar, vocals) are bringing their anthemic new songs to people, smashing up festival stages and venues alike in a joyous, celebration of big riffs, big beats and even bigger choruses. You owe it to yourself to see this band.

Baltimore co-ed feminist hardcore-punk band War On Women were born screaming at the world, formed in 2011 from a solid foundation of driving riffs and in your face vocals that attack the listener both sonically […]

There are few heavy metal bands that have managed to scale the heights that Judas Priest have during their 40-year career. Formed in the early ’70s in Birmingham, England, Priest were one of the first metal bands to exclusively wear leather and studs – a look that began during this era and would eventually be embraced by metal heads throughout the world. JUDAS PRIEST went on to change the face of heavy metal.

Ghost are a Grammy® Award-winning rock band from Linköping, Sweden. The bands critically acclaimed third full length, Meliora and its accompanying EP Popestar, elevated the Swedish rock band into the pantheon of rock greats and resulted in a Grammy Award for ‘Best Metal Performance’.

It’s rare that a career gets a second shot, let alone a whole second act, but then Anthrax isn’t your average band. Formed in New York in 1981, the group that would go on to sell over ten million records and become the living embodiment of America’s hi-top wearing, riff-spitting, ear-thrashing answer to the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal has undergone not one, but two complete eras – but that isn’t their real achievement.

Polish death metal band Behemoth are no strangers to blasphemy. Over the course of the last 27 years, they’ve pushed the boundaries of black metal and heresy alike. Behemoth have been pivotal in the establishment of the Polish extreme underground metal scene. Time and again, the government of their native Poland has charged them with various “crimes” such as tearing up a bible onstage in 2007 and using the Polish coat of arms on a Behemoth t-shirt in 2017. We welcome their sacrilege with open arms to Download 2019!

For 18 years, Rise Against has kept their moral compass steady, using their international punk platform to speak out for social justice. After two successful underground releases, 2001’s ‘The Unraveling’ and 2003’s ‘Revolutions per Minute’, the activist, straight edge, vegetarians catapulted into the mainstream with 2004’s ‘Siren Song of the Counter Culture’ and have never looked back!

Download Festival 2018 was the first on Aussie shores and had one date in Melbourne. Organisers expanded the festival for 2019, taking it to Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse and Sydney’s Parramatta Park in March.