A festival edition in which Shoegaze & Goth were given the main stages – and so luckily it’s not just the storm that reverberates.
What would be a particularly bold step for other mainstream events of this size is a given at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona – part of the attitude, a curation statement. Because after the year of the Powerpuff Girls Chappell Roan, Charli
Most of the artists mentioned brought their shoegaze, dream pop, post-industrial, gothic rock and Americana to the people on the main stages. And there were actually plenty of them – and with a high attention span. The 24th edition of the event at the Parc del Fòrum was sold out for the second year in a row. For reasons.
Storm and shitstorm
But before all of these flat, dark, full-body concert experiences could take place, the organizers first had to weather a shitstorm and the visitors had to weather the real storm. Because the first real day of the show brought rain and gusts of up to 80 km/h, which meant that Massive Attack, Doja Cat, Alex G and Mac DeMarco, among others, were unable to play their gigs and many visitors were left in the dark. The communication surrounding the cancellations was poor on Primavera’s part, and the crowd vented a lot in the comment columns of the open air.
The festival makers tried even harder to ensure reconciliation in the next step – and ultimately managed to get Olivia Rodrigo for a spontaneous set on the final Primavera day. She was joined by Robert Smith for the duet “What’s Wrong With Me.” It was precisely moments like these that once again underlined the uniqueness of this event, which attracts the masses not with averageness, but with a sense of musical nuances in every direction.
More than festival clearance
In the end, what resonates is what happened on the stages – concerts that were not run of the mill and often felt more like intimate club shows than like handling the XL crowd. For some bands it actually seemed like this festival was important to them. The xx, who performed on the last evening, returned to the venue on the opening day to experience the Primavera in its entirety. Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine also arrived earlier and was seen along with Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai and Rachel Goswell from Slowdive.
Grian Chatten, who only had a guest appearance at the Kneecap show but no Fontaines DC show of his own, could be seen dancing to The Cure.
Little Simz stayed longer to join the Gorillaz on stage, and Robert Smith himself also stood in for Olivia Rodrigo.
So there was always a mix of who came as a fan and who came as an artist. This created a comprehensive feeling of togetherness – which is rare with an audience of 287,000 people.
The xx and the community highlight
The xx’s concert was one of the community highlights of the first weekend in June. As soon as they sang their debut songs “Crystalised” and “VCR”, the audience sang along fervently and even embraced Romy’s solo piece “Enjoy Your Life”. When Oliver Sim moved through the crowd during “GMT”, the balance of closeness and musical force seemed completely rounded.
The fact that the silence and darkness of their tracks could reach a crowd of this size again would not have been on critics’ bingo cards – and yet they blew people away.
Hypnosis, shoegaze and an electric cello
My Bloody Valentine achieved something similar with their hypnotic, wobbly sounds and visuals: despite Olivia Rodrigo performing at the same time, they got a stable crowd to shoegaze with their continuous wall of sound. They needed few announcements to convince.
Neither did Dev Hynes, who opened his slot with an electric cello rendition of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” initiated. He set the tone for all the concert moments to come, which oscillated between longing, darkness and dreamy pop and gave everything even more space.
The Cure: Celebration instead of sadness
Ultimately, The Cure also took some space and performed a two-and-a-half-hour show at a festival. It was the first concert without their guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who died in December. Eden Gallup, son of bassist Simon Gallup, took over Bamonte’s parts – a decision that gave the overall impression something much more familiar.
What Robert Smith and his band showed on stage was a surprise: no mourning, no pause, but the most festive, festival-ready repertoire they could have chosen – a generous parade of singles spanning almost five decades. The Cure delivered a melancholy set that didn’t get lost in sadness, but felt like a gesture forward.
Perhaps that is exactly the real Primavera promise in a nutshell: a festival that is not afraid of the dark resonates loudest.