Rock am Ring, June 2024

I had not been to Rock am Ring before, but a few friends wanted to go this year (particularly to see Avenged Sevenfold), and I knew that Kreator was coming; Kreator is one of my favourite bands, but I hadn’t seen them live before (beyond their Dying Alive live release). Luckily for all of us, both Kreator and Avenged Sevenfold were performing on the same day, so we only attended that one festival day (travelling with the shuttle bus). A nice experience overall.

Here’s a picture of the festival entrance.

We arrived at the festival around 4 p.m. or so, and Dropkick Murphys was the first band we could see. I don’t listen to them regularly, but I quite like Irish rock in general and some of their songs in particular, so I was happy to have the chance to see them live for once. They did not disappoint; it was a very fun concert.

Here are a few photos taken during their performance (since we arrived shortly before they started playing, we were a bit far from the stage, but it was still visible enough to really enjoy the atmosphere).

As I mentioned, Kreator was the main reason why I wanted to go to the festival this year, so I was super excited about the performance. My friends wanted to see another band at the same time, so I was here alone. I was super lucky that I was at the stage quite early, so I could get a spot in the second row, just to the right of the center of the stage. The concert was amazing; as energetic as I expected it to be.

After Kreator, we were briefly at the performance by Die Ärzte. This was clearly a highlight of the day for most of the visitors; it was super full, and we could only see the stage from very far. While it was nice to hear some of their older songs, the performance was accompanied by way too much talking for my liking, so we only stayed there for about half an hour or so.

The last band we saw was Avenged Sevenfold. My friends were very excited about this one; I am not really a fan, but I was still looking forward to an interesting live concert. Sadly, the sound engineer had done a pretty bad job here; the drums were deafeningly loud, and the singer could not be heard at all throughout the performance (this was the same stage where Kreator was and then another band after that; there were absolutely no issues in those performances). So, from a musical point of view, this was a pretty bad concert. Visually, it was really good though; what was shown on the big screens was fun to watch, as the musicians in the live stream were replaced by horror-like creatures (skeletons, zombies, things like that). A very neat use of AI in the entertainment industry.

Here are a couple of pictures of ongoing performances while waiting for Kreator and Avenged Sevenfold.