5 Highlights From Primavera Sound 2025 Thursday, June 5
Warmed up by Caribou’s celestial, pitch-perfect set on the opening day of Primavera Sound Barcelona, the first day of the festival proper was all about feeling the heat. Charli XCX, the first of the headlining Powerpuff Girls – whose statue is among the first things you see when you enter the Parc del Forum this year – would take the stage late into the night, preceded by Jamie xx, FKA twigs, and sweltering guitar-driven sets by the likes of julie and Momma. In chronological order, here are five highlights from the first day of Primavera Sound 2025.
julie Whip Up a Storm
I walk down toward the sound of screeching guitar and uproarious drumming introducing the Los Angeles band julie, who maintain their shadowy demeanor under the scorching sun. Despite technical difficulties, their set was tightly balanced between dynamically paced iterations of grunge, shoegaze, and punk, whipping up a storm but letting you catch your breath, even in moments of atonality. “There’s a low hum,” Keyan Pourzand says at one point, and clearing it up recharges the group into highlight ‘pg.4 a picture of three hedges’. Though vocalist/bassist Alexandria Elizabeth’s presence was one of dark nonchalance, it grew more animated on songs like ‘lochness’, and a different emotional resonance when Pourzand joined in on vocals. (Her ribboned instrument was a nice visual touch.) Together, they were aching yet fearlessly hypnotic. I’d enjoyed julie’s debut album, my anti-aircraft friend, but hadn’t returned to it much; their live show not only reminded me of, but crystallised, its strengths.
Cassandra Jenkins, Breaking Open
Cassandra Jenkins played Primavera a la Ciutat a few years ago, an intimate, breathtaking set still etched in my memory. “Did I see any of you in 2022?” Jenkins asks the crowd standing before her at the Amazon Music stage, acknowledging the lines were long. What a delight it is, then, to see her grace this much bigger stage at the main festival, though not without slyly taking a jab at its name. (“That one goes out to all the billionaires in Texas,” she says of ‘Aurora, IL’, which references William Shatner’s Jeff Bezos-funded trip to space.) Her remark led to a string of older songs from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature that were given the space to breathe and shine by Jenkins’ live band, especially as the sax lit up a still-incredibly-moving rendition of ‘Hard Drive’. The new songs from My Light, My Destroyer sounded resplendent, from the distortion ratcheting up on ‘Aurora’ to the stirring guitar work on ‘Omakase’, where her vocals were featherlight and gorgeous. In a live setting, I hear echoes of Jenkins’ Dead Oceans labelmates: Mitski’s subtle theatricality as she acts out the line “punch the clock in the face” in ‘Only One’, Wednesday’s jagged guitar soloing on ‘Petco’. “Gotta play an ocean song,” she says as she looks out at it, launching into ‘New Bikini’: “The water, it kills everything.” Jenkins’ music – not cold, but doggedly warm and open-hearted – can certainly get your blood moving, too.
Momma Turn Up the Heat
As the temperature starts to drop, I head back to the Trainline stage to hear Momma turn up the heat with ‘I Want You (Fever)’, one of the most infectious songs of the year so far. With a punctuated low end courtesy of bassist and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch (drummer Preston Fulks was a force of nature, too) – the band ripped through highlights from their recent album Welcome to My Blue Sky and 2022’s Household Name. While pulling from a lot of the same reference points as julie, whose set they were quick to praise, Momma’s show was hookier, gutsier, and often breezier, though not without Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten maintaining an undercurrent of frustration and longing. It didn’t get more hypnotic than their revved-up, deeply felt cover of Elliott Smith’s ‘Christian Brothers’, which recently debuted on Amazon Music (you could imagine them up on that Primavera stage – give it a couple years). Finishing off with ‘Speeding 72’, they had the crowd singing along and ready to drench in sweat, if they hadn’t already.
FKA twigs, Finally
It was time to head to the main stages, but I was tempted to stick around. This Is Lorelei’s Nate Amos was greeting the crowd in the adjacent Schwarzkopf stage, and I was already bummed his set conflicted with FKA twigs (not to mention Magdalena Bay). It would be so easy to stay and sing ‘Dancing in the Club’ instead of going to hear music actually meant for dancing in the club. Maybe MJ Lenderman, also booked for the festival, would show up for their joint version of the song. Life could be so easy. But I ate my dinner in the dark, in a lonely summer breeze – I could be singing those lines, too – and braced myself, pacing alongside legions of fans determined to live up another Brat Summer.
I couldn’t miss FKA twigs. She’d cancelled her appearance at Primavera Sound twice in a row, and this time she was going to bring Eusexua to the stage. ‘Perfect Stranger’ set the vibe, which was broodingly extravagant and immediately entrancing, showing the audience what the titular word – which she spent so much of the rollout trying to define – is actually about, live in the flesh. More than a form of liberation, twigs and her dancers used their movements as what seemed more like a kind of exorcism, blurring lines between the sensual and the otherworldly. Such was the focus on dance that it threatened to overshadow twigs’ equally acrobatic singing, though most often they felt perfectly entwined and capable of riling up even the tamest fans in the distance, be it through pole dancing or sword choreography.
Among the Eusexua cuts, highlights included the booming ‘Drums of Death’ and freakily extended outro of the title track, while Caprisongs‘ ‘honda’ and ‘papi bones’ served as the show’s melting point. its ballad-heavy third act, dubbed The Pinnacle, required total silence to fully translate – zeroing in on each pause and quiver in her voice – which seemed impossible from where I was standing. Yet it was clear that hundreds of fans were still aching to hear her 2019 hit ‘cellophane’, which wrapped up the show. I’d try to put it into words, but I get overwhelmed.
For Every “It’s So Over”…
Brat fatigue is real, but at this point, I was less interested in assessing the state of a cultural phenomenon than my own physical stamina. Having stayed at the Estrella Damm stage through Jamie xx’s transportive set – which I’d recently caught in a much more intimate venue – I was pretty much tapped out. This was the third time I was going to see Charli XCX at Primavera Sound, and last year was a special one, timed as it was right before the release of Brat. It was all about anticipation, while this show, back at the main stage on the album’s one-year anniversary, was billed as a celebration. Charli had been hyping it up, posting “We’re so back” ahead of the 1:15am performance – during which both her and Troye Sivan’s refrain was more like, “We’re so drunk.” (It was Sivan’s birthday, too.)
As an exclusive European showcase of their SWEAT show, it was more about the interplay between the two stars and the scale of the audience (the biggest crowd Sivan’s played,per his estimation) than Brat itself. Sivan’s set was as gasp-inducing and expertly choreographed as the previous year, but it was a delight to actually hear them singing ‘1999’ together this time. As for Charli, the most exciting moments, at least for someone who was there last year, weren’t necessarily the biggest – except when Chappell Roan revealed herself as the ‘Apple’ girl – but the ones that pushed Brat to the edge. ‘Von dutch’, ‘360’, ‘Guess’, ‘Club classics’ – all those songs were still fun, as were her older hits. But it was the outro to ‘365’, slithering into mania, that was most thrilling; the buzzing frustration of ‘Sympathy is a knife’ and ‘Girl, so confusing’ (nicely bleeding into Sivan’s ‘One of Your Girls’), then unreleased. And most of all, it was the echo of ‘Everything is romantic’, debuted at Primavera so many months ago, and newly determined to prove we’d all keep feeling the heat, time and time again.
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