Rounding up from 2025, we’ve got two very belated Bloodstock reviews to go up which will be posted later today. They allow us to near-complete our Gig Review playlist for 2025 which currently stands at a staggering 757 songs (link in comments).
This means that last year we saw _over_ 757 live acts, taking into account the ones which we couldn’t add to Spotify, the festival acts we didn’t have time to include in writeups, and a couple of reviews we have outstanding. It’s probably nudging pretty close to 800.
Honestly, this blows me away. Sure I saw a lot of them, but the bulk of the coverage comes from the other writers and photographers who make up Moshville Times, and we’ve been fortunate enough to welcome a bundle of new ones this year. I might be the one who posts the majority of the content up, but if it wasn’t for the awesome team we have taking pics and throwing words at a keyboard we’d be so much smaller than we are.
It also shows how strong (arguably necessary) that the live scene is for bands both big and small – and we’ve seen both ends of that scale this year. From venues holding about 40 people to festivals like Hellfest, Bloodstock and 2000 Trees, we’ve covered all sizes.
We also started branching out with our Breaking Boundaries features – bands that are most definitely not in the rock and metal genres. We hit pop, folk and country more than anything else and we hope to check out more in 2026. What we’re trying to do with these reviews is to let people know it’s OK to like whatever music they like. It is possible to enjoy Slayer and Noah Kahan and Five and Amy Macdonald! The response to these has been largely (though not 100%) positive, but that’s fine. We’re all about opinions so long as everyone respects each others’.
So… more of the same in 2026? I don’t know if we’ll manage to cover as many gigs but we’ll see!
