The Underground Stage
Across 2025, I playlisted 2,797 tracks, and saw live sets by 323 different artists. I loved it all, but for the third year running, I’m having a crack at pulling together the fifty artists who gave me the most musical joy live and who made me mash the repeat button the most often. These are […]
“Sometimes you watch a band of mostly normal people aiming to come off deeply weird. Fuzztronica come off like deeply weird people trying really, really hard to be normal. As such, this – predictably – ends up being the fully wildest set I have seen all year. I’m struggling to articulate how utterly batshit it […]
“Salarymen soothe as much as they excite, warming the air while they set the shoulders and feet and hips to work. Wildly danceable but never out of control, it’s beautifully tailored, exquisitely crafted, and dizzily good retro-tinged fun. The wild thing is tonight sees them performing jetlagged and suffering with voice loss – this is […]
“Playne Jayne pound and wail and shred, confident enough to drop a Led Zep cover in only the second slot in the set and loud enough – with more than enough wind in the sails of the vocal – to propel it all forwards with tons of heft.” Gallery
