Wide Awake 2025: Part One (Live Review) ^Featured

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.