snippets

  • Primavera Sound — early lineup thoughts

    Three names on the poster already justify the flight. The rest is a bonus. Barcelona in June, as always, means staying up too late and missing the act you came for. We went through the lineup properly this year — not the Twitter version, the version where you sit with the PDF open and argue about which day is actually the one to clear your calendar for. Primavera still does something most festivals don't: it makes the undercard feel as important as the headliners. There's a cluster of names in the lower half of the poster that could easily become the story by Sunday morning. That's the part we're still writing up — who played like it mattered, who didn't, and which set will still be the one people talk about in October.

  • Way Out West — what actually mattered

    The headliners were fine. The real story was the Thursday afternoon slot nobody planned for — a Swedish artist playing to two hundred people in the rain, sounding like the whole festival depended on it. Way Out West has always been good at this: the moment that wasn't on your schedule becomes the reason you came. We spent most of the weekend chasing that feeling — the sets that felt accidental, the stages that emptied out right before something clicked. The full recap goes longer on the food, the logistics, and the one conversation we had with a promoter who admitted they'd booked the wrong act on the wrong stage and somehow got away with it. That's in the newsletter.

  • Festival season is open

    Lineups are dropping faster than anyone can process. We're not trying to cover all of them. Just the ones worth rearranging your summer for. April is the month of posters and promises — every festival claiming this is the year they'll get the booking right. Most won't. A handful will. Our job is to figure out which is which before tickets sell out and before the discourse hardens into takes nobody actually believes. We've got a short list already: a few names we're watching, a couple of bills that look wrong on paper but might work in a field, and one festival we're convinced is sleepwalking into a great edition without anyone noticing yet.

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