I’m bummed I wasn’t at Maryland Deathfest this weekend. Blood Incantation doing their full cosmic Hubble-visualization set, Cattle Decapitation headlining an outdoor stage, Kreator playing deep cuts, Dying Fetus running through their first three albums — that’s four days of exactly what metal is supposed to be, and it’s 2,700 miles from where I live.
Maryland Deathfest XXI wrapped Memorial Day weekend (May 21–24) in Baltimore across five venues — Nevermore Hall, Baltimore Soundstage, Power Plant Live, Market Place, and Angel’s Rock Bar. Over 100 bands. Death metal, grindcore, black metal, doom, and the experimental fringes of all of it. Marduk dug into career rarities. Misery Index celebrated 25 years. On the festival’s final day, Solitude Aeturnus brought out Jason McMaster as a surprise guest vocalist. Recap content is going to start flooding in over the next few days and it’s going to be stellar.
LA doesn’t have this. We’ve had versions — Decibel Magazine’s Metal & Beer Fest brought solid lineups to the Wiltern in 2018 and the Observatory in 2019, came back to downtown LA in 2021, but it’s a smaller indoor format. California Deathfest exists. Sound and Fury lands at Exposition Park in August this year with a stacked bill — Obituary, Rival Mob, Carry On — but that’s two days and it skews hardcore. Nothing has stuck at the sustained, multi-stage, multi-day, outdoor-and-indoor scale that MDF operates at.
And it matters because MDF isn’t just a festival. It’s a temperature check on the underground — what’s actually moving, what’s being rediscovered, what acts deserve a bigger room. You don’t get that from a club run or a one-off touring package.
Keep an eye on recaps this week. And here’s to hoping somebody eventually builds an LA version of this that actually sticks.