After a hard day interviewing and making Pot Noodles with water from the hot-tap the Hammer faithful had a few moments to beer and band.

Architects frontman Sam Carter shouts, “We don’t really fit onto this bill, but thanks for checking us out.” We’re not sure in what way he means ‘don’t really fit’. The band may not be five long-haired and barrel-chested leather-wearing Lemmy-look-alikes, but the guys deliver a full-on punch of pop-Meshuggah metal. The five young Brightonians are in fact perfectly at home on the bill (alongside bands such as Annotations Of An Autopsy, Sylosis, Sepultura and Opeth) despite their short(er) hair and non-regulation coloured t-shirts. As for the music, the quintet rip through an engaging set drawing from their three albums, the latest (‘Hollow Crown’) giving the set some of it’s highlights: crushing metal with hints of breakdown modernity interspersed with clean yet aggressive chorus-lines. Great riffs, great melodies: something more to take away with you than a bangover.
Architects differences only lie in appearance, and while the fist-pumping at the beginning of their set was sparse, the youngsters held their crowd, and by the end of it the airborne fists had grown in number by 500%. A captive audience happy to be so.

Opeth’s performance is one of the most anticipated of the whole festival, and as the lights dim and the intro track plays, we can see people swarming into the main arena until every square foot of the floor is filled by someone leaning in to see. The band come onto stage and after a prolonged second launch into a perfectly crafted set of their signature prog-death. Not only perfectly crafted, but tonight, perfectly delivered: the sound system and the band’s execution is so amazingly accurate that you can hear all the tiniest of Opeth’s purposeful instrumental nuances. The light show too, is unbelievable (that is until some technical issues strike the board and technicians run frantically trying to rectify the problem). Even without a strobing, pulsatingly vivid light show Opeth’s intensity and drama isn’t diminished, and you are utterly drawn into every note of the vast songs. The famously dry Swedish frontman, Mikael Akerfeldt, addresses the crowd after two songs (about 25 minutes). “This band is called Opeth. We are from Sweden. And as you know, all Swedish people are very rich. And this gig has just made us a bit richer.” His dryness is easy to mistake as tactlessness.
Track from the seminal ‘Blackwater Park’, ‘Ghost Of Perdition’ (Including the title track) and last year’s ‘Watershed’ are right on the money: slow minimal and serene sections with soaring and sumptuously played guitar collide with thunderingly heavy death and dramatic drum fills. The crowd are absolutely ecstatic, today’s headliners have a tough act to follow.