This summer we are celebrating our 30th festival by hosting the biggest and baddest rock party in Swedish history! And today we are presenting the first four acts of the 2023 line-up.
As part of the celebration, the opening night is becoming a full festival day, making for four full days of festivities with all five stages running! More than 90 bands will be performing, and today we are happy to announce four of them:
IRON MAIDEN
Iron Maiden is one of the biggest and most legendary metal bands of all time. In 2018, they played one of the most lauded concerts in Sweden Rock history – this summer they return with a brand new show THE FUTURE PAST tour, featuring some epic tracks from their latest chart-topping album Senjutsu along with a focus on 1986’s classic Somewhere in Time. A collection of classic cuts from the rest of their career is also being promised!
MÖTLEY CRÜE
At first, record companies and critics refused to take Los Angeles’ very own Mötley Crüe seriously. In the early 80s, the combination of heavy rock, glam and the sleaziest rock’n’roll imaginable was supposedly dead on arrival. But Mötley Crüe got the last laugh. Albums like Shout at the Devil (1983), Girls Girls Girls (1987) and Dr. Feelgood (1989) were great commercial successes and also widely influential. Already living legends, Mötley Crüe grew into even greater notoriety following the release of their no-holds-barred autobiography The Dirt in 2001. The 2019 biopic of the same name became so successful that the band, who actually called it a day in 2015, decided to return to the stage once more to the delight of new and old fans alike. Their huge “Stadium Tour” with Def Leppard now crosses over from the US to Sweden and SRF – who have known and loved this mega-legendary band for ages.
DEF LEPPARD
They started out as a teenage, glitter rock-inspired addition to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the late 70s. From there, their career skyrocketed and Def Leppard became one of the biggest, most iconic acts of the 80s. Albums like Pyromania (1983) and Hysteria (1987) sold millions and millions of copies and produced countless hit singles. Def Leppard even managed to make it through the 90s without losing their legendary status, and keep producing dignified works like Def Leppard (2015) and the very well-received Diamond Star Halos in 2022. Since the band’s major tour spectacle “The Stadium Tour” alongside Mötley Crüe has already brought down the house in the US, the time has now come for Def Leppard to bring this experience over to SRF.
GHOST
Sweden’s foremost theatrical rock outfit Ghost brings its phantasmagorical live ritual to Sweden Rock for the first time since 2011. Fall under the spell of Papa Emeritus IV and his Nameless Ghouls as they headline the final night of this summer’s 30th-anniversary edition of Sweden Rock – and bear witness to the Ghost live experience that the media is calling a “euphoric spectacle” (Rolling Stone) and “the next generation of arena stars” (The Wall Street Journal).
