Outbreak Festival 2025: Proof that Turnstile summer has commenced
On June 13th, London became terrified of itself. Highs of 27 degrees meant infrastructures shuddered like dogs overheating on a porch, threatening breakage. Victoria Park pickled, green grass blooming brown. For the debut of Outbreak festival, a celebration of hardcore in its 14th year, hailing from a happy reception in Manchester, things were poised to go wrong.
Collapsed into a tiny space that could be traversed fully in less than five minutes, LIDO festival acted as host for the hard-rock festivities. Charli XCX would headline the next day, which was perhaps the festival’s first problem; popular names in the hardcore genre were stuffed into the tiny ‘The Club’ stage at random times. Take Sunny Day Real Estate, a cult band huge in the 1990s. Forcing their outrageous emo cataclysms into a tent operating a one-in-one-out system is a huge blunder. The general consensus, confirmed or not, was that the LIDO organisers didn’t know quite what to do with the eclectic genres that’d dropped onto their lap.
One band that seemed suited to The Club’s melting-pot mania was Pennsylvanian shoegaze outfit They Are Gutting a Body of Water. After two sold-out nights at London grassroots venue The George Tavern, the four-piece provided the first twitterings of distortion, though leaned too heavily on electronic tracks fused between songs. They didn’t look at the crowd once, which seemed standoffishly cool in the way only certain Americanisms can.
That poky stage with a constant snake of addled rock-heads slithering about its belly hosted some of the best moments of the day. During Jane Remover’s set, the hyperpop-cum-rage-rap star twisted and grooved, yelling over glitchy songs screamed back word-for-word by an enraptured crowd. Squeezing furious energy into a 30-minute set, Danny Brown made a cheeky appearance. Riding the same energy, the exclusive set from queer industrial outfit Model/Acrtiz saw Cole Haden dancing gloriously within the crowd.
Over on the main stage, a breezy indie-pop set came from Momma, who only recently delivered a punchy Jimmy Kimmel rendition of stand-out single ‘I Want You (Fever)’ from their latest studio album, Welcome to My Blue Sky. New infidelity-focused track ‘Rodeo’ glimmered to show a band comfortably sailing through an impressive tour circuit. Only more surprising were Los Angeles three-piece Julie, who returned to the capital after cancelling a London show on the day due to a family emergency only months ago. Sexy and self-assured, they strutted through a solid shoegaze set, prognosticating a future for the genre that is as lavish as it is lascivious. The kids were all in.
Rapper Danny Brown danced cheekily across the main stage to provide a welcome lightness to the day. “Every time I’m in London, I feel like I’m back home,” he cheered. One couldn’t say the same for Alex G; not even as the heat relented could the songwriting maestro pick up enough threads to spell out success. Facing a slightly underwhelmed and underwhelming crowd, the singer boasted only one show under his belt for 2025, and it showed. He played an unreleased single, leery with a country twang that sounded surprisingly like MJ Lenderman. His new single, ‘Afterlife’, missed the bill entirely.
In 2013, a tiny band hailing from Baltimore made their UK live debut at the Vox in Leeds, where the third year of Outbreak was forced to relocate. The tale came from Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates, as he faced an audience that finally bulged with all the promise of the day coming to a head. Though arriving 20 minutes late, the next ninety minutes raced by in a pressure cooker of bodies on bodies on bodies. There was relief about the set, finally. Here’s what we’d all been waiting for.
Opening boldly with the eponymous track from recent album, ‘Never Enough‘, Dev Hynes, also known by the stage name ‘Blood Orange’, tore the hardcore sound open with an extended flute solo. Despite their recent high-brow adventures with a visual album recently debuting at Tribeca Film Festival, the band delivered a set that paid homage to their roots. The crowd, slipping in the rain now tumbling from above, broke out into a “Free free Palestine!” chant in reaction to a festivalgoer’s shirt broadcast on the screen. Yates roared it back, and a fresh stream of crowd-surfers lost layers to the beast of the beat.
The set purged any lasting phantoms of useless queues and missed sets. Instead, as we walked home, lightning struck the black London sky. The hoards of sweat-soaked, rain-glazed fans cheered at the rumblings, laughing out of sheer humanness. Oh, to be amused by the beauty of noise. It seemed a fitting way to end a day filled with the twists and turns of bodies thwacking together over oft distorted guitars to find a place that finally stuck.
