Welcome to a new year with COPENHELL! The completely sold-out festival celebrated its 10-year birthday here in 2019 with lots of flames, beer and great music. We are immensely proud to present the first bands for COPENHELL 2020 today ' and not least a whole new stage!

"Throughout the last ten years, COPENHELL has placed itself in the top of not only the Danish, but also the European festival landscape, and people expect a lot from us. In 2020, we will open up a fourth stage which allows to add even more bands to the poster and offer our audience an even more diverse and comprehensive music line-up. The new stage also allows us to focus even more on the growth layer with the hard and heavy music genres both in and outside Denmark and strengthens the festival's balance between the great and famous bands and the smaller and less known ones," says festival manager Jeppe Nissen.

The kings of 'heavy fucking metal', JUDAS PRIEST, will revisit COPENHELL in 2020. Festival veterans will no doubt remember the band's formidable 2011 concert, and Robert Halford & co. have only become even better during the years since then. The brave Brits have toured together for half a lifetime and judging from their most recent concerts, they are nowhere near done touring the world yet. The band themselves asked to play at COPENHELL again ' and we were only happy to accept. You can look forward to a great music experience ' You've got another thing comin'!

David Draiman's powerful, sonorous voice and an impressive array of catchy tunes are the primary ingredients in the great success that the popular metal band DISTURBED has enjoyed since the mid-nineties. A lot of us were "Down with the Sickness" around the turn of the century, and the band made a new breakthrough with their amazing version of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" in 2015. The band has been in extremely high demand by the COPENHELL audience, and we look forward to experiencing their special aggressive mix of alternative hard rock and nu metal for the first time at the festival next year!

Already in early August, COPENHELL made the world-first presentation of MERCYFUL FATE's reunion ' a bomb that exploded in the middle of summer holiday! The Danish (oc)cult band from the music wave that started everything back in the early eighties will finally enter the festival's main stage with the iconic King Diamond in front in 2020. This will be a spectacular, unmissable piece of music history for all metal fans.

Just like JUDAS PRIEST, the metal band KOЯN also performed at COPENHELL 2011 and they will also return to the festival next year! Everything is fucked up and filled with pent-up anger in the band's wild musical universe, which draws on everything from hip-hop to heavy metal. Their newest release, "The Nothing", shows a band at their absolute peak more than 25 years into their career. Their music is tight as hell, and lead singer Jonathan Davis' vocals are even more driven by his inner demons and existential pain than ever before.

You cannot talk about "the second wave" of black metal without mentioning EMPEROR from Norway. This band will visit COPENHELL in 2020 ' and we can't say if this is due to successful sacrifices from the black segment in our audience who has been asking for the band for years! The band's live performances are often described as much more than music: They create transformative art when front man Ihsahn sweeps the audience into a chaotic, horrifying vortex full of sinister sound and forbidden emotions. Inno a Satana!

The British metal titans from BENEDICTION have delivered perfect mid-tempo death metal for 30 years: A hard, bombastic sound wall only punctured by groovy guitar riffs that settle deeply within both your body and soul. The band's old front man Dave Ingram (who lives in Copenhagen, by the way) returned to the microphone earlier this year after 20 years of pursuing other music projects. The band is currently writing their first album in 11 years since "Killing Music" from 2008, and expectations are sky-high ' not least for their live performance at COPENHELL next year.

The southern Californian quartet OF MICE & MEN has been delivering explosive metal since their debut in 2010, which has sent them on the covers of metal magazines all over the world and on tours with several big names during the years. Their music is a heavy melting pot of everything from melodic metalcore to alternative rock. The band is famous for their formidable musical striking power during their concerts. The band gave everything they had when they visited COPENHELL in 2014, and we look forward to meeting them again in 2020.

The Danish extreme metal band XENOBLIGHT performed their hard and aggressive music so convincingly at last years' COPENHELL Metal Cruise that they secured themselves a spot at the festival in 2020. In only two years, this band has shot up from the dark Danish soil with a rarely seen speed and strength. Their music is fertilized with high quality and great interplay between the musicians ' and not least Marika Hyldmar's fascinating vocals, which move seamlessly around between high-pitched black metal screams and death growls all the way from the abyss below. Get ready for a band that will entertain you!

When you know that the power metal band GLORYHAMMER was started by the pirate captain Christopher Bowes from Alestorm, you also know that they don't take things very seriously. The band's albums circulate around a crazy galactic adventure driven by lots of ironic distance to their genre ' and it works! This is pure silliness combined with excellent musicianship and great entertainment value. We look forward to what will no doubt be one of the festival's biggest beer parties!

The Ukrainian group JINJER is currently climbing the metal heavyweight class, not least because of their charismatic and formidably skilled singer Tatiana Shmailyuk. The band's Opeth-inspired, hyper-technical groove metal creates the perfect foundation for her absolutely exceptional vocals, which change almost surrealistically between demonic growls, wild screams and beautiful clean singing. This will be a very special experience at COPENHELL.

DESTRUCTION plays good, old-fashioned thrash, and the third of the four German "Big Teutonic 4" bands will visit COPENHELL for the first time next year. The band's new 2019 release "Born to Perish" is a great return to the old virtues from the eighties, with catchy hooks and riffs delivered at turbo speed and lead singer Marcel "Schmier" Schirmer barking like a rabies-ridden dog above them. Get ready for high-caliber nostalgia when these veterans perform next year.

HIGH COMMAND plays music like others wage war: With a completely unstoppable and merciless offensive. The band's music is inspired by the wild barbarian hordes from Robert E. Howards "Conan" universe, and they invite their audience to ride with full speed into the darkness and fight the enemy together with them. This is oldschool crossover thrash with the brutality meter dialed all the way up into blood-red!

ORM stepped directly on to the Danish black metal scene with their rock-solid debut in 2017, and the follow-up from 2019, "Ir", has been praised by many as a modern Danish metal masterpiece. The album consists of only two songs of more than 20 minutes each, and the music is just as relentlessly hard and sharp as the granite stones on the Danish island of Bornholm that the band grew out of.

CRYPT SERMON entered the doom scene with their excellent debut "Out of the Garden" in 2015, and they are not afraid to experiment with genre boundaries. Here we get heavy, epic and melodic medieval atmosphere vibrating in the field between classic and progressive metal.

The Norwegian black metal band VREID rose from the ashes of the dissolved band Windir in 2004. Songs in both Norwegian and English whirl around in a chaotic and destructive soundscape that draws upon several sources outside of the genre, and the audience can look forward to some heavy black'n'roll!

Many more bands will be announced continuously, and with the new fourth stage COPENHELL can present more than 60 bands next summer!

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