Wide Awake 2025: A Sonic Manifesto In Brockwell Park

Part One

Words by Captain Stavros

Pics by Luke Dyson & Captain Stavros

You've read the headlines: Kneecap closed Wide Awake 2025 with a set that was as politically charged as it was musically compelling. But to focus solely on their performance would be to overlook the rich tapestry of talent that graced the stages throughout the day.

Wide Awake isn't just a festival; it's a statement. This year, the grounds of Brockwell Park were dry and sunlit; a stark contrast to the storm of ideas and sounds that filled the air. From overt political declarations to subtle social commentaries, the festival was a crucible of contemporary thought and artistry. So, let’s dip right into it. 

MANNEQUIN PUSSY

Stage: Bad Vibes | Set time: Late Afternoon

Sliding through the festival gates just in time, we caught the opening riffs of Mannequin Pussy with the urgency of someone who already knew they were about to witness a standout. Last year, we saw them tear the paint off the walls at The Windmill, and if that felt like watching a band shake the rafters of a tiny church, then Wide Awake gave them the altar they deserve.

Frontwoman Missy Dabice doesn’t just command attention; she extracts it from the crowd with a chaotic grace. Across the short 15-minute window we caught, the band tore through tracks like ‘Control’ and ‘Perfect’, a searing one-two punch of emotional desolation and noise-laced catharsis. The contrast of melodic vocals and thrashing guitars never felt cleaner or more purposeful. Their sound isn’t messy, it’s methodical rage refined into melody.

The band’s chemistry is so dialed-in, it feels instinctual. Every dropped beat or guitar squeal feels born from muscle memory and shared trauma. There’s a particular moment during ‘Pigs is Pigs’, where the pit cracked open and one punter went down hard. The crowd paused, helped them up, then dove back in like nothing happened. That wasn’t just crowd etiquette; that was Mannequin Pussy’s ethic in motion; solidarity in aggression.

John Mulaney recently gushed about having them on his show, and frankly, we get it. Their star isn’t rising; it’s erupting, the kind of band you’ll soon be paying triple to see through a sea of phones. At Wide Awake, they reminded us that punk can still feel dangerous, intimate, and rooted in community. If the rest of the festival had been a wash, those 15 minutes would’ve justified the ticket

BDRMM

Stage: Moth Tent | Late Afternoon

Some acts demand your attention with bombast. Others, like BDRMM, ensnare it; slow and low, like fog creeping in beneath the festival’s sun-bleached canopies. The Moth Tent, usually a place of bleary-eyed comfort or post-noon pacing, transformed into a surreal chapel of reverb and dissonance as the band emerged.

Drenched in loops, pedals, and cavernous low end, BDRM delivered a set that felt closer to a séance than a performance. The opener rolled in with a wall of sonic velvet: thick, tactile, and unsettling. Vocals floated in like distant alarms, not quite screams, not quite words. You don’t so much listen to BDRM as surrender to them.

Their sound engineer deserves a raise. In a tent that could have easily swallowed their atmospheric nuance, the mix was laser-cut; from the sub-bass that rumbled like tectonic shifts to the shimmery, high-end distortion that kissed your eardrums without ever piercing them. Guitars were less instruments than conduits, channeling something between shoegaze, doom, and drone-pop, My Bloody Valentine by way of Sunn O))) and Grouper.

We caught about three or four tracks, though in BDRM time, that’s enough to rewrite your neural pathways. One highlight had vocals layered into an inhuman chorus of howls, feedback rising like ghost smoke around the audience, many of whom stood motionless as if in reverence or ritual. No dancing. No phones. Just immersion.

There’s something deeply cinematic about their entire presence. No frills, no posturing. Just pure, uncut atmosphere. If you walked into that tent looking for hooks, you walked out converted to the religion of tone.

While not explicitly political onstage, BDRM’s ambient nihilism felt right at home in a festival increasingly shaped by protest culture and global anxiety. Their set was a study in quiet resistance; not with slogans or flags, but with the kind of sound that dares you to stop tweeting and actually feel something.

Frankie And The Witch Fingers

Stage: Moth Tent | Late Afternoon

We were en route to food, stomachs rumbling, heads spinning from BDRM’s sonic séance, when Frankie and the Witch Fingers grabbed us by the collar with the kind of siren call you only hear once or twice a festival. It wasn’t just the volume. It was the way their fuzz-drenched guitar lines wrapped around your spinal cord and pulled.

You know that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the astronaut goes through the psychedelic wormhole? This was that, scored by a garage-psych band operating at peak velocity. What we caught of the act, they didn’t just play a set, they detonated one.

Launching into what sounded like a seamless blend of ‘Empire’ and newer material from Data Doom, they built massive walls of rhythm that crashed and reformed with every breakbeat. The dual-guitar attack created the illusion of motion blur, like watching a cartoon band vibrating at double speed. The basslines didn’t walk, they rampaged, a stampede beneath the riotous squall above.

Lead singer Dylan Sizemore looked less like a frontman and more like a prophet mid-possession, hair matted with sweat, eyes somewhere else entirely. His vocals weren’t so much sung as spat through a psych-punk filter; urgent, ecstatic, unhinged. But amid all the distortion and wig-out energy, the musicianship was razor-sharp. These aren’t just fuzz merchants. They know exactly when to snap a groove shut or let it spiral out into chaos.

It’s not often you watch a band hijack a tent like that. Everyone inside seemed locked in, half of them spinning in loose-limbed ecstasy, the other half looking like they’d just been hit by the best bad trip of their life. One guy in front of us yelled, “This is what it’s about!” like he’d just discovered the meaning of the universe in a snare roll.

Frankie and the Witch Fingers didn’t talk politics onstage, not explicitly, but theirs was a set of liberation. From genre, from inhibition, from cynicism. They played like a band too good to care whether you got it, because those who did were already levitating.

English Teacher

Stage: Main Stage | Late Afternoon

If Frankie and the Witch Fingers were a fever dream in stereo, then English Teacher were the morning after; where the adrenaline dips, but the introspection cuts sharper. Still riding the buzz of their debut album, This Could Be Texas, the Leeds four-piece delivered a set that felt equal parts thesis and tantrum, holding the audience in a careful push-pull between the intellectual and the primal.

Opening with ‘Albatross’, they set the tone with Lydia Rolke’s haunting keyboard line and Lily Fontaine’s surgical lyricism. Fontaine’s delivery is uniquely hers; clipped, sly, sometimes bordering on performance poetry, sometimes a full-throated howl. It recalls the dry wit of Lambrini Girls but trades in the rage for razor-wire precision. You could hear a pin drop during the verses, only for a tidal wave of slamming bass and guitar crescendos to crush the hush seconds later.

The crowd, already thick and unyielding by the time we arrived, seemed caught off guard by how tightly coiled the band was, how much tension they could build without ever fully detonating. We only caught about four tracks, but each one painted a different shade of discontent. ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’ grooved like a post-punk lullaby for the doomed, while the biting, unreleased ‘Mastermind Specialism’, which we clocked from recent setlists, was a standout: wry, weird, and entirely addictive.

English Teacher are fiercely political, but they don’t resort to sloganeering. Fontaine doesn’t shout her stance; she constructs it, line by line, image by image, until you realise you’ve been hit in the gut with an entire worldview. Between songs, she nodded to the housing crisis and the cultural gutting of the North, though she let the songs speak loudest.

For a band relatively fresh to stages this size, their control was eerie. They filled a massive, roofless space with brooding intimacy, like managing to whisper through a megaphone. You couldn’t get anywhere near the front, but that was fine. This wasn’t music that needed proximity. It found you.

Next up: Sprints — Dublin’s lightning bolt, riding the post-punk revival straight into punk chaos. 

Daffo

The George Tavern

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

A Feverish Dive into Country Chaos

The George Tavern is packed to the rafters. The air is thick with anticipation and the scent of denim, both literal and metaphorical. Daffo, the name on everyone's lips, is set to take the stage, and the crowd is buzzing like a hive on overdrive.

The theme of the night? Denim. An unfortunate choice given the sweltering heat, but fashion waits for no one. As we waited, pressed against the stage like cheese in a toastie, the atmosphere was electric.

Daffo emerges, cowboy boots several sizes too big, exuding a charm that's both endearing and chaotic. Gabi Gamberg’s voice comes in rich and full, her country twang cutting through the room with clarity. A heartfelt "We love you, Daffo!" pierces the air, met with a humble acknowledgment.

"Slow doooaaawoon," Gabi sings, the drawl stretching wide and low. She shares, "This is my first time in the UK ever, super stoked to be here. This is also the first time in my life I've sold out a show, which is really cool." The crowd erupts, knowing this won't be the last.

The audience is feverish, locked into every note. Gabi introduces a new track, ‘Sideways’, requesting a ton of reverb on the vocals. The song dances with itself, the band members swaying as if with phantom partners. The drummer, glued to the kit, seems ready to burst free.

Next up, a winter song is introduced to cool down the room, a miscalculation, as it only turns up the heat. It’s likely the unreleased ‘Winter Hat’, a track that brought more fire than frost.

“I will kill a spider if it gets too close”, Gabi sings. The crowd erupts, joining in word for word. It's ‘Wednesday’, a standout from the 2021 EP Crisis Kit, and the singalong is visibly moving for Gabi and the band, the kind of communion that makes a night feel significant.

"When I'm in hell," Gabi declares, "Let's face it, we're all probably going to hell, but it's gonna be a party!" The fretwork backflips, a rolling lurch of sound that crests and crashes in a sharp, deliberate drop. The audience, far from winded, yells their approval straight through the final note.

"Can everybody bark?" Gabi shouts. The crowd obliges without hesitation. ‘Go Fetch’ launches, a thundering, upbeat tune full of crash-heavy chaos. Picture a mess of distorted dog faces flapping in a frenzy, total absurd joy.

"Cheers everyone!" Gabi hollers, taking a deep pull from a pint. "This next one's about God." The crowd already knows the lyrics to ‘Good God’ and belts along, voice for voice, nearly drowning the band out. The applause afterward is long and loud, the energy unrelenting.

Throughout the set, Gabi’s vocal control is unmistakable; gritty, elastic, but never faltering. The band’s sound has that homegrown garage feel, like someone duct-taped the pieces of a busted Weezer Blue Album and a Kurt Vile B-side together and then let it all play at once in the back of a hot van. Raw and real.

The band's reactions to the crowd’s energy are wide-eyed and ecstatic. They're visibly overwhelmed, exchanging glances of disbelief and joy at every cheer and singalong. The heat only fuels the delirium; by the end, it felt like even the air was sweating.

For the penultimate track, Daffo pulls a volunteer on stage, someone to play harmonica with no real expectation of talent. The result? Total chaos and great fun. The song, ‘Doe See Doe’, was a crowd favourite with the sharpest lyrics of the night.

Setlist Highlights:

‘Sideways’

‘Winter Hat’

‘Wednesday’

‘When I'm in Hell’

‘Go Fetch’

‘Good God’

‘Doe See Doe’

Daffo's performance at The George Tavern was a testament to the raw, unfiltered energy of emerging country-infused indie rock. A night of sweat, sound, and unbridled enthusiasm, a gig that won't be forgotten anytime soon.

M for Montreal

The Old Blue Last

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

QUÉBEC SPRING BLOWS THE ROOF (AND THE PLUMBING) OFF THE OLD BLUE LAST

Ballsy and Alix Fernz ignite M for Montreal’s 20th with soaked ceilings, soaked riffs and soaked shoes
 

It’s bucketing down in Shoreditch and the roof at the Old Blue Last is leaking like it’s on strike, but that’s hardly enough to drown out the buzz as M for Montreal hits town. Celebrating 20 years of building transatlantic bridges between Québec’s artful misfits and the UK’s music heads, the Canadian crew are throwing a party worthy of their rep, and yeah, the bar’s open and the pizza’s free. Good luck topping that, Camden.

First up, it’s Ballsy, and she’s not easing anyone in. Launching her set like a confetti cannon at a kindergarten rave, she’s all heart, hooks and heavy pop glow, the kind that makes you feel like you’re twelve again at your rich mate’s birthday bash. Except this time, the sugar’s swapped for wine and the cake’s a fridge full of free booze.

Her blend of dream-pop and indie grit, fresh off debut EP Bisou, has all the fizz of someone who’s not here to “warm up” the room; she is the room. “We just wanna have a fun time and party with you tonight,” she says, all swagger and sincerity. At one point, there’s talk of death by electrocution, “If I die tonight, someone clear my search history,” she quips, eyeing the water leaking from every crevice. It’s Montreal-in-May levels of damp, but Ballsy’s defiance is electric enough to dry socks.

There’s no drummer, but who cares? The beats are tight, the vibes are looser, and by the time she hollers, “Let’s get fucking weird on this one,” we’re already there. Closing with a shout-out that lands like a manifesto — “Fuck transphobia, fuck genocide, and fuck Donald Trump”, it’s clear: Ballsy isn’t just a party starter, she’s throwing Molotovs at the status quo and handing out glitter for the fallout.

Next up, Alix Fernz, in his UK debut, steps up like he’s been playing these shores forever. No filler, no chat, just a relentless, propulsive stream of fuzzed-out post-punk and lo-fi synthwave nightmares. If Ballsy lit the match, Alix is the firestorm after. It’s all in French, a bold choice that feels like a flex, and it works, tapping into that Molchat Doma-style otherness that makes lyrics feel secondary to vibe.

Imagine early-2000s French indie dragged through a dystopian wormhole and spat out in a leather jacket. There’s a gritty, magnetic stage presence that feels part Iggy Pop, part space crash survivor. At times, the band sounds like they’re playing inside a collapsing satellite, all chaotic drum assaults, upstroked bass lines like twitchy nerves, and synths that glue the madness together.

And yeah, that sound? It is like love songs interpreted by wild animals. There’s something rabid and romantic in the way the disjointed rhythms and maniacal vocals spiral together – and it turns out, they may owe part of the process to mushrooms. Alix is the rare kind of performer you can’t look away from, not because he’s begging for your attention but because you’re afraid you’ll miss something important if you blink.

It’s keenly, violently interesting. A showcase that proves “performance art” and “punk” don’t have to sit at opposite ends of the room, they can pull the pin, then calmly finish the verse.

As the night ends, the crowd spills out into the soaking London streets with cheap pizza slices and a buzz you can’t fake. M for Montreal’s London takeover is more than a showcase, it’s a reminder that the next wave of musical greatness doesn’t always come from LA lofts or East London basements. Sometimes it’s born in snowy provinces and explodes outwards, loud, weird and proud.

If this is your intro to the Québec Spring scene, consider it your call to action. Fernz plays The Lexington on Friday. Ballsy’s still gigging across the UK. The rest of the M for Montreal crew, from Geneviève Racette’s haunting folk to the post-genre chaos of Patche and Truck Violence, are dotted around the country like sonic landmines. Step on one. Trust me.

Death Valley Girls

The Lexington

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

A Laughing Gas Gospel of Joy and Noise

As Bonnie Bloomgarden's supernova grin burned through the haze and her golden sax player sent sunbeams bouncing into the crowd like cosmic flares, it was clear from the first shimmer of ‘Abre Camino’ that Death Valley Girls weren’t here to mess about. They were here to bless us, baptise us, and blow the roof off The Lexington.

That opener? A psychedelic swirl more Marrakesh than L.A., the sax solo hanging over the crowd like incense while the rhythm section kicked in with piston-force precision. Bass thumped, kickdrum pounded, and then that guitar, slung high and scratching down the fretboard like nails on a chalkboard, announced the real arrival. You didn’t just hear this gig; you were wrapped in it. Full, rich, and beautifully balanced, loud enough to shake the room, never enough to drown it.

Bloomgarden, all gothic-Harley Quinn energy and spearmint bravado, slithered her vocals through the mic cable like a conjurer, weaving between the heavy and the heavenly. She looked like she’d been born grinning and never stopped, even mid eye-contact stare-downs that felt part flirtation, part spiritual intervention. Was it a hit of the gas? A higher power? Unclear, but whatever it was, she had it, and we were under her spell.

Death Valley Girls, rotating members or not, sounded locked in. Like a coven three weeks deep into a joyfully possessed tour. Everyone on stage had a mic. Everyone sang. Everyone meant it. The harmonies didn’t just land, they hovered, holding space between punk yelps and doo-wop dreams. Tracks like ‘I’m A Man Too’ were cheeky, righteous mantras in motion, a lo-fi surf-punk hymn for anyone who ever felt like the cool kids were missing the point.

Then there was the moment Bonnie swan-dived offstage, hugging every woman in the front row like some glitter-swathed spirit guide. It wasn’t a gimmick. It was the whole point.

As the set edged toward its finale, Bloomgarden turned to the crowd and cut the theatre: “This is the encore — right now, be here now.” No on-off pantomime, no need for formalities; just three final tracks delivered straight, sweaty, and soul-first.

‘Magic Powers’ hit particularly hard, a track that sounds like what you'd get if John Waters formed a girl gang and made them play garage rock under a full moon. By the time the set closed, there was no doubt: this was church for the beautifully weird. A last night of tour turned full rebirth.

As the last notes rang out and the stage lights melted down, you didn’t feel like you'd seen the end of something. You felt like you’d stumbled into the beginning of a better timeline, one with more saxophones, more spearmint, and more Bonnie Bloomgardens to remind us that joy can still come loud, proud, and slightly off-kilter.