“I will remember when ghosts were mighty, and I will laugh and catch my own tears.”
With ArcTanGent 2025 thoroughly enjoyed by our team, we decided to indulge ourselves and make our requests public before next year’s line up becomes finalised. So far the festival has announced a set of incredible names: near the top we’ve got heavy hitters from Igorr, Perturbator, Chat Pile and Alcest, all making returns to the festival as subheadliners. Oathbreaker is an especially exciting pick – nobody expected this seminal blackened gaze band would be reforming, but after the announcement that they’d be playing Roadburn 2026, surely every promoter was calling them up. TTNG are in the same category, an essential band of their genre and prime ArcTanGent material that many had started to count out, yet here they are on the poster. A few picks will be expected for fans of 2 Promoters 1 Pod (Dimscua and Overhead, The Albatross were practically booked from the stage), and a few more especially exciting bands we’ll pick out are BRUIT ≤, Psychonaut, Agent Fresco, HAAL, and Sans Froid.
At publication time (19th Nov), the festival are beginning to tease the next batch of bands, including the three headliners. However poorly it ages, we’ll keep our request list intact for posterity, and direct you to our coverage of additional confirmations.
Photography in this article by Kieran White – contact Kieran prior to any image use.
Múr
A band that is almost too perfect a fit for this festival, Múr from Iceland took Boolin Tunes by storm when we discovered their 2024 self-titled debut album earlier this year. Having already proven themselves on a mainstage at Incineration festival, pyro and all, Múr’s hypnotic blend of beautiful cinematic post metal and pulverising progressive death metal would be a surefire hit at ArcTanGent 2025. Led by the keytar wielding frontman Kari Haralds, his demonic growls will hopefully echo across the fields of Fernhill Farm next year.
The Acacia Strain
Before you scroll past this and ask why we’re suggesting beatdown veterans The Acacia Strain to play ArcTanGent, hear us out. In recent years The Acacia Strain have taken a much larger turn towards the doom metal genre than ever before, and this was made all more apparent by their recently released masterpiece You Are Safe From God Here. A harrowing, miserable album that alongside their usual beatdown fanfare is a sludgy, doom metal atmosphere looming above its head. With The Acacia Strain being more genre hopping than ever before, the idea of a more doom infused setlist from this band at ArcTanGent is something that excites us.
Arcane Roots
The absence of Arcane Roots since their split in 2018 was felt by all ArcTanGent-goers and fans alike. As of late, however, cryptic teasers and botted responses to comments on said teasers are leading us to believe that the british prog metallers are back with new music. Having played the festival at its very first iteration in 2013, and two other times in 2016 and 2018 (regular and electronic sets), they are a no-brainer for the festival if it’s true they have returned. For the fans who miss their synth-laden atmospheric strain of prog metal, we are so back.
maudlin of the Well
Visitors of ArcTanGent 2025 were met with the brutal clash between Clown Core, and Kayo Dot. For a lot of people the choice was obviously Clown Core, but the choice of Kayo Dot was also obvious for a very dedicated crowd inside the PX3 tent. But what if we go before Kayo Dot? The project that came before Kayo Dot, maudlin of the Well, are one of the most celebrated bands in the underground avant-garde metal scene and 2026 sees in important twenty fifth anniversaries of the seminal albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map. The concept of a potential reunion was discussed in our interview with Toby Driver ahead of last year’s festival, the short answer being ‘it could happen’. The oppressively weird and baffling song structures and soundscapes would be a perfect fit for ArcTanGent, and a much needed celebration of these important releases.
Agalloch
A band that surprisingly has never played the festival before since its inception, American extreme metal veterans Agalloch returned to the UK headlining this year’s Fortress festival after reuniting in 2023. Their progressive and avant-garde strain of folk metal, incorporating atmospheres from black metal and post metal, makes for an atmospheric melancholic journey that will give you chills. An anniversary Ashes Against the Grain in full set would be the perfect cooling pack for a hot summer festival. A few more atmospheric black metal acts which would be extremely timely (and sufficiently weird for ArcTanGent) would be Aquilus, Grima, Æl-Fierlen, and Outergods.
Forlorn
Southern UK act Forlorn came out of the gates stomping in 2025 with the release of their fantastic debut album Aether. The band seamlessly blends melancholic art, paganism, and pounding progressive metal to create a wholly unique, haunting folk horror sound. Recently supporting ArcTanGent alumni Ithaca at their final headline show, as well as selling out their Aether release show, Forlorn have proven themselves in the UK metal scene as a haunting and inevitable force that would be a great fit for the UK’s premier festival. They are well deserving of opening their circle on the biggest stages.
Sadness
A somewhat enigmatic solo project by Mexican musician Damián Antón-Ojeda which started as a solo DSBM project, has now blossomed into a live band with newer material now incorporating sounds of shoegaze, emo and post-rock. Having over sixty bodies of work to the projects name the band have an abundance of material that would be a great fit for ArcTanGent, the highlight inside the haystack being 2019’s ethereal masterpiece called Circle of Veins, an album filled with such atmospheric ecstasy and hypnotic dissonance between Antón-Ojeda’s distant screams and blissful walls of sound. An ArcTanGent festival appearance would be Sadness’ first time playing outside the US and Canada, and we couldn’t think of a better place to change that than the grounds of Fernhill Farm.
Portico Quartet
With Sungazer going down a treat at ArcTanGent 2025, the door is now open for jazz. Continuing to explore fusion feels like the best way to go, yet rock and metal fusions are thoroughly covered across the festival, so why not go electronic? Portico Quartet are known for shaping jazz into a new format that embraces cinematic synth and percussion, not to mention their signature instrument, the hang, which makes their sound instantly recognisable. Perhaps you could call them the 65daysofstatic of jazz (a reference that only ArcTanGent attendees will understand). The project isn’t playing many shows right now, but their last tour focused on a suite called Terrain, a three part epic that ought to satisfy those looking for something equal parts ambitious and ambient. Caveats aside, this is an example of an act that would expand ArcTanGent’s boundaries even further.
Holy Fawn
This is possibly our least ambitious (or most realistic) pick of this bunch, given Holy Fawn played in 2023, which was their last visit to the UK. That it’s been so long is reason enough to ask them back, but there are a few more reasons why they’re such a good choice. We’re in the midst of a surge in interest in shoegaze, yet so many bands of the genre are just too “rock” or “grunge” oriented to be a sung ArcTanGent fit. Holy Fawn’s incorporation of post rock and doom elements make them a shoo-in. On other visits to the UK they’ve supported The Callous Daoboys and Rolo Tomassi, which embeds them further within the scope of ArcTanGent. Observing from afar their tour through the US with Rivers of Nihil has been painful, and the anticipation for a new body of work from the band is very high within our ranks. If they get booked for ArcTanGent 2026, it won’t just mean a fantastic set – it probably means a new album is coming very soon, too.
Soulkeeper
With every passing ArcTanGent, there’s always that one core-adjacent slot catering exclusively to the masochistic – a singular inclusion so utterly electrifying that it continues to make waves across the festival and its community long after the curtain falls. 2023 found itself Kaonashi’s turn in the blood-soaked spotlight and this year treated us to the equal-parts punishing and provocative vianova. Well, boy: do I have a proposal for you! The Soulkeeper experience can be likened to a trip to the gas-station, with the addition of hooking yourself up to the nearest car battery and swiftly dropping a match on that rather suspicious nearby diesel-spillage – y’know, for fun. All this to say: it’s white-hot, feverishly mathy-madness with a tasteful Y2K aesthetic that’s perfect for Fernhill Fam’s increasingly Kafkaesque taste. Not to mention the fact that it would potentially be (as far as we can tell) the band’s UK-debut, which is always an exciting prospect.
Greyhaven
The undisputed masters of the chorus, Greyhaven fill out an incalculable amount of niches that we, as ATG devotees, crave. All the best parts of The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, Deftones and even Nirvana amalgamate here to form a sound so decadently darling, so buttery smooth as it slides down one’s ear-canals that we almost feel insulted for them that merely 150k monthly listeners have embraced them yet at the time of writing. Especially given the recent release of their brand-spanking-new, fourth full-length dazzler Keep It Quiet or even monumental EP Stereo Grief last year before it, which took the number two spot on our EPs Of The Year article. In recent memory we have seen them tour alongside the likes of Better Lovers, Frontierer and ‘68, well-proving their worth in the process; But we collectively agree that the time has come to expose this collective to the wider festival audience, so that their flowers may finally be delivered, picked fresh from the fields of Fernhill and tied with gold-trim.
Conjurer
This one feels a little bit like cheating, considering the fact that Curse These Metal Hands (featuring one half of Conjurer) is ArcTanGent’s favourite recurring party trick. Regardless, the timing is now better than ever for an indulgently doomy victory lap around their spiritual home-turf, having now unveiled their rightfully-acclaimed third LP Unself — which splatters their gory innards outward in an attempt to stain the world around them with much-needed sentience and compassion, showcasing them at their most sonically and conceptually intense thus far. There’s a little something for everybody wriggling inside of this band, whether you’re a glutton for sludge, skramzy-hardcore sensibilities, or just really like riffs (which, let’s be honest: who doesn’t?).
All four headliners for ArcTanGent 2026 have now been announced, see here.