Wednesday begins with the kind of name that hardly needs introducing, but everyone still loves to introduce as if they invented heavy metal themselves: Iron Maiden.

There are bands that play concerts, and then there are bands that arrive like an international shipping company for mythology, merchandise and male youth that refuses to die. Maiden давно ago became bigger than metal. They are religion, machinery and family tradition in one and the same leather vest. Bruce Dickinson still flies, still runs, still shouts, and Eddie still appears like a hallucination from a teenage bedroom poster that has survived divorces, mortgages and bad knees.

For younger metal fans, Maiden may feel less brutal than Slipknot, Lorna Shore and all that modern breakdown chaos, where the drums sound like a printer being executed. But live, they are still one of the most iconic things you can experience. Not necessarily because they are the heaviest, but because it feels like standing in the middle of the genre’s own constitution.

Alice Cooper is Wednesday’s other big argument that age is only a problem if you don’t have enough snakes, guillotines and stage makeup. It probably shouldn’t still work. A man onstage like a retired horror host from hell, surrounded by props and rock theatre. But Cooper works because he never tries to be anything other than Alice Cooper. And that is, in fact, an underrated art form in an age when everyone else is trying to rebrand themselves every six months.

Tom Morello will probably be exactly what you hope for. Strange guitar magic, political statements and sounds that make the instrument behave like an angry fax machine with class consciousness. It may get messy. It almost has to get messy. Morello without the mess is like Rage Against the Machine without the machine.

Mastodon has also become one of those bands you forget have been around long enough to be veterans themselves. They started out as “the new exciting prog-metal band” and now stand there as a strange, heavy, highly skilled beast in the middle of the poster. Still massive. Still technical. Still with that feeling that every riff is built from stone and sleep deprivation.

And then there’s Konvent. If Maiden is the great communal mass, Konvent is the dark basement afterwards, where the lights flicker and someone forgot to say the party is over. Their doom is not just heavy. It lowers the body temperature. This is music that doesn’t move forward, but downward.

Suicidal Tendencies arrive with caps, skate energy and 80s chaos in a can. A band that is either the coolest thing in the world or completely inexplicable, depending on who you ask. And Mammoth, Wolfgang Van Halen’s project, becomes interesting precisely because the Van Halen name is both gift and curse. People are going to talk about the father. That is unavoidable. But the question is whether the songs can stand on their own once the family tree is packed away.

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Thursday smells like the day when the most people lose their voices and then call it an “experience.”

Bring Me the Horizon are the headliners, and if there is one band that can make old metalheads write novels in the comments, it’s them. They started in deathcore chaos and ended up as a kind of arena-metal mutant with electronics, pop hooks, breakdowns and emotional overproduction. It shouldn’t work. But often it does. Especially live.

BMTH have become the kind of band that no longer asks for permission to be metal. They just take the space. And maybe that’s why they still provoke people. They remind the genre that evolution doesn’t always look like graceful maturity. Sometimes it looks like a teenager with eyeliner, Auto-Tune and a stadium budget.

Papa Roach is Thursday at its most shameless. No one is going to claim it’s the most elegant booking on the poster. But if “Last Resort” starts up, Copenhell suddenly turns into a shared therapeutic karaoke machine with draft beer. And there is something beautiful in that. You can be ironic right up until the chorus. Then you’re just in it.

Ice Nine Kills look like a band invented by someone who watched too many slasher films in high school and never quite recovered. Blood, horror, theatre, knives, laughter, screams, the whole package. It’s ridiculous in exactly the way Copenhell is allowed to be ridiculous. The gimmick works because they understand that metal has always also been costume play for people who take emotions very seriously.

Sepultura is still a huge name, even if the story of the band almost always ends up being about the people who are no longer there. The Cavalera brothers are gone, yes. But the legacy is still standing. Groove metal, tribal heaviness, political anger, all the things that made the 90s sound like the world was being pulled apart with an angle grinder.

Rival Sons keep the classic rock torch burning without smelling too much like a museum, Queensrÿche still sound like something that should be playing in a rain-soaked cyberpunk film from 1989, and Static-X are pure nu-metal nostalgia with a masked frontman and a strange resurrection energy. It’s a little wrong. It’s also pretty right.

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Friday is the day Twisted Sister got pulled from the poster, and Copenhell answered in the most Copenhell way possible: with Fifteen Years in Hell.

Not a normal replacement act, but a big anniversary show that sounds like a mix of Danish rock history, an internal Christmas lunch and a collective fever dream.

Tim Christensen, people from Pretty Maids, Bersærk and a larger crowd of guests gathered in one show could be absolutely fantastic or complete chaos. Probably both. And that is kind of the point.

A Perfect Circle are Friday’s strange, dark wildcard, where you never quite know whether you’re at a concert or in the middle of an expensive psychological experiment. Trivium deliver modern metal stability with thrash, metalcore and melody in disciplined balance, while Anthrax remain thrash’s old uncles, able to lift heavier than everyone else in the gym.

P.O.D. are the kind of booking people laugh at first and then end up singing along to anyway. And Soilwork provide Swedish melodic death metal that makes the body nod in time, even when it should be lying in the shade with fries and rehydrating.

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Saturday will be the day when the most people say, “I’m not really a Volbeat fan,” right before they see Volbeat in front of thousands of people.

And that is Volbeat. Denmark’s biggest rock and metal export, no matter how many memes the internet makes. They’re easy to tease because they’re so recognisable. Elvis vocals, rockabilly riffs, arena-sized choruses, the great popular compromise of the leather vest. But live, it works. Even the sceptics end up standing there looking like people who have lost a principled argument with a bass drum.

Social Distortion bring American working-class punk and biker romance onto the grounds. It’s old in the good way. Not old as in tired. Old as in oil on the hands, bad decisions and a voice that has smoked more than the health authorities would recommend.

Saxon are pure New Wave of British Heavy Metal history. The kind of band where you’re almost impressed they still exist, right up until they walk onstage and remind you why. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s craftsmanship, stubbornness and denim as a life philosophy.

And then Saturday also carries that special Copenhell feeling that everyone is starting to run on empty, but no one wants to admit it. That’s the point where the dust has settled into your skin, your phone is at 12 percent, and you start wondering whether you’ve actually become friends with a man from Horsens because you both shouted along to the same riff.

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Reflection

Copenhell 2026 does not look like a festival trying to be elegant. Luckily. It is trying to be big, hard, silly, nostalgic, modern and slightly overwhelming all at once. That is exactly why it works. Because metal is rarely one thing. It is Iron Maiden as church, Bring Me the Horizon as a generational war, Twisted Sister as mascara rebellion and Volbeat as national self-deception with singalongs.

Let’s put it like this: you don’t have to love the whole poster. You just have to find the spot on Refshaleøen where your own bad taste suddenly feels like community.

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