10 absolutely definitive Slam Dunk Festival performances

Originally a one-off all-dayer evolved from the Leeds club night of the same name, Slam Dunk has grown over close to two decades into the UK’s answer to Warped Tour. Having stopped off in cities as far and wide as Glasgow and Dublin, Wolverhampton and Cardiff down through the years, it’s settled into a loud-and-proud jaunt between Hatfield Park and Leeds Temple Newsam on the late-May bank holiday weekend, thrilling fans with repeat performances from the biggest names in alternative from all around the world.

Indeed, genre diversity has been Slam Dunk’s greatest strength. From emo and pop-punk to metal and ska, the specific blend of flavours all boiled down into one head-spinning day at the rock show is quite unlike anything on offer anywhere else, carving out a niche away from other big weekends like Download, Bloodstock and Reading & Leeds while weaving a close-knit community all its own. And as organisers tease a Slam Dunk 2025 that’s set to be bigger and better than ever before – headed up by the overdue debut by the mighty A Day To Remember – we look back at the legendary sets that made its name…

Slam Dunk might’ve grown out of the club night at Leeds’ (now-defunct) 500-cap Cockpit, but its first shot at the hoop was anything but an intimate affair, as 7,000 fans packed into the city’s Millennium Square for a line-up featuring Hundred Reasons, Thursday and The Academy Is… Fresh off the success of smash-hit second album From Under The Cork Tree, rising Chicago crew Fall Out Boy had just smashed a run of shows at big venues like the Manchester Apollo and Brixton Academy, but headlining the inaugural edition of what would become the UK’s ultimate emo celebration cemented their place in fans’ hearts and minds. Still a year off Infinity On High, they blew us away with a barrage of early hits Dance, Dance and Sugar, We’re Goin Down and deeper cuts Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner and Of All The Gin Joints In All The World which would drop out of their setlist in more recent years. Even then, you could see they had everything it would take to become one of rock’s biggest bands.

Another outfit now capable of top-lining the world’s biggest events, it’s wild to think that Paramore weren’t even headlining Slam Dunk when they dropped by in 2007 for what’s currently their only appearance. That honour went to Huntington Beach ska-punk legends Reel Big Fish who, in fairness, absolutely tore the house down. But there was a sense of lighting-in-a-bottle watching Paramore storming through a set culled entirely from 2005 debut All We Know Is Falling and 2007 breakthrough Riot! Held up against the well-oiled, world-conquering trio who sold out UK arenas in 2023 and played stadia with Taylor Swift through 2024, this was the wilder, sweatier, far less precise work of kids still figuring out who exactly they were destined to be. There was no better place than Slam Dunk to witness it.

Writing any history of their biggest, brightest moments, there’s an irresistible pull towards the beating-heart emotion and before-they-were-famous glamour of the festival’s more pop-tinged favourites. But Slam Dunk has a gnarlier side, too. Never more so than with the arrival of Buffalo bruisers Every Time I Die in 2012. Keith Buckley and the boys levelled both sites, but it was in Leeds sweatbox Honour Over Glory stage that shit really kicked off. Sandwiched between a never-better Cancer Bats and Architects on the schedule, they detonated a setlist loaded with bangers Underwater Bimbos From Outer Space and We’rewolf, sending the circle-pits into overdrive before Ebolarama gave security a nervous breakdown by triggering a stage invasion for the ages. Vintage stuff from one of heavy music’s very best.

Okay, okay, memories of Kids In Glass Houses’ 2014 break-up are a lot less wrenching nowadays. Without an inkling of the Cardiff alt. rockers’ 2022 return and this year’s excellent fifth album Pink Flamingo, though, their Atticus Stage headline was just a surging, tear-stained celebration of a truly fantastic band. It began with an unabashedly nostalgia-spiking run-through of 2009 debut Smart Casual: the journey from a characteristically punchy Fistcuffs to bittersweet closer Church Tongue a rinsing ordeal in itself. Watching frontman Aled Phillips power through a climactic encore of Sunshine and Matters At All at the end of a long hot day was simply too much for some, however, making for the kind of heartbroken wallowing in which we all secretly love to indulge.

Whether gracing the K! cover, opening for Brit-rock royalty Don Broco or paying tribute to their heroes in Linkin Park, there’s an assuredness – and downright cool – about everything Trash Boat do nowadays that makes it easy to forget how far they’ve come. Back in 2015, just a year after the St Albans collective had gotten together – and another 13 months before they’d release their debut LP – Tobi Duncan and company were still struggling to make their mark. Taking on fellow bright-hopes Palm Reader, Astroid Boys, The Lafontaines and Dead! in a K!-sponsored ‘Fresh Blood’ contest for a slot at that year’s Slam Dunk, victory was far from guaranteed. But with the strength of songs from their outstanding Brainwork EP, a brash attitude and determination to hold their destiny in their own hands they won out – then made everyone else sit up and take notice with a show-stealing set at the festival itself. Truly trashtastic.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Architects guitarist and chief songwriter Tom Searle had just over a year to live when the Brighton metalcore masters stepped up to headline Slam Dunk’s Monster Stage in 2015. They’d absolutely smashed the festival before – their aforementioned 2012 set almost also making this list –but the level of emotion flowing through C.A.N.C.E.R and These Colours Don’t run that weekend were spine-tingling to behold. “Thank you Slam Dunk for a great weekend,” Tom would tweet the day after the event concluded, “and thank you so much to all the friends I saw, who were so supportive and kind to me.” The poignancy of those words now only stokes the memories. Indeed, it’s the thousands of fans who got to be part of one of the best shows of their lives who should have been thanking Tom. Rest easy, man.

“We’ll never write another album like Take To The Skies,” Rou Reynolds wrote in the run-in to the St Albans supremos 10th anniversary celebration of their inimitably raucous debut at Slam Dunk 2017. “Enter Shikari isn't really a band that looks backwards. But as this is a special occasion it’s important for us to recognise the importance of this album to us, and for the family of people who have supported us since those early days.” Indeed, it was a party for the ages. Stopping short of anything as predictable as an in-sequence play-through, we got the record’s songs mixed unpredictably into an 80-minute assault on the senses that stressed not just how incredible Shikari were right out of the gate, but how staggeringly far they’d come. It’s only another few years until TTTS turns 20. How about an encore performance, lads?

‘It’s a new day, but it all feels old…’ Slam Dunk was right on the brink of metamorphosing into the fully-outdoor behemoth we know today in 2018, but while it had already taken up residence at Hatfield House, the final takeover of Leeds city centre was incredible to behold. With co-headliners Jimmy Eat World over on the original Millennium Square Stage, Good Charlotte were shoved into the near 14,000-cap First Direct Arena and promptly packed the place. On paper, the Maryland icons were there to promote seventh album Generation Rx – even delivering a live debut of lead single Actual Pain to the Yorkshire faithful – but it was really about underlining their status as lesser-spotted princes of pop-punk, sending thousands of fans over the top with everything from The Anthem and Keep Your Hands Off My Girl to The River, I Just Wanna Live and all-time banger/increasingly pertinent calling-card Lifestyles Of The Rich & Famous. Heroic stuff.

Who doesn’t love a secret set? Billed as Y3K on the Key Club Stage (see what they did there?!) it didn’t take an awful lot of brainpower to imagine that we might be headed to the Year 3000 in 2019, but the actual reality of seeing one of the biggest British pop bands of the 21st century arrive for a seven-song set was still absolutely joyous to behold. Lining up gleefully horny adolescent originals Air Hostess and What I Go To School For alongside Shipwrecked In Atlantis and Reunion from just-released fourth album Half Way There might’ve been an effort to show haw far Busted had grown. It was a little redundant, mind, as Crashed The Wedding and Year 3000 proved there’s nothing more invigorating than getting in some teenage kicks. Kudos to the sort-of encore from Busted’s colleagues in McFly in 2021, too.

You Me At Six have some special memories at Slam Dunk. From opening the whole shebang at the second edition in 2007 to jumping halfway up the bill in 2008 and headlining in 2009 – and on to headlining again over a never-more-stacked undercard in 2015 – the fest was both proving ground and well-sprung platform for the Surrey pop-rock overlords. When they announced their impending break-up in early 2024, the selection of what would be their last-ever UK festival performance felt obvious. The actual reality of them tearing apart Slammy D with well-aged favourites Take On The World, Underdog and The Consequence (featuring a run-in from The Blackout’s Sean Smith) was something else, however. From soaking up the sunshine in Hatfield to watching tears be lost in Leeds’ rain, it was a poignant showcase not just of how they transformed from irrepressible upstarts to indomitable elder-statesmen, but also of how Slam Dunk and its faithful has grown in tandem from saying hello to their new favourite bands to watching them wave goodbye. It’s the rock’n’roll circle of life. And on these shores Slam Dunk has become an inextricable part of it.

Get your Slam Dunk 2025 tickets this Friday, September 6 from 10am at slamdunkfestival.com.

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