Download Festival – Saturday (see Friday)
Donington Park, Derbyshire
13th June 2026
There are not many places where you can spend an afternoon photographing a band that soundtracked your teenage years before wandering across a field to watch what appears to be a full scale satanic ritual. Then again, there are not many places quite like Download Festival.
Saturday at Donington feels less like a festival and more like a collision of worlds. One moment there are soaring metalcore choruses and festival sized singalongs. The next there are towering demonic costumes, clouds of smoke and enough fire to make you question whether somebody had accidentally opened a portal to another dimension. By midnight, Guns N’ Roses will be attempting to remind everyone why they became the biggest rock band on the planet. In between comes one of the most memorable days of the entire weekend.
LANDMVRKS waste little time setting the tone. The French metalcore outfit have spent the last few years building a reputation as one of the genre’s most exciting live bands and their Download debut feels like a statement of intent. Frontman Florent Salfati commands the Apex Stage with infectious energy, seamlessly switching between crushing breakdowns, soaring melodies and the band’s now trademark bursts of French language vocals. Even at an early hour, the crowd response suggests many people already know this won’t be the last time they find themselves playing a much bigger slot at Download.
We Came As Romanscontinue the momentum with a performance that balances emotional weight and festival-sized energy. Years removed from unimaginable tragedy, the band remain one of modern metalcore’s most resilient success stories, and that resilience is written into every song they play. Dave Stephens spends much of the set urging the crowd to give everything they’ve got, but he hardly needs to ask. Download responds instinctively.
Those Damn Crows arrive to prove that modern British rock remains in rude health. Shane Greenhall possesses one of those voices that seems tailor-made for festival fields, effortlessly carrying across the Opus Stage as the Welsh rockers deliver one of the most uplifting performances of the afternoon.
With a little help from security, a young child makes their way along the front barrier dishing out fist bumps to fans as the crowd erupts around them. Whether future rock star, family member or simply the coolest kid in Donington for five minutes, it perfectly captures the atmosphere surrounding the set. While plenty of bands spend Download trying to look dangerous, Those Damn Crows spend theirs looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
Then comes the most personal moment of my weekend. Long before I ever picked up a camera, Bush were one of the bands that helped shape my musical world. Like many teenagers discovering alternative rock for the first time, I found myself pulled into Gavin Rossdale’s world of huge hooks, melancholy melodies and songs that somehow felt both massive and deeply personal. So standing in the photo pit at Download Festival, camera in hand, photographing a band I grew up listening to feels genuinely surreal.
For three songs, the years collapse. The teenage fan disappears. The photographer takes over. Then the teenage fan returns all over again. Rossdale remains an effortlessly charismatic frontman, prowling every inch of the stage with the confidence of someone who has spent decades commanding huge audiences. Songs that once blasted through headphones now echo across Donington Park. It is one of those rare moments where reality briefly exceeds expectation. Not every highlight of Download needs flames, explosions or controversy. Sometimes it’s enough to find yourself standing exactly where you’ve always dreamed of standing.
Marmozets bring a welcome dose of unpredictability to the Avalanche Stage. Returning to Download after years away, they perform with the energy of a band making up for lost time. Becca Macintyre remains a magnetic focal point, while the band’s blend of technical chaos and infectious hooks reminds everyone why they became such a beloved fixture of the UK alternative scene.
Then the gates of hell open or at least that’s how it appears when Behemoth take the stage. Download has seen its fair share of theatrical productions over the years, but few bands commit to the spectacle quite like the Polish extreme metal veterans. Towering costumes, ritualistic imagery, smoke, fire and enough occult iconography to give a medieval priest heart palpitations transform the Opus Stage into something closer to a dark fantasy film than a festival performance.
Every movement feels carefully choreographed. Every visual element serves a purpose. Frontman Nergal stalks the stage like some infernal master of ceremonies while the band unleash a wall of sound powerful enough to shake the foundations of Donington itself. Whether you’re a fan of blackened death metal or not becomes almost irrelevant. Behemoth aren’t simply playing a concert. They’re creating a world.
Hot Milk provide the perfect antidote to Behemoth’s darkness. Where the Polish legends conjure images of the apocalypse, Hot Milk arrive determined to throw the biggest alternative party of the day. Han Mee barely needs to ask before the Avalanche Stage erupts into movement. Circle pits open. Crowd surfers appear from seemingly nowhere. Every chorus is hurled back towards the stage with the sort of passion usually reserved for bands much further up the bill.
What makes Hot Milk so effective live isn’t just the songs. It’s the connection. Han and Jim Shaw have an ability to make a packed festival crowd feel strangely intimate, transforming thousands of strangers into a single, bouncing community for forty-five glorious minutes.
Then the Opus Stage calls, where Architects attract a crowd so large it threatens to overwhelm the space available. The atmosphere feels electric long before a note is played. What follows is simultaneously triumphant and chaotic. Security interventions and crowd management concerns repeatedly interrupt the flow of the performance, visibly frustrating Sam Carter, but they also underline just how enormous Architects have become. The band have long felt destined for bigger stages and Saturday’s crowd only strengthens that argument. Even when circumstances threaten to derail the momentum, Architects still deliver one of the day’s most emotionally charged performances.
Then come Guns N’ Roses. For all the debates surrounding modern Guns N’ Roses, the moment Slash walks onto a stage with a Les Paul hanging around his neck remains one of rock music’s great images. The set is undeniably long. At times perhaps too long. Yet every time the performance threatens to lose momentum, Guns N’ Roses reach into one of the deepest catalogues in rock history and pull out another classic. Welcome To The Jungle. Sweet Child O’ Mine. November Rain. Songs so ingrained into popular culture that they feel almost impossible to judge objectively anymore.
But the moment that lingers arrives much later. As the evening sun begins to disappear behind Donington Park, the opening chords of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door drift across the festival site. For a few minutes, the scale and noise of Download seem to fade away. Friends throw arms around shoulders. Pints are raised. Thousands of voices become one. It is one of those rare festival moments that cannot be planned and cannot be recreated.
The final stretch belongs to the hits. November Rain feels suitably epic beneath the darkening sky before Paradise City finally brings the evening to a close. Whatever arguments people may have about modern Guns N’ Roses, they still possess an unmatched ability to create moments that feel bigger than the songs themselves.
What I’ve learned about this festival is that it has a habit of making the ridiculous feel completely normal. By this point in the weekend, watching a man in a top hat play one of the most famous guitar solos ever written while tens of thousands of people sing along beneath a setting sun somehow feels like the most natural thing in the world. As the final notes of Paradise City disappears into the Donington night, one thing becomes abundantly clear. Friday introduced me to Download Festival. Saturday shows me why people keep coming back.
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All photos by Adam Williams unless otherwise stated. Click to follow here.
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