Battling mounting odds, and the encroaching horde of dead-eyed money men, the Supersonic crew keep the torches burning for the experimental and the just plain weird. Despite continuing venue difficulties, 2025’s edition of the festival was as great as ever, a defiant celebration of musical exploration and the shared magic of performance. The world may be on fire and worsening by the hour, but we do not have to submit or let the horrors consume us entirely. You have to hold on to your joy. In recent times print project Black Lodge Press has been a regular at the festival, and one of their posters this year offers a fitting exhortation – “For Music! For Art! For Life! For The Death of Fascism!”
Embodying the notion of music as a valuable escape from the grim, grey world, Mermaid Chunky bring a carnival of colour and good times. They wear loud outfits and there’s a decent amount of whimsy (their psychedelic films feature hedgehogs quite a lot, and rarly on they interpolate lyrics from ‘Little April Showers’.) As such they have all the makings of a crowd-splitting turn, but do you wanna be the kind of sourpuss weakener who whines about their joy? Well do you, punk? That’s what I thought. Their music sidesteps reservations about theatricality by being sparse and flowing, and carrying many entwined threads of festival music, from folk through hippies to house, as if they were weightless. If you were sleep deprived and day drunk in a field you’d be helpless to resist. ‘Céilí’ builds from multiple loops of recorder and a beat -up old drum machine; as it gets going, the costumed dancers that have been weaving through the crowd arrive onstage. It is a little bit like The Wicker Man set on Balamory, but charming enough to win you over.
Chunky Mermaids. Photo: Rob Barrett
If you remain stalwartly uncharmed, then Water Damage are here to bring the noise and fry your head. A drone -rock collective based in Austin, Texas, Thor Harris opens the set by patiently introducing the seven musicians on stage, revealing a couple of UK members joining for this performance. They work up a growing squall of sound for a few minutes before the double drummers kick in. The beat is a blank double-snare hit spaced a couple of seconds apart – a metronomic thud rather than a groove. It doesn’t propel things forward so much as hold them in line, like fence posts in a storm. The band producing vast, textured, thunderhead of sound that envelops you.
It didn’t occur to me at the time but I’m pretty sure it’s a version of ‘Reel 25’ from the recent Instruments album. The pedigree of the musicians involved in Water Damage is considerable but Thor is probably the most high profile, and because of his time in Swans they are often mentioned in pieces about the band. Despite this I’ve never before considered any musical similarity but this has that remorseless, unwavering trudge. As their recordings run the 20-minute length of a tape, I vaguely expect they might play a couple; yet at some unclear point it becomes clear they’re just going all the way through. Time crumples and evaporates, the music becomes a whirling hypnotic thrum. Overtones, undertones, hallucinatory ghost sounds move in and out. It’s sensational stuff, an absolute highlight.
Water Damage. Photo: Joe Singh (@snaprockandpop)
Moin are an altogether more cerebral and anxious experience. They deconstruct sounds from 90s alt-rock into collages of texture and mood that prove particularly pleasing to those of us who love that stuff, but are largely underwhelmed by more recent bands’ attempts at it. Increasingly, the vocal tapes they use have moved to centre-stage and I was curious how they might work live, being something of a stress point in the performance/production duality. ‘Melon’, one of the older tunes in the set, comes early and seems to address this with a wry nod, “Hello, do you hear me? Can you hear me? You don’t know me…”
Moin. Photo: Rob Barrett
I was worried the careful vocal placement in their recordings would be hard to replicate with clarity, but in truth they don’t rely on them so much, and the absence of a vocalist as some kind of focal point, or bridge, to the audience is possibly more of a problem. They face inward, concentrating, washed in pale-blue light, playing their strangely disembodied music. Now, I know it’s a bit rich to hail a band for their dreamily abstract, dissociated music and then expect them to function like a regular rock band onstage, but I felt some of the magic of the recordings had evaporated. As great as it is to watch Valentina Magaletti’s fluid and extraordinary drumming carrying the whole thing forwards, there was something ghostly about it; a bit bloodless.
Zu. Photo: Ewan Williamson.
By contrast Zu operate at full tilt – a raging, skronk punk assault. They’ve got dynamics and some contrast between the elements, but all three of them seem to go at it with maximum intensity, all the time. It’s bracing. This is the first time I’ve made it over to Norton’s, which is subbing as second venue today. It’s absolutely rammed in here, which only adds to the hectic overload of the show. For better or worse it’s unusual for anything to feel this uncomfortably packed at Supersonic. Norton’s is a decent enough small venue, but it’s taking on the acts that would have played in XOYO and there may not be quite enough room for Zu. Generally, the opposite applies; the majority of acts playing this festival are never likely to play a venue as large or grand as the O2 institute under their own steam. Yet I’m not aware that any of them were daunted by it or unable to fill the space sonically; they’re at home on the big stage if they get the chance. This is one of the things Supersonic does so well, bringing together artists and audience for challenging, adventurous, performances. At one end of the scale this is facilitating UK exclusives for international acts like Backxwash, Witch Club Satan and Funeral Folk; at the other, it’s introducing smaller UK acts like Death Goals, Meatdripper or ZD Grafters to an appreciative community of like-minded music lovers. For Music! For Art! For Life! For The Death of Fascism!
