Skaņu mežs 2026

Riga, Latvia’s experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs 2026 will take place on October 9–10 at the venue Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street), and its first confirmed act is avant-garde metal group Krallice, hailed by “Stereogum” as “one of the most unique and uncompromising bands in metal today”. Early bird tickets can now be purchased for 40 EUR at www.bilesuserviss.lv. Once the first 100 tickets are sold, their price will rise to 60 EUR.

Recap of 2025

The Wire Magazine, previously having hailed Skaņu Mežs as the biggest avant-garde music festival in the Baltic states, focused the review of its 2025 edition on its informed and open-minded audience: “There is nothing this audience can’t handle,” wrote Daniel Spicer.

Last December, British radio station BBC Radio 3 aired a two-hour show, devoted to the festival. Music journalist Tom Service said: “Skaņu Mežs casts its net as generously as possible over the vast and thrilling terrains of new musicmaking.”

Meanwhile, Daryl Worthington of The Quietus described the festival as “a weekend of stunning performances”, “a space of radical sound and vision”, and “a world of deviant and defiant art”.

First confirmed act – Krallice (USA)

"Unapologetically extreme and intense [..] as cathartic as it is crushing."
– Pitchfork

"Where there was virtuosity, there was no glibness."
– The New York Times

Krallice is a metal band from New York, USA. They play an experimental, highly
technical style of black metal.

Krallice was formed by Colin Marston and Mick Barr in 2007. Barr said in an
interview that "Colin and I had talked about trying to do a black metal record
together with no real plans of making it sound good or even releasing it, but as we
were writing the music we kind of let it take its own shape. And we liked it more
than we expected to." They later recruited Lev Weinstein on drums and Nicholas
McMaster on bass and second vocalist. They released their debut full-length
album “Krallice” in 2008 through Profound Lore to critical acclaim.

Krallice have been extraordinarily prolific since their self‑titled debut in 2008, releasing fourteen additional studio albums according to the available discography data. After the early, steady pace of “Dimensional Bleedthrough” (2009) and “Diotima” (2011), the band entered its first major productivity peak in 2015–2017, issuing “Ygg huur” (2015), “Prelapsarian” (2016), “Hyperion” (2016), and “Go Be Forgotten” (2017) in rapid succession. A second surge followed in 2020–2022, with “Mass Cathexis” (2020), “Demonic Wealth” (2021), “Crystalline Exhaustion” (2022), and “Psychagogue” (2022). Their most recent releases, including “Mass Cathexis 2 – The Kinetic Infinite” (2023) and “Inorganic Rites” (2024), confirm that the band’s post‑debut output has been not only extensive but also clustered into intense creative bursts that define their reputation as one of the most relentlessly productive forces in modern experimental metal.

On “Inorganic Rites”, several members shifted to new instruments: Lev Weinstein remained on drums, McMaster moved to guitar, Barr took over on bass, and Marston expanded his role by adding keyboards.

The band's music features dense multi-tracked guitars often performing fast, precise tremolo-picked guitar passages. Krallice make frequent use of long, complex song
structures. The earlier material drew more heavily on early black metal bands such
as Burzum, Gorgoroth, and Ulver, though over time the band has significantly
expanded their sound beyond those early influences. In fact, Colin Marston has said that, for him, the period from 2013 to 2015 was “the real start of Krallice,” because the band had finally shed any genre‑tied objective.

While they originally opted for a lo-fi approach to production (as is traditional in black metal), Colin Marston said that "Our music was too dense to come across successfully with a low-fi
approach. So instead, I decided to do a full-on 2" tape, everything multi-mic'ed,
layered, and carefully mixed production."

A live performance by Krallice is a significant event in the world of Skaņu Mežs – organisers have strived to bring the band to Riga since 2018. It is also worth mentioning that the Skaņu Mežs show will be part of their very first European tour.

Early bird tickets

To reach the festival’s most forward‑planning visitors, early bird tickets are now available at Biļešu Serviss box offices and at www.bilesuserviss.lv for 40 EUR. These tickets provide entry to both paid concert evenings on October 9 and 10.
The 40 EUR early bird tickets are available until the first 100 tickets are sold. After that, the ticket price will increase to 60 EUR.
The festival is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, Goethe-Institut Riga, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
Skaņu Mežs is part of the sound art project tekhnē, supported by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. The festival is also part of the NERDS network, co-funded by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.

Media partners include The Quietus, TVNET, Satori.lv, Radio NABA, Arterritory, magazine “Mūzikas Saule”, and la.lv.