It’s the people that make the atmosphere whether they’re playing instruments or not. Music wise, Portals festival provides a space for a wide spectrum of artists to come together who might not have an obvious, or at least regular, home elsewhere.
Lewis from Enemies made this point during his band’s set, for example, clearly excited that a math rock band can – for once – find a line-up where they’re not outliers but are playing alongside other acts of a similar ilk. In my preview article for Echoes & Dust, I emphasized the festival’s focus on the spectrum of rock in previous editions. While many of the bands this year do fall into that spectrum, it doesn’t quite do justice to the diverse range of music that I encountered at Portals 2024, even if the majority utilized electric guitar in some form. It can’t be easily whittled down to genre or sub-genre – although precise, snaggy, angular styles always seem to go down well, as will bands who tell nuanced sonic stories without words.
The point is that, at Portals, a lot of bands who don’t fit in elsewhere – too experimental, too eclectic, too idiosyncratic – can feel they’ve found not just a home but a community. And it’s important to emphasize how international this edition was, with bands connected to Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as Canada, Europe and Scandinavia.
Enemies. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
And it felt a bit like that for me too: like returning to a wonderful home, if a busy one with a lot of stairs. Portals has exactly the atmosphere that I always want from a music festival: of walking through, well, a portal and into a nerdy utopia where everyone “gets” you. Every interaction throughout the weekend – between other fans, venue staff, security, volunteers, vendors, musicians, photographers – was friendly, warm and convivial. So at the start and the end of the day, it’s the people who make the atmosphere..
Joe Norman makes friends. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
But clearly, a load of great bands and a triple-decker, kitted-out venue helps too! EartH Hackney provided our Portals home for the second year in a row, and I look forward to returning there next year. While I unfortunately did not attend the previous editions held in The Dome, Tufnell Park, it seems clear that the festival has outgrown those stages, with the organizers proudly announcing their biggest selling event yet. It felt busy at points, but never uncomfortable. It does mean that you spend a fair bit of time traipsing up and down narrow stairwells to get from Bar to Theatre to Hall – pretty exhausting even for an able-bodied person – but the one-way system made it feel safe, and I understand that two stages are accessible through other means. If I have one suggestion, it is that the food arrangement could be expanded somehow to work more speedily: Feed the Village provided truly delicious vegan food, working at a formidable rate, yet the queue was often still long and unwieldy, cutting into precious time reserved for the smorgasbord of sonic treats also available. But I’m sure our trusty organizers are on the case.
Årabrot. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
And it’s certainly tough to select highlights from that smorgasbord, with so much on offer. I think Årabrot, Norway’s finest eccentric Gothic rockers, provided the most sheer fun for me, with huge sing-along choruses (“Wooo, we want blood!”), melodramatic stage gestures (Bull Horns, Target Practice, Supplication) and a truly exuberant energy. Ripping through a short-but-sweet set of mainly new songs from the superlative Of Darkness and Light, Årabrot are perhaps one of the more traditional bands on the bill in terms of songwriting, but are still a perfect fit, and I overhear excited new converts across the weekend.
Årabrot. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Yama Warashi, the project of London-based artist with Japanese heritage Yoshino, was simply one of the most interesting for me, combining aspects of Japanese folk dance and tribal African music with more familiar styles like heavy psychedelia. Bringing a three-piece to the wide Theatre stage doesn’t feel spare when your band wears such colorful robes. Yama Warashi’s songs weave together reggae bass, xylophone melodies, precise percussion, and heavy grooving in unusual scales. Yoshino lyrics are sung, I assume, in Japanese and offers a few words on the inspiration for each track to orient us: “intuition and delusion”, “about veganism”, “on sunsets”. Yama Warashi offer an uplifting, joyful, and very danceable musical experience that can’t be reduced to just “World Music”.
MØL. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
I can say with certainty that Danish band MØL were the most intense band of the festival, providing a singular, late-night experience: unrelentingly savage yet bright and transcendent. Comparison points include the most blackgaze moments of Alcest or Deafheaven, but MØL are too introspective for the former and too harsh for the latter. Their vocalist Kim makes the Theatre seem small as he stalks the stage, leading a stylish band decked out in suits, and demonstrating supreme vocal control and charisma. Close behind in terms of intensity, Year of No Light from Bordeaux, France, provided the heaviest moments of Portals 2024. This is claustrophobic, uncomfortably loud, drone metal of the most effective and the most emotive kind. (I’m not sure how I saw them for the first time here, given they appear on the line-ups of two other festivals I attended, emblazoned on the backs of the crowd-members in front.)
Year of No Light. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Overhead, the Albatross carried the flag for the most emotive, post-rock experience of Portals 2024, distinguished from others in the genre especially by their use of keyboards. They can build from gentle, delicate piano ambience to a tear-jerking crescendo in what feels like seconds, with energetic, bass-driven segues in-between. Like all the best post-rock bands – your Godspeeds and your MONOs – Overhead know how to climb to a peak but then build there, keeping you trapped in the overwhelming turmoil of emotion in that moment. Frankly, it’s one of the best musical experiences you can have – so long as you don’t mind crying into your rum amidst strangers. Around the middle of the set, Overheard’s frontman gets out a lyric sheet, using partially-audible poetry (“I want to succeed in your eyes”) to anchor the instrumentals in more concrete emotions. Following this, we all need the jokes he cracks about the UK’s penchant for bubble tea.
Overhead, the Albatross. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
We also get those post-rock peaks with Wang Wen 惘闻 from China and This Will Destroy You from the US. Adding trumpet and tuba into the mix gives Wang Wen 惘闻’s compositions a particularly mournful, wistful timbre which this crowd clearly responds to with great feeling, whether we’re reclining on the Theatre steps or pressed together at the wide space at stage-front. This Will Destroy You are very happy to have finally made it over to Portals for the first time, so it’s a shame that tech problems threaten to mar their headlining set. Loud electric crackling does break your immersion somewhat, but the band take it in good stride, and most of the set continues without further incident. They play several tracks from their self-titled album “for the first time in a while”, finishing with the twelve minute epic ‘Little Smoke’ from 2011’s Tunnel Blanket. TWDY take us from the most tender, intimate moments to huge cacophonies – pin-drop silence to awesome, crushing heaviness – in what seems like no time at all. And I am almost relieved at their final note, such is the force of the landscape of emotions that their music conveys.
Wang Wen 惘闻. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
TWDY. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Slow Crush from Belgium also provide emotional heft, but of a different kind. Almost entirely shrouded in smoke for their set, this quartet could not be more perfectly named. Slow Crush’s lush shoegaze has the vibe of Miserable’s candy-sweet doom or Team Sleep’s gorgeous stoner stupor: music to become absorbed by, like imbibing muscle-relaxing smoke or emerging from a strange and languid dream.
Slow Crush. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Japan’s LITE were definitely the most eclectic and danceable band I saw at Portals 2024. Combining quirky, frantic rhythms, distorted vocals, math time-signatures, and chiming synth lines, this crew provided a performance as bewildering in its break-neck genre shifts as it was joyous in its attitude of sheer, danceable fun. It felt like the bass truly leads this band, with a slap tone that forms a through-line for this disparate assortment of styles. I don’t think I’ve skanked to ska for a very long time, and certainly never in the midst of a funk-punk, post-rock epic. Perhaps comparable in terms of eclecticism,
LITE. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Elephant Gym from Taiwan were a real discovery, managing to combine most of the intensity, heaviness, fun, and emotionality mentioned above in a quietly virtuosic performance. On tracks like ‘Witches’, this experimental trio meld the jerky rhythms and complex chords changes of modern jazz and funk with a post-rock sense of narrative and crescendo. Singer KT Chang leads the band with her bass as much as her voice, winning the crowd over instantly with her sense-of-humor and charismatic honesty (“buy our merch! Touring in Europe is really expensive,” “Sorry I played that really bad”).
Elephant Gym. Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
I could continue at length about the bands I’ve highlighted above, and all the others I didn’t have the chance to mention. But I will leave this overview here, simply imploring all who enjoy original, unpredictable and eclectic underground music to come along and contribute to the atmosphere we can expect at Portals Festival 2025.
Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
Photo: Talie Rose Eigeland
