10 Undercard Acts You Shouldn't Sleep On

Blood Incantation make death metal with room in it for synthesizers, and they mean it: Tangerine Dream's Thorsten Quaeschning is one of the guests on Absolute Elsewhere, the Denver band's 2024 album. The record holds two pieces, "The Stargate" and "The Message," each about 20 minutes long, made at Berlin's Hansa Tonstudios with producer Arthur Rizk and released by Century Media on October 4, 2024. Metal Hammer named it the best metal album of that year. When the band played it start to finish in Brooklyn that November, the set moved from death metal into prog-rock drift and back without a seam. In early 2027 they open for Meshuggah on a tour that also carries Testament and routes through Sonic Temple, and all three play Thursday. That makes it the day for anyone who likes their metal long and odd.

Thursday's upper bill is turn-of-the-century punk and emo, with The Offspring, The All-American Rejects and Jimmy Eat World under Blink-182, and The Paradox are the day's newest band by a distance. Eric Dangerfield, Christopher "Xelan" Bernard, Donald Bryant and Percy "PC3" Crews formed in Atlanta in the summer of 2024: four young Black musicians playing pop-punk in a city better known for rap and R&B, which is a big part of how they present themselves. By the band's own count they passed 130,000 followers within three weeks of posting their first videos, and opening slots for Green Day and Jack White followed. In January 2026 "Get the Message," from their debut EP NSFW, reached No. 1 on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart; the Los Angeles Times noted they were the first all-Black band to top it. Travis Barker plays on their single "Bender," so their Thursday slot under his own band has a certain logic.

The only stoner-rock act on the bill comes from Bergen, Norway. Slomosa call their sound "tundra rock," which also became the title of their second album in September 2024: big, fuzzy grooves out of the desert-rock tradition, with some grunge in the hooks. Tundra Rock won Rock Album of the Year at Norway's Spellemann awards in April 2025. They've toured North America with Helmet, who play Sunday, and Columbus has already had a look at them: their first U.S. headline tour, the Breaking Ice run in spring 2026, played A&R Music Bar on April 30. A band that headlined a Columbus club a year earlier comes back to play the stadium grounds.

Screen composers rarely turn up on metal posters, and this one is billed by the festival as "The Legendary Composer." Bear McCreary wrote the music for Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, Outlander, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and the God of War games, and won an Emmy for his Da Vinci's Demons theme. Plenty of people on Friday will know his music without knowing his name. The reason he's on a rock bill is that he went and made rock records. The Singularity, in 2024, was a hard rock concept album that came with a graphic novel and a live show, with Serj Tankian and Corey Taylor among the guests. The sequel, The Singularity: Ekleipsis, was announced for July 31, 2026 on Sparks & Shadows with Patrick Stump and Meshuggah's Jens Kidman on the guest list, ahead of a September run of West Coast club dates from Portland to Las Vegas.

The one metalcore pick here is also the act least like the rest of that crowded field. HANABIE. call what they do Harajuku-core, after Tokyo's youth culture and fashion district: metalcore and groove metal crossed with hyperpop and vocaloid. Vocalist Yukina, guitarist and vocalist Matsuri and bassist Hettsu met at an all-girls junior school and started out covering Maximum the Hormone in music class; Chika plays drums. After Girl's Reform Manifest (2021) and Reborn Superstar! (2023), their first shows outside Japan included Louder Than Life and Aftershock, two of the other festivals Danny Wimmer Presents runs alongside Sonic Temple. Revolver noted they'd been championed by Limp Bizkit, Slash and Bring Me the Horizon. They played Wacken Open Air in 2025, and the five-track HOT TOPIC EP, opening with "ICONIC," followed in January 2026.

One of three acts on the bill tagged electronic, and the only one in the undercard. Carpenter Brut is French producer Franck Hueso, and his style, darksynth, sounds like a 1980s horror score turned up to metal volume. He has spent close to a decade on one story. Leather Teeth (2018), Leather Terror (2022) and Leather Temple (February 2026) follow Bret Halford, a picked-on American teenager whose revenge on the cheerleader who mocked him ends, by the third album, in 2077 with his return as a half-machine weapon. Each record is written as the soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist. Hueso has said the first was meant to be the softer, more glamorous entry, with the real darkness saved for later, which means the trilogy's heaviest chapter is the one he's touring now. Saturday also has The Prodigy, so anyone who came for electronic music with a metal crowd's volume has two sets to plan around.

The first of two Ohio picks. Midnight is one person in the studio: Athenar started it as a solo outlet in Cleveland in 2003 and is still its only permanent member, writing and recording the music himself and taking it on the road with hooded live players. The sound mixes first-wave black metal, speed metal and the new wave of British heavy metal with a lot of punk attitude. Satanic Royalty, the 2011 debut, is still the record people bring up; one review at the time said Midnight "make music to start fights to." For that album's 15th anniversary in 2026 he took the band on a world tour, including fall North American dates supporting GWAR, who are on this same Saturday bill. The 2025 album Steel, Rust and Disgust includes a single called "Cleveland Metal," in case the hometown loyalty needed spelling out.

Nailbomb was never meant to be a band. In Arizona in the early '90s, Max Cavalera, then fronting Sepultura, and Fudge Tunnel's Alex Newport started swapping riffs, and Roadrunner released the result, Point Blank, in 1994: drum machines, Iggor Cavalera on six songs, and homemade samples that included baseball bats hitting an old washing machine and a Camaro braking at 80 miles an hour. The only real shows came in 1995, a club warm-up and Dynamo Open Air in the Netherlands. Newport hated touring, and that was that. Then in November 2024 Nailbomb played for the first time in 29 years, in Tempe, with Max's son Igor Amadeus Cavalera covering Newport's parts. European festivals followed in 2025, and in fall 2026 they toured the U.S. supporting Soulfly, the band Max started after leaving Sepultura, who also play Sunday. For three decades this record was something you could only hear at home.

The only undercard act tagged punk, and the tag undersells it. Ho99o9 are theOGM and Eaddy, a duo that came out of New Jersey and now works out of Los Angeles, splicing hardcore punk, rap and industrial noise. Their 2022 album SKIN was produced by Travis Barker and has a Corey Taylor guest spot. Tomorrow We Escape, their third album, came out on Last Gang Records in September 2025 with Chelsea Wolfe on "Immortal," Greg Puciato on "Tapeworm" and Nova Twins and Pink Siifu on "Incline." It runs from a protest song called "LA Riots" to a closer called "Godflesh," and ReGen Magazine called it their best album yet. The singles "Power In Numbers" and "War Bait" followed in 2026. Sunday leans on nu-metal, with Korn on top and Snot, Spineshank and Dry Kill Logic further down; Ho99o9 are the set that sounds like none of it.

The second Ohio pick, and the one that's easy to forget is from here. Matt Thiessen, Matt Hoopes and Brian Pittman started Relient K as high school students in Canton in 1998 and named it after Hoopes' car, a Plymouth Reliant K, with the spelling bent. Gotee, the Christian label, released the early records, and pop-punk fans found them through The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001), Two Lefts Don't Make a Right...But Three Do (2003) and Mmhmm (2004), the album with "Be My Escape." Capitol took them to a wider audience around 2007's Five Score and Seven Years Ago. These days they come out selectively: in 2025 a secret show at Brown's Diner in Nashville and a return to the Alive Music Festival at Atwood Lake Park in northeast Ohio. Sonic Temple bills their Sunday set as a rare show, and it's about as close to a home crowd as this bill gets.