Electric Callboy at Roskilde Festival 2025

Electric Callboy is no longer a niche phenomenon. They’ve sold out Royal Arena. They’ve played Copenhell. They have internet culture behind them and merch with flashing LED glasses. They are something. But what that something actually is remained pretty unclear at Roskilde Festival.

It felt as if the band themselves had forgotten what they wanted to be. A show that, on paper, should have been a party felt like an identity crisis with confetti. They opened with energy, but it was awkward energy — like a bachelor party with too many themes. Genres, screams and autotune were thrown around, all wrapped in ironic distance, as if they hoped we wouldn’t take them too seriously if things went wrong. And, well, they kind of did.

Musically, it never got heavy enough to hit the metal crowd, and it never got catchy or kitschy enough to become a proper party show. They hovered in the middle, in a strange genre limbo, where you just stood waiting for it all to turn into something. Above all, they seemed like a band enjoying themselves more than the audience did.

The crowd was ready, though. Cheers went up, horns were thrown in the air, and you could feel that plenty of people in the crowd had been looking forward to this. But the energy drained away quickly. It’s hard to keep the pot boiling when the hob keeps being switched off and on again.

At one point it felt as if they were trying some kind of EDM/metal throwback mashup, but it mostly came across as a bad joke without a punchline. One song felt like a Eurodance parody from the 2000s, another like Linkin Park with ADHD. The only thing you couldn’t call it was cohesive.

The stage show? Well, there were lights and smoke. But even that felt uninventive. No wild visuals, no moment where you thought wow. The whole thing felt like a band playing to a TikTok trend that had died two weeks earlier.

Maybe it all would have worked better at Royal Arena, where the audience comes for them — and not just drifts past with a beer and a “let’s see something fun” attitude. At Roskilde, the concert just ended up feeling like a strange interlude. Not enough party, not enough musical bite, and too much attitude without substance.

Reflection:

Electric Callboy may be a symptom of the times: everything is mixed, ironic, overproduced and self-aware. And that can be great. Just not here. Not in this setup. At Roskilde, you need to bring the crowd together, not confuse them with TikTok-core and joke metal without an anchor.