Preview: Party.San Open Air 2025
There are festivals, and then there is Party.San Open Air—that perennial blight upon the Thuringian fields, returning every August like a plague upon the pious, armed with blastbeats, brimstone, and the sacred stench of death. What began as a rogue congregation of metalheads in 1996 has evolved into an institution: unapologetically extreme, fiercely curated, and wholly indifferent to trends. In 2025, the festival once again casts its grim shadow across Schlotheim, promising three days of obliteration in the blistering summer heat.
This year’s billing is a gauntlet thrown in the face of all that is sterile in modern metal. While others bow to algorithm and nostalgia, Party.San sharpens its knives on the raw edge of tradition, inviting only those who worship at the altar of the true. Among the desecrators chosen for 2025, several names loom like reapers above a corpse-strewn battlefield.
The Line-Up is cool and well curated, and here are our four highlights:
First and foremost: Bloodbath. Sweden’s finest purveyors of HM-2-drenched carnage return to reclaim their throne. With a discography as gnarled and grotesque as a graveyard tree, their legacy is unimpeachable. Whether it’s the cavernous rot of Nightmares Made Flesh or the blasphemous swagger of The Arrow of Satan Is Drawn, Bloodbath have always revelled in death metal’s most putrid glories. Expect no compromise, only corpsegrinding riffs and the sound of soil being shoveled over the living.
And where there is Bloodbath, there must be Grave—another cornerstone of Sweden’s death metal pantheon. With nearly four decades of subterranean warfare behind them, Grave’s continued presence is testament to the endurance of the old ways. The chainsaw tone, the sepulchral howls, the relentless battery: these are not artefacts of the past, but weapons still drawn and deadly. Their set will not be a reunion, nor a celebration—it will be a ritual.
From across the North Sea, Napalm Death arrive once more to burn the fields. What can be said that hasn’t already been screamed? As furious and relevant now as they were in the days of Thatcher and police batons, Napalm remain the conscience and chaos of grindcore. Armed with the venom of Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism and decades of righteous noise, their performance will be a fusillade of ideology and obliteration—an affront to apathy, a soundtrack to resistance.
Lastly, Mass Worship bring the new blood—the sound of post-apocalyptic collapse filtered through HM-2 distortion and urban dread. Their brand of monolithic death metal is as bleak as it is precise, fusing dissonance with groove in a way that speaks to modern despair without sacrificing heft. Don’t mistake their relative youth for weakness; Mass Worship are the soundtrack of a world in ruins, and they’ve come to add yours to the pile.
Party.San 2025 is a party – and it’s more: an endurance trial, a pilgrimage, a battlefield. For those who still believe in volume as sacrament and extremity as virtue, this is the place where faith is tested—and found worthy.
See you in the dust.
