5 Highlights From Primavera Sound 2025 Saturday, June 7

When Primavera Sound announced its 2025 lineup, the big news was that they’d managed to get Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan to headline. But it’s clear that the festival organizers understand convergent fanbases at every scale, which, on Saturday, June 7, meant booking bands like Cap’n Jazz and Los Campesinos! (embracing their emo status), Fontaines D.C. and Black Country, New Road (shaking off the post-punk label), or Chat Pile and Turnstile (transcending hardcore). Yet Primavera is also the only festival where you can hear MJ Lenderman shred just minutes before hearing the guitar solo on ‘Pink Pony Club’, and then from that head directly to the relentless noise-punk of Machine Girl. Here, in chronological order, are five highlights from the final day of Primavera Sound 2025.

Christian Lee Hutson’s Hushed, Heavenly Folk

“I’m no shrinking violet/ I just like being quiet,” Christian Lee Hutson sings on ‘Carousel Horses’, just one of the many lines that stood out during his intimate, heavenly set at the Cupra stage on Saturday afternoon. He’s soft-spoken but personable, hyping up his only accompanying musician, violinist Odessa Jorgensen, while shutting down a fan’s claim that the Quitters cut ‘Teddy’s Song’ is the best song ever written. (“I don’t know if that’ true. The best song ever written is, like, ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ or something.”) Playing songs from Beginners onward, he made tracks like the devastating ‘Northsiders’ feel wrapped up in the same universe as his latest album, Paradise Pop 10. More than just lovely, the set was a reminder of how his songs call back to each other, remembering how it all felt.

Los Campesinos! Put on a Hell of a Show

Few bands were more psyched to play the festival this year than Los Campesinos!, who called it “our white whale until now.” During their blistering, triumphant set, leader Gareth David mentioned the videos fans sent him of ‘Feast of Tongues’ playing on the PA at last year’s festival, and he seemed to choke up while singing the song. It’s just one of the show’s many cathartic and charged-up moments, which included clapping along to ‘Long Throes’ and howling ‘Romance Is Boring’. While several of their albums were represented with at least one song, the set was heavily focused on their most recent, All Hell. “It’s a banger,” David asserts, recommending it as a starting point for the uninitiated. He stretched his voice to the absolute limit on the opening ‘Psychic Wound’ and cartoonishly wept to the line “The punks on the playlist are crooning for kindness.” (IDLES were on the main stage the previous day. Just saying.) “If any of you leave to see Fontaines after this, we are taking names,” he quips, given that their sets were conflicting towards the end. It wasn’t until the end of their set that I headed over – the two bands had at least one shared message, which was freedom for Palestine – but I’d have stayed twice over.

MJ Lenderman’s Eerie, Ecstatic Guitar Heroics

Everyone’s having a great time, and it’s only soundcheck. This could be the vibe for the entire show, you think, and no one in the audience would mind. They’ve skipped Chappell Roan to see a 26-year-old rising star from North Carolina and his incredible live band, featuring Colin Miller (a producer and singer-songwriter who’s helped engineer MJ Lenderman’s records, among many others in the local scene) on drums, Friendship bassist/keyboardist Jon Samuels on guitar, Ethan Baechtold on bass, and his Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis. There were other indie-leaning choices, too: Squid, Cap’n Jazz. But for those gathered at the Cupra stage (turned himbo dome) on Saturday night, Lenderman is an indie rocker with an incomparably heroic status, and this was the last stop of their European tour, so they were going to make it count. “We don’t give a fuck anymore,” he says before the obligatory “just kidding,” and then it’s ‘Joker Lips’ with “Please don’t laugh, only half of what I said was a joke.”

Any hint of aloofness is deceptive. Lenderman (who also joined Waxahatchee the previous day) cares and his band is absolutely locked in, his endearing awkwardness matched by their collectively steadfast dynamism. The show was ecstatic (‘Knockin”, ‘Wristwatch’, ‘She’s Leaving You’) with an undercurrent of eeriness that ballooned on its final stretch, from the feedback-laden ‘Bark at the Moon’ to the closing ‘Tast Just Like It Costs’. Lenderman indulged in a few theatrics here and there, from dragging his SG Firebrand around the stage to pointing it like a gun at the crowd. It was all about the energy, which the audience matched not just by cheering and shouting along but, at one point, singing “Olé, Olé, Olé” to the tune of “MJ.” Samuels fired off a guitar solo on ‘Rudolph’, Miller sang Karly Hartzman’s backing vocals on ‘She’s Leaving You’, and Chelmis’ pedal sang its lonesome duck walk on ‘You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In’, where Lenderman’s melancholy was unguarded. I’ve never seen anyone rock out on the tambourine like Chelmis did during ‘Tastes Just Like It Costs’, and I hope we get to hear him screaming on the next Wednesday record. “Best show of all time, I think,” Lenderman remarked, circling back to a promise he made to someone backstage. Please don’t laugh, etc.

Chat Pile Rattling Off Train Movies at Trainline

Chat Pile on the Trainline stage, kicking ass. Raygun Busch, wearing a shirt in that photo, which is deceptive, because it didn’t take long for him to take it off. Chat Pile on the Trainline stage: Raygun Busch rattling off train movies. Unstoppable with Denzel Washington. The Train starring Burt Lancaster. “This is all for you, Trainline.” Train to Busan, maybe the best zombie movie ever. “I’m in an altered state.” ‘I Am Dog Now’. Ever read The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau? “Why do people have to live outside?” Mystery Train. The First Great Train Robbery. All out of train movies. We’re by the beach though, right? The Beach. Leonardo DiCaprio. Some guy’s favorite movie. ‘Tropical Beaches, Inc.’ Old by M. Night Shyamalan. Fuck Old. Of course this guy has a Letterboxd account. Wonder how much shorter their set would be if they were on the other side at the Schwarzkopf stage – would love some hair movie recommendations, though. ‘Funny Man’. Free Palestine. Chat Pile. Trainline. Kicking ass.

Commencing Turnstile Summer

A year ago, Charli XCX kicked off what would soon be known as Brat Summer with her late-night set at Primavera Sound’s Amazon Music stage just days before the album’s release. She returned to the festival this year to celebrate Brat‘s one-year anniversary, but not without previously suggesting “Turnstile Summer” would be a worthy successor, so it’s only fitting that the Baltimore outfit would play the same stage at 3:00am on the final night of the festival. The crowd was thrilled to hear them just a day after the release of Never Enough, the follow-up to their 2021 breakthrough Glow On, erupting on every single song from that album yet already palpably familiar with the new material. The balance turned the show – bookended by footage of waves crashing on the beach – into something breezier, more meditative, and vulnerable than their 2023 Primavera performance, but no less buoyant. As soft and pensive as their music can get, it’s an entirely positive energy we could feed off for months to come.

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