It felt like someone had thrown Italo Brothers, goofy Melodi Grand Prix metal and a Rammstein-lite aesthetic into a Temu blender with the lid off. Everything was flying around, but nothing really landed. Mostly I just stood there thinking: who exactly is this for?
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Electric Callboy are 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 was as if the band themselves had forgotten what they wanted. 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 stag do 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. There were cheers and horns in the air, and you could feel that plenty of people had been looking forward to it. 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 like they were trying some kind of EDM/metal throwback mashup, but it mostly came off like a bad joke without a punchline. One track felt like a parody of 00s eurodance, another like Linkin Park with ADHD. The only thing you couldn’t call it was cohesive.
The stage show? Well, there was light and smoke. But even that felt unimaginative. No wild visuals, no moment where you thought wow. It all seemed like a band playing to a TikTok trend that had died two weeks earlier.
Maybe it 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 felt 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. But not here. Not in this setup. At Roskilde, you need to bring people together, not confuse them with TikTok-core and joke metal without an anchor.
