“We’ve always been saying the best thing about our cruises is that you have a community of music fans always around you.”
Parkway Drive
Heavy metal cruises have – perhaps surprisingly – been a mainstay of the European and American heavy music live markets for years now.
70000TONS OF METAL, Barge To Hell, Monsters Of Rock, Headbangers Boat – insert sea and riff pun here – the list is endless.
But, even more surprisingly, it took until last year for an Australian edition to hit the market.
But when that happened, in the form of Hellbound, run by the Choose Your Cruise company (who specialise in rock-themed cruises), demand was overwhelming.
With a line-up featuring an Australian all-star cast of all things metal and core – in the first case, Parkway Drive, Polaris, Northlane, Make Them Suffer, and loads more – the punters voted with their wallets and snapped up tickets in just seven minutes.
“It really took all of us by surprise, to be honest,” Caitlin Manov, Operations Manager of Choose Your Cruise (AKA the ‘First Mate’), told The Music. “We’ve been doing these cruises for almost 15 years now, and in the festival aspect, it’s not unusual for gigs to sell out straight away.
“With cruises, however, because it is a completely different product from a festival ticket or buying a ticket to a gig, it’s something that people really need to sit down and consider.
“We’re normally incredibly happy if a crew sells out 12 months in advance, whereas Hellbound sold out so quickly,” she adds. “We couldn’t believe it. It was just something that had never happened in the history of our business. And also, as far as themed music cruises go, it’s probably the fastest-selling cruise anywhere.”
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So unexpected was the quick nature of the sellout that the company issued an apology to those who missed out on tickets ahead of the announcement of the second edition – Hellbound II.
Like Hellbound, the next edition will again be headlined by Parkway Drive, but this time around the Byron Boys will be joined by a host of new sailors, including The Amity Affliction, Thy Art Is Murder, Alpha Wolf, and I Killed The Prom Queen, with the lot set to disembark on January 17th-21st 2027 (tickets go on sale Thursday, February 5th with a pre-sale taking place the day prior, so act quickly if you want to join aboard).
“The idea of the statement was that, as we’re a transparent company, we want people to be along for the ride with us,” said Caitlin’s brother Dylan Manov, Brand Executive (or ‘Quarter Master’) of Choose Your Cruise.
“You can predict things – we have 15 years of this under our belt – but to have that many people all trying to book at once, it’s a good problem to have, but it also is something that we can learn from,” he explains.
“We can only get better and make it fairer, and have those systems in place to make it as seamless as we can this time around.”
Part of making that process fairer is making sure pre-sale allocations don’t exhaust the entire event before the general public has their chance to snap up their berth (a problem that caused consternation for the first edition).
“We’ve done more in the back-end to make the process as fair for people as possible”, Dylan explains. “Once the pre-sales are exhausted, people will have another opportunity the next day for the general sale.
“The first-time round, it all just came as this tidal wave (no pun intended) of interest, which is a great problem to have, but nobody, whether it’s here in Australia, or a theme charter even in America or Europe, would’ve expected that sort of demand.”
The itinerary of the cruise might help explain the demand.
The cruise will essentially be a five-day floating music festival, with multiple stages set up around the ship, allowing punters to pick and choose which bands they want to watch.
Additionally, a land-stop will occur at Tangalooma on Moreton Island, Queensland, where landlubbers can go tobogganing, explore shipwrecks, or just spend some time on solid ground.
But this stacked program doesn’t fully explain the excitement.
Choose Your Cruise has now spent over 15 years in the business, running cruises boasting the likes of Jimmy Barnes, The Angels, and The Superjesus.
What is it about metal fans in particular that makes them so eager to splash a few grand and step onto a ship for five days and mosh in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
“The metal community and the genre are very, very much community-based,” Caitlin muses. “I think the excitement of being able to have a festival that is new and unique is something that hasn’t been provided to music fans in Australia.
“The idea of bringing 3,000 metal fans onto one ship is really exciting, not only just for the music, but for all of the other guest experience aspects that come into play.
“We’ve always been saying the best thing about our cruises is that you have a community of music fans always around you,” she adds. “Even if you are coming on solo or you don’t know anybody who is going to be on the ship with you immediately, everybody is connected by the love of that type of music.”
The team remained tight-lipped about whether a Hellbound III was already in the works (“maybe?”, Caitlin says with a smile), but they’re happy to share that work began on Hellbound II as soon as the first edition sold out.
“It takes a really long time”, Caitlin says, before Dylan adds that the team were creating events that, at least on paper, “are not meant to be on a ship”.
“There are so many plans and logistics, and just to get production sorted, bands contracted, and to secure the ships takes months and months,” he points out.
Yet despite all the effort, if demand keeps up, Aussie heavy music fans can expect more chances to open up the pit on the quarter-deck while on the high seas in the near future.
“We’ve had over a 100,000 guests come on board our cruisers, and we’ve racked up almost at 50 chartered cruises since we started in 2009,” Caitlin said.
“It’s a really exciting opportunity to bring music that we personally love onto these cruises, and if we keep selling out these cruises, we will keep putting them on.”
Pre-sale tickets for Hellbound II will be available on Wednesday, February 4th, at 11 am AEDT (sign up here for access) ahead of the general sale on Thursday, February 5th, at 11 am AEDT. You can find more information via the event website.
Choose Your Cruise Presents
HELLBOUND II
17-21 JANUARY 2027
Parkway Drive
The Amity Affliction
Alpha Wolf | I Killed The Prom Queen
Thy Art Is Murder
Banks Arcade (NZ) | Closure | Dead City Ruins | Down and Out
Elm Street | Future Static | Gravemind | Heavensgate | Hei’An
Major Arcana | Mammal | Maple’s Pet Dinosaur | Mirrors
No Apologies | Ocean Grove | RedHook | Rocky’s Pride & Joy | Starve
Taking Back Saturday DJs | Stage Host MANOV
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative
Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
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