Qualla: Roadburn Festival

Roadburn Festival: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mamelukkikala, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tickets vanish in minutes. Sometimes in seconds. Three quarters of the audience has flown in from outside the Netherlands, some of them from California or Tokyo, to spend four April days inside a converted Tilburg concert venue listening to doom metal, drone, sludge, post-rock, dark folk, and music that has not yet been given a genre name. Roadburn is not a festival in the ordinary sense. It is, as its founder Walter Hoeijmakers prefers to call it, a redefinition of heaviness, and the audience treats his curation the way other audiences treat the work of a favorite director.

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Mamelukkikala | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roadburn Festival: From Blog to Mecca

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Astrid Tonella, CC BY-SA 2.0. It began as a website. In 1999, Walter Hoeijmakers and Jurgen van den Brand were running a blog about stoner rock, the desert-fuzz heavy music that bands like Kyuss and Fu Manchu had grown out of the American Southwest. The blog was called Roadburn. They started promoting concert...

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Astrid Tonella | CC BY-SA 2.0

Roadburn Festival: The 013 and Its Annual Ritual

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cavemandan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Since 2005 Roadburn has lived inside Tilburg's 013 concert hall, with overflow rooms at Het Patronaat and a smaller venue called V39 added as needed. The festival became multi-day in 2006, expanded to four days in 2008, and quickly began selling out within an hour. The 013 holds ...

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Cavemandan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roadburn Festival: The Curators

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grywnn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every year, Roadburn invites a guest curator. Sunn O))) did it in 2011. Voivod in 2012. Tom G Warrior of Celtic Frost and Triptykon shaped Friday 2010 around death and ritual. Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth chose the 2014 lineup. Jacob Bannon of Converge made 2018 a Converge retrospec...

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Grywnn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Roadburn Festival: Heaviness, Redefined

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cavemandan, CC BY-SA 3.0. The genres on a Roadburn poster do not fit on a poster. Doom metal sits beside Irish folk, then dark ambient, then a Konnakol-influenced classical piece, then drone, then noise rap. The 2024 headliners included The Jesus and Mary Chain, the Irish folk band Lankum, the rappers Cli...

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Cavemandan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roadburn Festival: Four Days, One Tilburg

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergé Technau, CC BY-SA 4.0. For one weekend each April, the Old Dutch wool city becomes the unlikely capital of adventurous heavy music. The 013's neon glows over the canal-side Spoorzone neighborhood. Distorted bass shakes the cafe windows on Veemarktstraat. Tickets to next year's festival go on sale, in t...

Read more: Roadburn Festival on Qualla

Image: Sergé Technau | CC BY-SA 4.0