Chris Motionless says Motionless in White are ready to deliver the kind of production they always imagined when they first started out, and the band is aiming to prove doubters wrong with its first European festival headliner slot.
Question: “Chris, there are certain milestone moments in a band’s career. I saw recently that Bloodstock has named Motionless in White as one of their 2027 headliners. What does it mean to have reached that point in your career where you’re closing out festivals? And does this provide you the opportunity to do the Motionless in White show you’ve always wanted?”
Chris Motionless’ response: “Yeah, that’s been something that it’s always the case when you’re a younger band. You’re like, ‘Man, if we were ever given that chance, we would put on the craziest show we possibly can’ and now we get to do that.”
“We’re in the belief that when you’re given this opportunity, you better spend every penny you can on putting the craziest production together and making sure that your band is as tight as possible and you are playing the right songs. So to have that now equate to we’re about to go headline our first European festival, we’re gonna go so hard and do everything that we can to bring what we can typically only do in America over to the U.K.”
“The reason why we chose to do that show instead of Download, which is earlier in the summer, is because we wanted to give back to the people that were believing in us. They thought that we were a headliner. We wanted to go do that and prove them right. To be honest, [we want to] prove a lot of other people wrong and that’s a cool motivating factor and we’re gonna go super hard.”
That milestone has been a long time coming for a band that started out in a small Pennsylvania city and has spent two decades building toward a moment like this one. The headline slot is not just a single booking, but the result of steady growth across albums, tours and festival appearances that gradually pushed Motionless in White from club shows to main stages.
Motionless in White will headline Bloodstock Open Air 2027 alongside Mercyful Fate and Electric Callboy, with the festival set for August 5-8, 2027, at Catton Park in Derbyshire. The band takes the Ronnie James Dio main stage as one of three headliners for the event, which has confirmed 27 bands so far.
The band was formed in 2005 while Chris Motionless, Angelo Parente, Mike Costanza and Frank Polumbo were still in high school, later signing to Fearless Records and building its profile with Creatures, Infamous and Reincarnate. That early run laid the groundwork for a career that has since moved well beyond its underground metalcore origins.
Reincarnate became the band’s highest-charting album at No. 9 on the Billboard 200, while later releases such as Graveyard Shift, Disguise and Scoring the End of the World kept the group in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Decades, the band’s seventh studio album, continued that momentum and underscored how far the group has come since its self-titled demo.
The UK festival began in 2001 as an indoor event at the Derby Assembly Rooms before moving outdoors to Catton Hall, growing into one of the country’s flagship heavy metal gatherings. Placing Motionless in White at the top of that bill reflects how much the band’s live reputation has expanded over the years.
The booking also carries a personal weight for the frontman. Electric Callboy will take Saturday’s headline slot for their first Bloodstock appearance, while Motionless In White will close the festival on Sunday with what Chris Motionless has described as the band’s first European festival headline performance and its only UK show of 2027. For a band that has long been told what it could and could not achieve, that Sunday night closing set is exactly the kind of statement Chris Motionless has in mind.
