Limp Bizkit settle a 23-year debt, Linkin Park return to where they last stood with Chester, and Donington bakes under three days of freak sunshine on the UK’s biggest stage to celebrate one of the best renditions of Download Festival!
Words & header photo by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc), photos by Josephine Best (@josephinexbest) & Download Festival
Right then. Download Festival 2026. Limp Bizkit. Guns N’ Roses. Linkin Park. Even typing that sentence still feels like something I would have scribbled onto my notepad back at school as I daydreamed about who might be playing Download Festival. After three days of surprisingly brilliant sunshine, the spiritual home of rock and metal delivered one of its best weekends in years! The Apex Stage got a bloody banging upgrade and the Opus, Avalanche and Dogtooth all saw some of the most cracking sets we’ve seen from some bands so far! With a 95,000-capacity sold-out site and too many camping chairs to count, this was definitely a weekend that’s going to leave some lasting memories. So grab the aftersun, crack something cold, and let’s get into it.
Friday
If you’ve been following us as of late then you know we’ve been hyping up Native James for some time now. So what better way to kick off the weekend than at the Avalanche Stage to see (let’s be frank) one of the most bloody banging sets of the weekend! Seriously, this was a set that wouldn’t feel out of place over on Apex, yet the intimate stage made for a truly unforgettable moment for both Native James and all of us punters in the crowd. We’ll be upfront: we’re biased here, and we don’t care. Back in April we caught AJ supporting Enter Shikari at a sold-out Haggerston Brew, shot the photos, sat down for the interview, and left the venue with our jaws somewhere near Hackney Road. He told us ahead of Download: “I don’t just want to play Download. I want to play Download. Let’s make history. Welcome to the realm.” And that’s exactly what he delivered. FALLEN had the Avalanche tent in a pit inside 30 seconds, GTFU had it bouncing in unison, and the guest appearance from Frisco on unreleased track Never Been Scared followed by a closing cameo from Professor Green turned a debut into a proper event. That grin when he walked out said it all. He knew exactly what was in his sleeve.
Over on the Opus Stage, Paleface Swiss are doing what Paleface Swiss do: making the room feel considerably smaller than it actually is. Marc “Zelli” Zellweger tells the crowd they’ve been given one meal for the whole day and it was dinner, then channels every calorie of that grievance straight into the performance. If you checked out our ones to watch for Download we said they’d burn your face from your skull and that they most sentiently did. In the best possible way.
As we drift into the nu-metal-filled afternoon ahead of headliners P.O.D., Apex Stage arrivals don’t come much better. Hitting the stage early, the veterans delivered the kind of set that reminds you just how stacked their back catalogue really is. “This is the lion’s den over here. Lions only!” declared Sonny Sandoval, and a healthy crowd responded accordingly. Boom exploded with all the kerosene-soaked energy you’d want before mid-afternoon, Youth Of The Nation had fists pumping in earnest, and the dedication of Alive to guitarist Marcos Curiel’s newborn daughter turned the closing singalong into something unexpectedly moving. “I wish we had two more hours to play, but we’ll take what we can get,” smiled Sonny. Dark horse set of the weekend? Absolutely.
The curveball nobody saw coming. Pendulum come crashing onto the Apex Stage, arriving via a genuinely creepy puppet interlude nobody is ready for, then Propane Nightmares lands and all is forgiven and forgotten. The real moment, though, is forever side-questing Rou Reynolds of Enter Shikari bouncing on to deliver an absolute belter of a remix of Sorry You’re Not A Winner. Seriously chaps, when’s this one dropping? We need it asap. After their past few sets felt below par, this one is anything but; a focus on heavier, crunchier tracks finds Pendulum at full momentum and we’re here for it. As always though, it feels criminal to have this lot on an afternoon slot in the blazing sun. Please just give us an intimate tent set so those visuals can truly pop.
If Pendulum got the blood pumping, Electric Callboy turned the Apex Stage into their own private funhouse. We’d caught them doing this just a fortnight earlier at Rock im Park on home turf in Nuremberg, where they treated the Zeppelinfeld to a 75-minute cardio session with pyro, but there’s something about the Download crowd that pushes them into another gear. Shell suits that looked one errant pyrotechnic away from catastrophe. Boyband formations. Costume changes. Nico Sallach and Kevin Ratajczak bouncing off each other’s charisma while pyro fired up literally in front of them without so much as a quiver. Nobody parties like Castrop-Rauxel’s finest. Nobody.
Creeper on the Opus Stage were, as they always are at Download, completely in their element. Opener Mistress Of Death conjured instant singalongs, Headstones was a hot-blooded party starter, and Hannah Greenwood’s showcase on Razor Wire was genuinely spine-tingling. Guitarist Ian Miles headbanged so hard for stretches that the safest thing anyone could do was stand clear. The guillotine finale, William Von Ghould’s head dispatched by the Mistress of Death for the second festival in a row this summer, was the kind of committed theatrical nonsense that makes this band completely irreplaceable on a bill like this. “I promise you’re in safe hands,” Sam Carter said across the site about an hour later. Will might beg to differ. One helping wasn’t enough, mind: they were so good here that we happily went back for seconds when they returned with a second, completely distinct set over in the Dogtooth tent on Sunday. A band so nice we caught them twice. And if you missed both, there’s still time, because fresh off Download they’ve announced the Off With Their Heads! tour, its title lifted straight from that guillotine routine, with four special October shows built around the world of new album Sanguivore II: Mistress Of Death, a fresh stage production, and support from Calva Louise and Starbenders. On this evidence, just mind your neck.
Now let’s get to the big dawgs in the house. Fred Durst walks out in his now seemingly signature wig to a field that’s been a sea of backwards red caps and low-slung baggy jeans since lunchtime. Limp Bizkit fever has been the loudest thing on site all day, and twenty-three years after dropping out of the very first Download, they finally, properly, headline Donington. The wild part is how thoroughly they’ve earned it: their feral 2024 sub-headline slot pulled a denser crowd than that year’s actual headliners, which tells you everything about how completely the wind has swung back their way.
They know it, too, and they refuse to be rushed. The open is pure trolling, Wes Borland teasing Break Stuff before Durst yanks the plug, a cheeky lick of Ministry’s Thieves thrown in, then Break Stuff detonates for real and the field goes up. From there they could sprint hit to hit, but instead they cruise, padding the gaps with daft pop blasts over the PA and turning the whole thing into a victory lap rather than a set. Most bands couldn’t get away with that. This is precisely the band who can.
Durst dedicates the night to bassist Sam Rivers and close friend Dougie Miller at the top of the set, and again mid-show, the commemoration framing the whole thing less as mourning and more as celebration. “We are all here to celebrate life and celebrate music.” Rollin’, Nookie, Take A Look Around; freight trains, every one. Behind Blue Eyes turns into a call to crowdsurf for everyone they’ve lost, simultaneously sentimental and completely unhinged.
The one wobble isn’t theirs to own. A crowd injury near the end of My Way brings everything to a halt for a good ten minutes, a fan stretchered out, and Durst handles it about as gracefully as anyone could, watching on, talking the field through it, not filling the silence just to fill it. The second blast of Break Stuff that closes the night was never going to detonate quite as hard after a pause that long, but as a way to send 95,000 people home it’s bonkers in the only way Limp Bizkit know how. 95,000 people. Debt settled.
Saturday
Saturday belongs to the early risers, and Snot reward everyone who drags themselves out of a tent for an 11:55am Opus slot. Kicking off with their own self-titled calling card is exactly the right move, a shot of caffeine straight into a few thousand hungover heads, and a reminder that this lot carried real swagger as late-90s nu-metal contenders before tragedy cut the original run short. This is nostalgia with teeth rather than a lazy victory lap, and it’s easily one of the undercard highlights of the whole weekend. More bands should treat a noon slot like it matters this much.
South Arcade have the Apex Stage at 12:05pm and treat every second of it accordingly. Serving as the perfect Saturday morning remedy after Limp Bizkit, the Oxford quartet were more than prepared for this moment. Giant spraypaint cans puffing out clouds of smoke, searing blasts of pyro, Harmony going wild with a CO2 gun, and supersized songs from HOW 2 GET AWAY WITH MURDER through the sassy D.A.N.G.E.R to the electrifying 2005. The crowd fills faster than a 12:05pm slot has any right to expect, and by the time it’s done a significant portion of Donington has decided Saturday is going to be a very good day. They’re playing Brixton Academy next year without even having an album out. Something is very much happening here.
LANDMVRKS follow on the Apex Stage, flanked by two giant mermaid-like gargoyles, because why not, with enough flames around them to toast a month’s worth of marshmallows. Creatures makes for a pummelling opener, A Line In The Dust is a masterclass in controlled command, and Self Made Black Hole is a glass-gargling send-off that has the field fully convinced. “Merci beaucoup!” says vocalist Florent Salfati at the end.
Hot Milk are exactly what a sunny Saturday on the Avalanche Stage calls for. The Manchester four-piece, dual-fronted by Han Mee and Jim Shaw, treat the tent like a congregation, the two of them trading glances and aiming every line straight at the front rows. Swallow This and 90 Seconds To Midnight go off with everything they can throw at them, a cheerful “You look bloody gorgeous” gets sung straight back at the stage, and Party On My Deathbed sends everyone out buzzing. You always get the sense Hot Milk back themselves harder than anyone else in the room. On this evidence, the room is catching up fast.
Black Veil Brides arrived in the early afternoon with Vindicate barely a month old, Andy Biersack in peak showman mode and a grin that suggested he already knew this was going to be a good one. “I think this is my favourite Download yet!” he declared, and spent the set making a convincing case for it. Knives and Pens open and what a way to send us elder emos properly feral! The new cuts Bleeders, Hallelujah and Certainty sounded leaner and meaner than the band have in years, and In The End was a divine send-off designed to restart every cold, black heart in the field.
Over on the Avalanche Stage, Mouth Culture deliver everything we’d hoped for. The Leicester trio are about as close to a hometown act as this corner of Leicestershire gets, and frontman Jack Voss makes the most of it, opening with Ratbag before steadily unravelling into a scrappier, sweatier version of himself as the set wears on. Shirt off, a bottomless appetite for the pit, calling Downloaders “sexy motherfuckers” one minute and daring them to stop being pussies the next, and getting exactly what he asks for. This is a band who’ve spent the year quietly levelling up, from opening You Me At Six’s farewell run to festival slots that keep getting bigger, and Saturday feels like another rung climbed on purpose. It’s moody, synth-heavy, intricately built stuff, and the hooks lodge themselves and refuse to leave. Keep watching.
Now, as always with festivals, plenty can go right and wrong. Fortunately for As Everything Unfolds, it was firmly the former. Handed a late promotion up to the Opus Stage and a bumped-forward slot, they treat it as exactly the break it is. GASOLINE, Ultraviolet and the breakout that first put them on the map, On The Inside, all land with conviction. Charlie Rolfe remains one of the most naturally commanding vocalists in UK metalcore, full stop, the Opus Stage is absolutely rammed, and there’s real weight to watching her own a bigger platform barely two months after the band poured the grief of losing drummer Jamie Gowers into new album Did You Ask To Be Set Free? The white text on her skirt asks, “Do you believe in destiny?” By the end, it reads less like a question than a statement of fact.
Behemoth took the Opus Stage early evening and performed the kind of ritual that Download fields were built for. Odd as it is seeing them in daylight, they’ve gotten very good at it; Nergal’s eyes during the mighty singalong of Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer were those of a man focused entirely on domination, The Shit Ov God was delightfully wicked, and a riotous cover of Bathory’s The Return Of Darkness And Evil was the kind of bonus that makes an already great set excellent. This was a delightfully sinful experience that sent us into the evening.
Immediately after, Architects close out the Opus Stage under a gorgeous late-evening sky, and for a while it’s everything a stage-headline set should be. Opener Elegy is a gauntlet thrown down, Sam Carter prowling the boards and demanding the biggest nu-metal bounce Donington has ever managed during Whiplash, with Doomsday and Gravedigger swinging like wrecking balls behind him. Then it all goes sideways. The set is repeatedly halted on crowd-safety grounds, most painfully mid-Blackhole just as it’s building into something enormous. Carter walks off in visible frustration at the mixed messages coming through his in-ears, returns insisting he’ll be the only one calling any stoppages, and eventually even drummer Dan Searle comes out to plead with the crowd to look out for each other so the band can actually play. Through all of it the riffs stay disgustingly good, a guest turn from LANDMVRKS’ Florent Salfati lands beautifully, and Carter’s reflection on getting sober gives Broken Mirror real heft. That the chaos never quite tips into disaster is down to him alone, though it does raise the fair question others have asked too: have Architects simply outgrown this stage, or was the festival not ready for a band this ferocious in this spot? Crowdsurfing bananas get passed down the barrier during the longest pause, like kids snickering after a telling-off.
Guns N’ Roses top the Apex Stage for a third Donington headline turn, and across three hours and twenty minutes you get a set that lurches between genuinely transcendent and frankly a slog, more or less in equal measure. The opening salvo underwhelms: Welcome To The Jungle arrives more dutiful than dangerous, It’s So Easy lands like a B-side, and the early Mr Brownstone and You Could Be Mine feel road-worn from a band who’ve played these songs half to death lately. And then, somewhere in the back half, they remember who they are. November Rain, Sweet Child O’ Mine and a Paradise City finish pull 95,000 people into one voice. Axl, Slash and Duff properly locked in remains one of the great sights in rock, and the Nightrain singalong has the hill spilling over. An uneven night, then, but when it connects it connects like almost nothing else on the bill.
Sunday
Unpeople get the Sunday morning Apex opening slot and treat it like a statement of intent. You hear them before you see them, a swell of chants and screams rising from behind their banner, and then Jake Crawford bursts out suited and booted, bellowing “Wakey wakey!” at a field with no business being this awake this early. Fresh off announcing their debut album, lead single Clouds gets roared back as if it’s been a staple for years, Em Lodge anchoring the low end while Download supplies the lungs. We tagged them at Slam Dunk a few weeks ago as main-stage ready without a debut record to their name, and an hour into the morning on the biggest stage of the lot, that reads less like a punt than a prophecy. Less a band by the end than a movement picking up speed.
Not going to lie, by Sunday all I really needed was a Texan man barking at me, and Kublai Khan TX oblige in style. Running on barely any sleep and a late-night McDonald’s, Matt Honeycutt still somehow addresses Download like the most charming, chest-thumping gentleman in the field. Darwinism rattles skulls, the breakdowns drop like a skip being tipped, and Theory Of Mind makes for a closer far heavier than an early-afternoon slot has any right to be. “Yes ma’am.”
The Plot In You bring something genuinely different to an afternoon stacked with relentlessness. Where everyone else is chasing weight, Landon Tewers chases the raw nerve underneath it. He pares Divide and You Get One right back to its aching core, lets Left Behind crank the emotional voltage, then steers the lot into FEEL NOTHING, a closer that tips the tent clean over the edge into something bittersweet and genuinely moving. “This has been an absolute pleasure. It’s been a dream,” he tells Donington, and clearly means it. For a band trading in this much hurt, there’s a strange uplift in watching them land it on this many people. The Plot is only just getting going.
Røry has been one of our most championed names all year. We put her in the Bands You Can’t Miss piece with no caveat attached, just “honestly, go.” The Apex slot proves us right, and it’s one of the stranger routes to a main stage you’ll see: she built her following well outside the usual rock pipeline, partly through ADHD Love and her advocacy for neurodiverse people, and she hauls all of that up here rather than leaving it at the wings. She swings between laser focus and total emotional spillage, crouching at one point to take in the sheer weight of where she’s standing, using Sorry I’m Late to talk about the triumph of being a woman in her 40s on a stage like this, threading stories of grief, addiction and chasing a stubborn dream through the set until Blossom opens into the crescendo it was built for. One fist up, standing victorious. Every second of it earned.
Dogstar are the kind of leftfield booking that perfect festival programming is made of. Yes, that’s Keanu Reeves on bass, greying and bearded and annoyingly handsome, though he’s firmly a supporting player rather than the headline act, anchoring a Los Angeles alt-rock outfit that owes far more to Pearl Jam and Bush than anyone expected. Fresh off a Roundhouse show the night before, Runway and All In Now from their just-released fourth album slot neatly into a knackered Sunday afternoon. It isn’t flawless: a strange mix of crowd crush and idle curiosity flattens the atmosphere a touch, and plenty are here to gawp rather than listen. But the band carry a cool, unbothered confidence the rubberneckers didn’t see coming, and they’re all the better for it.
Thrown refuse to be upstaged even when a flight of Red Arrows screams up out of East Midlands Airport mid-set. Marcus Lundqvist clocks the jets, gives them half a beat of acknowledgement, then gets straight back to it. The Swedes are all blunt-force riffs, barked vocals and sweat-soaked chaos, parasite and guilt landing like cast-iron, debut single grayout still as bleakly funny in its greyness as the day it dropped. We tipped them in the preview as one of the most criminally overlooked names on the bill. Donington hands them their due in full.
The Pretty Reckless turn up with Taylor Momsen owning the runway from the first stride, working her mic like a wand and pulling screams out of the barrier with a grin. The songs do not miss: Going To Hell churns out riffs like industrial machinery, the newer material swaggers with proper doom-laden menace, and Heaven Knows and Take Me Down land like the modern classics they are. Nobody does arena-sized bluesy hard rock quite like this lot, a point we made catching them in the Rock im Park sun a fortnight ago, and on the Apex it holds. The one frustration is the crowd, or the lack of one. The field looks noticeably thinner than a band this good has any right to draw, and you find yourself wondering whether Sunday’s pit-hungry, horror-primed audience was quietly saving itself for Ice Nine Kills, or whether Momsen and co. would simply have felt more at home a day earlier, trading in the same classic-rock currency as Guns N’ Roses. None of it their fault. A supercharged, gritty, sexy set that deserved a great deal more bodies than it got.
As we descended into the final hours of the weekend Ice Nine Kills turn the Apex into a full horror film at five o’clock, early-evening sun glinting off an obscene amount of fake blood. Here’s my confession: I knew maybe a handful of these songs walking in, and it did not matter in the slightest. That’s the trick of this band. Every track is its own self-contained slasher, each one built around a film, so if you love horror and you love cinema you’re already fluent whether you know the words or not. Spencer Charnas runs the whole thing like the ringmaster of a haunted house, chainsaws roaring, pyro climbing, and the now-traditional bit where Download’s own dog mascot gets dragged into the bloodshed and gleefully dispatched onstage, the field howling with laughter rather than fear. Circle pits crack open, crowdsurfers pour over the barrier, and the people who only wandered in out of curiosity end up every bit as hooked as the die-hards. This is one of the most purely entertaining live propositions in heavy music right now, and the 2027 O2 date confirmed on a poster on site mid-weekend says everyone else has worked that out too.
Then comes the grand finale. The countdown. The teaser for Linkin Park‘s forthcoming film Unshatter plays before they appear, Mike Shinoda confessing in voiceover that the hardest part of ending is starting up again. The sky over Donington has turned dusty lilac and pink, near enough the cover of From Zero, as if the place already knew. The timer hits zero. Twelve years since they last stood here, fronted that night by Chester Bennington. Emily Armstrong walks out to The Emptiness Machine and becomes the first queer woman ever to headline Download in its 23 years, and the Apex sings the chorus back at her with a force that says whatever doubts trailed her appointment online have evaporated on contact.
We covered the Wembley show last July and called Armstrong a standout with a voice built for stages exactly this size. At Download it lands bigger still. Lying From You, Crawling and Somewhere I Belong carry the weight of two decades of other people’s lives, and the newer cuts mostly hold their own, even if one or two land a fraction cooler. Shinoda calls for an all-women pit during Two Faced to honour Emily, one of those moments you simply cannot manufacture, and a brief medical pause during One Step Closer (over a lost shoe no less) is handled without fuss before a stripped-back Lost resets the room. Then it’s pure detonation: What I’ve Done, Numb, Heavy Is The Crown, Bleed It Out, Papercut, In The End, the singalongs so vast they swallow the PA whole. By Faint, under falling confetti, 95,000 people have reached the same conclusion. The weekend’s defining set, done exactly right. Donington did what Donington always does.
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