Up and Down in Copenhagen: The Zeppelin Bar and The Left Hand Path

Randall Wilburn
Jul 29
6 min read

It was my first time in Copenhagen, my first time in Denmark, period. A place I'd always dreamed of visiting. I'd heard great things about the town and its history, and as a Metallica fan whose favorite record is Master of Puppets, it meant something extra that the album was recorded here. So on this trip, finding whatever metal culture the city had to offer became a personal mission.

Night one, close to my hotel, was a bar called "Luke's Rock and Whiskey Bar". A Thursday night, and it showed: one regular parked at the bar, two more chatting up the bartender about local nothing, a couple making out in a corner booth. I had the house whiskey and left. No story here, not tonight. The next day I knew where I needed to go. I'd assumed it was two separate venues until Google Maps steered me to a single address. The Zeppelin Bar. I'd done a little homework before leaving the hotel room, enough to walk in with a few decent questions for the staff and whoever was drinking there.

Zeppelin Rock Bar: the upstairs

Zeppelin opened in 2014 in Copenhagen's Vesterbro district, a short walk from Central Station, and built its reputation on a simple premise: good beer, no pretension, and a soundtrack that never apologizes for itself. The bar's own touchstones read like a classic rock and hard rock radio dial: Judas Priest, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Deep Purple, Ghost, Rammstein, and Danish hard rock institution D-A-D, among others. It's a room built for people who want to talk, drink, or actually meet each other, not shout over a DJ trying to get everyone dancing instead of interacting.

Zeppelin also books intimate concerts from touring and local acts, and it operates a "safer space" policy with zero tolerance for discrimination or harassment, a detail worth flagging for anyone unfamiliar with the venue before they walk in.

Left Hand Path: the bar underneath the bar

Left Hand Path opened in 2022, built specifically as a home for Copenhagen's extreme metal community. By the venue's own account, it was almost strange that a Scandinavian capital with an audience this substantial had gone so long without a bar explicitly dedicated to extreme metal. The soundtrack down there runs death metal, black metal, doom, thrash, and old-school heavy metal, filled out by guest DJ nights, record-release parties, and beer tastings.

The name is a deliberate nod to Entombed's landmark 1990 debut, Left Hand Path, one of Swedish death metal's foundational records. But the venue frames the phrase as more than a tracklist reference: not primarily occult, but the decision to follow an unconventional road and stand apart from ordinary expectations.

The bar is the project of Michael H. Andersen, a music industry veteran who put out his first metal fanzine, Emanzipation, back in 1992. Left Hand Path opened in the same year he marked 30 years in the scene, and the space plays like a distillation of three decades of collecting: rare demo tapes, 7-inch EPs, posters, and flyers pulled straight from Andersen's own archive line the walls. Designer Morten Varano, known for reworking Copenhagen venues like Rust and Hotel Cecil, handled the buildout. The logo belongs to Christophe Szpajdel, the Belgian artist behind the iconic lettering for Emperor, Arcturus, and Borknagar, so even the signage carries weight.

Checking the events calendar before my trip, I'd found something better than I could have planned for: on Friday, July 3rd, 2026, the day I'd be in town, Left Hand Path was celebrating one of metal's landmark anniversaries with a night dedicated to Slayer's Reign in Blood.

Alas, there was no cake...just Thrash Metal

Released in 1986, the album remains one of thrash metal's defining statements: 29 minutes, ten tracks, no filler, opening with "Angel of Death" and closing with "Raining Blood," a runtime so relentless it's been called the fastest 29 minutes in metal history. Its fingerprints are all over the death metal, grindcore, and thrash that followed, and its 40th anniversary was marked across the metal world this year, including Slayer's own anniversary shows in the US. Not the Metallica connection I'd been hoping to stumble into on this trip but damn, close enough!

Time for a beer

I arrived a little before 8:00, when the event was set to kick off, climbed the stairs from the street, and took stock. Bar to the left. Farther left, a stairway down (yes, I made the "stairway to hell" joke to myself, and no, I'm not sorry): the actual Left Hand Path. A small staircase led up beyond that, a smallish room with a table or two sat in front of me leading toward the bathroom, and a larger room with windows opened to the right. And the ceiling: a mural of Mercyful Fate's Don't Break the Oath cover, a fitting tribute to Copenhagen's own metal royalty, the King Diamond-fronted band that helped invent the genre's theatrical, occult wing back in the early '80s. Sweet.

I got to the bar and mulled the taps. For a Fermented Metal story, you start with a band collaboration beer. Curious as ever, I ordered a can of Thorium's "Suburban Rot," a New England death metal IPA. Reading the can, I learned it was brewed at a place called Slow Burn, which meant a fresh round of questions for the bartender: where's this Slow Burn brewery, and who's Thorium? By the time I had my answers, I had a new brewery to visit the next day and a Danish death metal band to queue up for the train ride there. Neither of them turned up when I'd used AI to search "metal plus brewery" before the trip, which is its own small lesson: nothing replaces showing up and talking to actual humans. That's what a bar like this is for.

Beer in hand, it was time to take the Left Hand Path downstairs, literally.

Entombed in Black

The room at the bottom was small: about five seating areas, all black paint, dark, very cool. It had the feel of a basement a friend and I might have put together as teenagers in the Midwest back in the '80s. Entombed, appropriately enough, felt like the right word for it.

Once I'd settled in, I struck up a conversation with DJ Anna and the table of friends sitting across from me, about the night and the bar in general. Over the course of 2026 she'd DJed several specialty nights at Left Hand Path, including a Chuck Schuldiner memorial night, honoring the Death frontman widely credited as the godfather of death metal, a Polish Metal Night that turned out to be one of the bar's bigger hits, and Zeppelin's Metal Bingo event upstairs. We covered the usual ground: old bands, new bands, what everyone was drinking. I handed out some Fermented Metal guitar picks. Good people, good conversation.

Once Reign in Blood had run its course, I headed back upstairs for another beer and a proper look around Zeppelin.

Back upstairs

Different vibe entirely up there; The Doors was on the speakers, as The Zeppelin bar was doing a "Doors/Jim Morrison Memorial Night". I found another collaboration beer at the bar, Cameron's Motörhead "Dancing with the Devil" stout, and logged it on Untappd: thick, dark, almost syrupy, light carbonation.

Curious about the small staircase I'd clocked on the way in, I went up. The room at the top was tiny and lit red, walls covered mostly in Judas Priest posters and photos. Half teenage metal treehouse, half private band green room. Whoever designed this place understood that people occasionally want somewhere quieter to hole up, and the music was piped in at exactly the right volume to still feel part of the night without drowning out conversation.

After the Motörhead beer was finished, I decide to have one more beer before the cold, dark walk back to the hotel. Appropriately, I ordered Trooper's "Fear of the Dark," not sure I'd ever see it again once I was back in California. I spent a few minutes looking over the photos of past patrons on the walls, the cassette tape collection, the flyers, the band lanyards, made the obligatory bathroom check for the requisite sticker-and-graffiti collage (present and accounted for, as it should be), and headed for the door.

One more thing

On the way out I nearly lost my Brujos hat, not to the wind that had been chasing me across northern Europe all week, but to a drunk older woman who plucked it off my head, laughed, and asked, "Can I have your hat?" I considered it for a second: she might genuinely appreciate a hat from a metal brewery out of Portland, Oregon. Then I looked into her very drunk eyes and took it back. "No, this old chrome dome needs to stay warm tonight." If she wanted something this specific, she'd have to travel halfway across the world to get it herself. Same as I did, for a night at the Zeppelin bar and Left Hand Path I won't forget