Helloween

19 minutes ago
2 min read

Forty years into the madness, Helloween still know exactly where the big red button is — and at Leyendas del Rock, they pushed it repeatedly.

Closing out the festival’s 20th-anniversary edition on Saturday night, the German power-metal giants arrived with a set built for maximum impact: huge riffs, twin-guitar fireworks, towering vocals and enough history to fill the Villena night sky. The festival itself had just enjoyed its biggest edition yet, with more than 60,000 people attending across four days, and Helloween gave the weekend the finale it deserved.

Opening with ‘March of Time’ before charging into ‘The King for a 1000 Years’ and ‘Future World’, the band immediately established the mood. This wasn't a polite trip through the archives — it was a full-contact celebration of everything that made Helloween one of European metal's defining forces.

And then came the songs. ‘Ride the Sky’. ‘We Burn’. ‘Twilight of the Gods’. ‘Hey Lord!’. ‘I Want Out’. Each one landed like another brick through the festival ceiling.

The real magic, though, was happening in the crowd. Thousands of voices joined the band, transforming the Polideportivo into one enormous, beer-soaked choir. By the time ‘I Want Out’ arrived, the distinction between stage and audience had pretty much disappeared — Villena was singing the song back at Helloween.

That's the trick Helloween have mastered over four decades: technical musicianship without losing the simple, glorious thrill of a great heavy-metal chorus.

The 40th Anniversary tour could easily have become an exercise in looking backwards. Instead, Helloween played their history like something still alive, still loud and still capable of rattling the ribs.

And with the festival reporting the performance as one of the most emotionally charged moments of its 2026 edition, the reaction was impossible to argue with.

Forty years on, Helloween aren't simply celebrating the past. They're still making a very convincing case for the future of power metal.

Words and photos: Rhyan Paul