Niels de Vries

Now you can start your Roadburn 2025 planning in earnest.

This information will illuminate your path through the festival… but trust us, we didn’t put that band on at that time just to spite you, we didn’t engineer these clashes to ruin your day. Travel plans, production needs and various other practical factors – as well as the overall flow of the day – determine these running orders.

So, print them out, scribble on them, highlight them, map out your days as you see fit.

In recent years Paradox Tilburg has been the spot to experience experimental and avant-garde music in an intimate setting on the Friday and Saturday of Roadburn. For the fourth year running, we’ve teamed up with this special, world-renowned jazz club to bring you:

40 Watt Sun  (solo)
Angles 9  – Death of Kalypso
Early Life Forms
Heavy Jazz Jam – hosted by Theo Holsheimer
ILL Considered
Under the Reefs Orchestra

Stay tuned for news on art exhibitions, the side programme – and yes –  the time schedules in the coming weeks. Tickets and info can be found over at Roadburn.com

Imagine this: It’s been a couple of days since Roadburn 2025. You are now back home and as you scroll through your socials you cherish the joy and love you find in the testimonials shared by other attendees – some of who you now might call friends. Do you feel connected? Do you feel supported? What is that feeling about?

More than just re-living performances through photos and reviews, is it the shared love of heaviness that deepens the community? Is it the unique environment brewed by the Roadburn team that make it feel like “home”? Or… something completely different?

This year we want to try to better understand the connections and experiences that make Roadburn what it is. Initiated by a fellow Roadburner with knowledge and experience of participatory heritage research and community archiving.

Share your Roadburn history
As hosts of the Reinwardt Academy-project ‘Archiving Heaviness’, we invite all who relate to Roadburn –  in whatever way – to take part in building a living archive together – starting at Roadburn 2025.

Think about your first Roadburn. Think about your last Roadburn. Think about performances, relationships and experiences that stood out for you and consider why that was. Zoom out and think about what attending has meant for you and your friends. Zoom back in and find that one special moment.

Whilst much of the magic of Roadburn may exist in an intangible form, for this project we’d like to assemble a collection of tangible pieces that represent all that is so hard to put in to words about the Roadburn experience. Fabric, paper or otherwise. Have you kept mementos or trinkets that remind you of your Roadburn adventures?

For all four days of Roadburn 2025, we will have a dedicated space at the 013 to:

• Present your stories in a collective way
• Exhibit your Roadburn treasures in a participatory pop-up exhibition
• Collect more stories and objects as they emerge from the festival itself

Are you ready to share a story? Thinking about bringing an object to the pop-up exhibition? Fill in this Archiving Heaviness Intake Form. As the festival approaches, we will get back to you with an update and practical information. Rest assured each object will be handled with care, given a unique ID number, and stored securely whilst away from its owner.

Want to know more?
You might be reading all this and finding yourself wanting to know more about this project, its approach, the research behind it, or just want to satisfy your curiosity. Check out the project website page here

Project leader Jonathan Even-Zohar (Reinwardt Academy and long-term Roadburn-goer) is very happy to answer questions via jonathan.even-zohar@ahk.nl

Archiving Heaviness is a collaboration between Roadburn, the Reinwardt Academy and Podiumkunst.net

We are extremely honoured to announce a special performance by Frente Abierto at Roadburn 2025. When Roadburn’s artistic director, Walter, saw the Spanish group at Le Guess Who? in Utrecht last November and also later had the opportunity of hearing their forthcoming debut album in advance, he knew their fiery mix between heavy rock and flamenco was perfect for Roadburn.

Frente Abierto are a collective of Andalusian musicians, led by Marco Serrato (Orthodox, Altair) and featuring ambient musician David Cordero and lauded guitarist Raúl Cantizano. Accompanying them for their incandescent live shows is a varying cast of the most inspiring voices of contemporary flamenco – at Roadburn, we will have the pleasure of hosting Sebastián Cruz and Lela Soto. Together, they become living proof that even today there are still unexplored connections between musical worlds, just waiting for someone with the right talent and courage to brave those unknown territories.

Though flamenco and the metal and heavy rock that have been the backbone of Roadburn might seem to be completely separate universes, they can merge seamlessly. Marco previously performed at Roadburn back in 2007 with Orthodox; Walter comments:
“I have always kept Marco Serrato and his music on my radar. The moment I realized he was involved in Frente Abierto and it became clear that the project and Roadburn had so much in common, artistically and creatively – it was a no brainer to invite them to play the festival.”

Marco adds:

“It is a privilege to be able to return to Roadburn after 18 years, with this new project where we have been able to take some of the essential elements of Orthodox to a level that at that time we had not even been able to conceive.”

Flamenco has always been an artistic expression of the underprivileged and oppressed. Its origins lie within the Gitano subculture of the Spanish region of Andalusia, itself a place with a unique identity influenced by Moorish and Jewish communities. Its themes have historically manifested the difficulties of lives led in poverty, typically associated with the Gitanos, becoming a crucial tool of cultural dissent for many outcasts and misfits for over two centuries. Traditionally, lyrics showcase not only the common themes of love and death but also the hardships of life led as an outcast. The roots of such struggles are well documented in music across many genres but within Frente Abierto’s work they’re presented in a unique way.

At its core, Frente Abierto embodies everything we imagine when we use the phrase “redefining heaviness”. They’ve found a way to capture the emotional weight we’ve always known and loved in our established genres and embellish it with something that is distinctively theirs. We are looking forward to welcoming Frente Abierto as a decisive centrepiece of this year’s festival.

It’s getting close! With less than 80 days to go until Roadburn 2025 kicks off, we can sense the anticipation all around us and we love seeing everyone getting really excited. We have added the last inspirational and essential artists that have made the bill feel complete, and now with almost all of the puzzle pieces in place, we are extremely happy to see our hard work coming to fruition. We hope that you will have a lot of fun discovering all the gems in the lineup and start getting those pre-Roadburn butterflies in your stomach already.

P.S. Fear not! Paradox, the renowned jazz club, will once again be a part of Roadburn. The lineup for Friday and Saturday will be announced a few weeks from now.

The latest additions to Roadburn 2025 are as follows:

• Alora Crucible will perform a set of their classical-meets-new age sonic explorations
• Bo Ningen return to Roadburn for a main stage performance of their 2012 album Line The Wall
• Bacht’n de Vulle Moane bring their raw black metal and analog synths to Roadburn
• Genital Shame will make their maiden voyage to Europe for their Roadburn debut
• Grey Aura return to present their new album Zwart vierkant: Slotstuk, in full.
• Kuunatic introduce Japanese tribal psych to Tilburg
• Mong Tong weave together sounds from South-East Asia with more traditional psych motifs from the 60s and 70s creating something fresh and otherworldly
• Morvigor combine the cinematic possibilities of prog and post-metal with expressive black metal.
• Penelope Trappes delivers atmospheric soundscapes and evocative poetry
• Silver Knife are a mysterious entity delivering full-force underground black metal
• Throwing Bricks and Ontaard join forces for a commissioned project that showcases the best of the Dutch underground.
• Toby Driver will perform his lush and voluminous solo material.