Wide Awake 2025: Brockwell Park Part Two(Live Review) ^Featured

Wide Awake 2025: A Sonic Manifesto In Brockwell Park

Part Two

Words by Captain Stavros

Pics by Captain Stavros & Garry Jones

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. 

Sprints

Stage: Main Stage | Evening

The wind had started to bite by the time Sprints took the stage, but the Irish quartet brought the kind of furnace-level energy that made you forget all about jackets and chill. If English Teacher were the simmering thesis, then Sprints were the footnote written in blood and all-caps: feral, direct, and completely unbothered by subtlety.

They kicked off with ‘How Does The Story Go?’ and from that moment, the tone was scorched earth. Karla Chubb, vocalist, guitarist, and absolute lightning rod, charged around the stage like someone who’s been told this set might be their last. She roared through each track with the rawness of someone testifying rather than performing. Her delivery is less about notes and more about nerve: shaky in all the right places, cracking open on the high notes just to show you it’s real.

We caught about four tracks, each one sharper than the last. ‘Adore Adore Adore’ turned the entire front half of the crowd into a sweaty, jostling sermon circle. It’s a song that’s half confessional, half primal scream rage against misogyny, performance, and the industry that expects women to package pain like it’s a brand. Chubb didn’t preach, she punched it through with every chorus.

What made their set hit hardest was the balance. Sprints aren’t just fast and loud. They’ve got this unpredictable dynamism, building a track slow and smouldering, then snapping the neck of the tempo without warning. Drummer Jack Callan was a particular standout, pounding the kit with such precision it sounded like the heartbeat of something colossal.

Sprints felt like the band you see in a pub right before they explode. Except this wasn’t a pub. This was the main stage. And they belonged on it.

Where English Teacher intellectualise the collapse, Sprints scream as it’s happening. They're not post-punk as trend, they’re punk as necessity. And as the bassline of ‘Literary Mind’ bled out into the wind, the crowd didn’t so much applaud as whoop; exhausted, elated, stunned.

Next up: CMAT — an orange fever dream with a steel guitar and a mouthful of glittered mischief.

CMAT

Stage: Main Stage | Evening

If anyone could chase the dust clouds kicked up by Sprints and turn them into glitter, it’s CMAT. Arriving on stage in a haze of surrealist camp and singalong swagger, the Irish-born pop-country superstar-in-the-making delivered a set that felt like Dolly Parton at Eurovision after one too many cans of Monster. In other words: completely unhinged, totally fabulous, and just the gear change the festival needed.

The sun had begun to dip, catching on the school-uniformed band (we never did quite figure out the theme, St. Trinian’s on acid? King’s Day in drag?). The crowd had bulked out massively by this point, and if anyone wasn’t yet a disciple, they were quickly won over by opener 'California’. CMAT’s voice; impossibly rich, stretching from belt to twang to full-body sob, bounced over distorted steel guitar and bouncing keys like it owned the park.

There’s a kind of theatrical chaos to her show. She’s self-effacing and whip-smart, cracking jokes between songs about Jamie Oliver lawsuits (yes, she did play ‘Jamie Oliver at the Petrol Station’) and the state of UK tap water, “Is this water? It looks like piss!”, she quipped, before taking another swig. It’s this balance of knowing absurdity and total emotional sincerity that makes her so disarming. She’ll have you crying to ‘I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!’ and laughing through the lump in your throat.

CMAT doesn’t skirt around the political either. Her new track ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’ took direct aim at the BBC’s body-shaming commentariat, flipping the finger at all the ways the industry tries to shape women’s art, image, and size into something palatable. She made no big speeches, she just performed the rebellion, joyfully and defiantly. There was something radical in how unbothered she was by the wind, by the cold, by the bullshit. She danced through it all with a smirk and a middle finger dipped in rhinestones.

The crowd, by this point, was a field of flailing arms and DIY butterfly wings. From our precarious perch atop two bean bags stacked against a piece of festival plywood art (bless the windbreakers), we had a bird’s-eye view of the kind of mass catharsis most artists would kill for.

Where Sprints had electrified, CMAT enveloped. Her set was glitterbomb therapy. A yeehaw answer to every cynical talking head that doesn’t understand why pop can be protest too.

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

Stage: MOTH Tent | Evening

By the time Psychedelic Porn Crumpets hit the MOTH tent, we’d already been knocked sideways by sonic intensity a few times, but nothing quite prepared us for the sheer force of their set. Think: Ty Segall after a power-nap on speed, King Gizzard if they'd taken a wrong turn into Mad Max territory. The Perth outfit didn’t just play loud, they played vivid. Like staring directly into a lava lamp being launched into the sun.

Opening with the fuzzed-out riffage of ‘Hymn for a Droid’, they didn’t bother easing us in. The guitars hit like whiplash, drummer Danny Caddy absolutely pummeled his kit, every crash of the cymbal felt like bin lids being slammed together in perfect, chaotic harmony. Frontman Jack McEwan, hair swinging wildly as he let rip, led us through a dense, layered trip that blurred the line between jam session and meticulously sculpted psych odyssey.

The tent was absolutely rammed, with bodies jammed shoulder-to-shoulder and heads bobbing in mesmerised synchronicity. Smoke filled the air, thick and vaguely suspicious. “What the hell is in that smoke machine, man?”, McEwan hacked between songs, coughing profusely while the crowd howled with laughter, “I can see sound.”

The band snuck in a few deep cuts and new tracks from an upcoming album. While some of that newer material didn’t hit quite as hard as the tested crowd favourites like ‘Bill’s Mandolin’ or ‘Cubensis Lenses’, the transitions between songs were seamless. Their set flowed like one long, frenzied acid spiral, complete with tempo dropouts, false stops, and guitar solos that could melt the enamel off your teeth.

It felt less like a festival set and more like being handed the keys to a malfunctioning spaceship, strapped in whether you liked it or not. And we liked it. A lot.

Patriarchy

Stage: Shackwell Tent | Evening

If Mannequin Pussy were punk’s bleeding heart, Patriarchy was the abyss that stared back. Walking into the Shackwell Tent felt like stepping into a goth-industrial séance: hooded silhouettes, latex glinting under deep crimson strobes, and a smoke machine working overtime to exorcise whatever polite indie ghosts might’ve been lurking.

Hailing from Los Angeles, Patriarchy are less a band and more a sensory experiment in controlled menace. Frontwoman Actually Huizenga, draped in black and bathed in shadow, conjured the ghosts of Marilyn Manson’s mechanical days and the lascivious unease of early Nine Inch Nails. Behind her, drummer The Drummer (yes, that’s the name) beat with a ferocity that made the tent’s flimsy scaffolding feel like it might buckle.

We caught them deep in a set that mixed thudding industrial beats with cinematic vocal delivery, alternating between ghostly coos and violent howls. ‘I Don’t Want to Die’ hit like a club track dragged through a horror film; propulsive, disorienting, erotic and terrifying all at once. The sound was surprisingly pristine for such a murky vibe: heavy but not muddy, synthetic yet surgical. Hats off to the engineer, it’s no small feat making decadence sound this precise.

The tent wasn’t full, but the crowd inside was locked in. A few people near the front were visibly stunned, as if they'd wandered in expecting a standard synth act and got hit with an unholy ritual instead. There was little banter, no nods to topical politics, but Patriarchy doesn’t need to sermonise. Their mere existence, a high-concept, female-led industrial act that flips the male gaze on its leering head, is political performance art at its most weaponised.

Their set didn’t go viral. They weren’t trending on festival TikToks by nightfall. But those who caught even a sliver of it walked away rattled in the best possible way. In a lineup that had its fair share of joyous chaos and singalong catharsis, Patriarchy offered something far rarer: transgression.

Kneecap

Stage: Main Stage | Closing Set

You’ve all read the headlines. The terrorism accusations. The controversy. The refusal to be silenced. Kneecap didn’t just play Wide Awake, they claimed it. Their closing set was less a performance than a confrontation, equal parts party and provocation. And yes, it was absolutely, unequivocally the most talked-about moment of the day.

They opened with 'Kashmir’ and from the first bass throb, it was clear: the sound was flawless. Like being trapped inside a bombastic, bouncing studio session with nothing but low-end and bile. The visuals popped with the cinematic bombast we’ve come to expect; all street-lit menace and grayscale Belfast noir, but it was the tension in the crowd that made it electric. We weren’t watching a show. We were watching a reckoning.

Mo Chara didn’t waste time. Four songs in, the crowd is heaving. Then: “Be careful, plain clothes cops right next to you.” A ripple of paranoia. Another moment later: “You don’t know how close we were to being pulled out of this lineup.” Everyone already knew, but hearing it hit like a lead weight.

The humour cut through too, especially when Mo Chara asked the BSL interpreter, “How do you say ‘cunt’ in sign language?” With a deadpan flash of the fingers, the crowd lost it. Punk theatre at its most profane.

But through all the politics, controversy, and (let’s be honest) paranoia, what stood out was the performance itself. The beats slapped. The flows were as tight as they’ve ever been. And through the long, strange pauses where the set seemed to stall, then snap back into gear, there was a palpable sense of danger. Of risk. This wasn’t polished rebellion. This was the real thing.

Final thought? Kneecap didn’t follow anyone. Everyone else came before them. And when they walked off stage, they didn’t bend the knee. They left a crater.

Closing Thoughts

Wide Awake 2025 was more than a festival. It was a manifesto. One stitched together by artists who know exactly what they’re up against — austerity, censorship, occupation, cultural rot — and play like they’re still not backing down. Support for Palestine pulsed throughout the day, whether shouted between songs, stitched into T-shirt stalls (like Warmduscher’s donations to War Child and Médecins Sans Frontières), or simply implied in the acts of artists who refuse to shut up.

That political edge bled into the local too. Lambeth residents, many locked and priced out of the parks they help fund, were there in force. It’s a strange irony; paying council tax, then a ticket fee, just to see the spaces you sustain become fenced-off playgrounds. But Wide Awake acknowledged that tension, didn’t sanitise it. This wasn’t a glossy Instagram dream. It was real, raw, defiant.

We covered what we could. Former Muso’s Guide chief Kenny McMurtrie stepped in for the sets we missed (working weekends still doesn’t pay in t-shirt merch), and between us, we pieced together a day that felt less like a music festival and more like a broadcast from the near future; volatile, noisy, and alive.

And that future sounds loud as hell.

Next up: An alternative take on the festival with Kenny McMurtrie.