This world isn’t always an easy place to be.
For every sunkissed pint in your favourite pub’s beer garden, there’s that mild throb of anxiety when you open your bank account the following morning. For every afternoon spent lounging in the park with your friends, there’s another spent worrying about whether you’re really ever going to find love; or whether, perhaps, you’re destined for a less-than-glitzy life as an ageing relic of a life you swear you used to revel in, armed with little more than some semi-embellished stories and a more-than-half-realised sense that maybe, just maybe, you’ve nothing to show for your time on this earth.
But sometimes, we’re able to forget those fleeting concerns. And we don’t know about you, dear reader, but we find that there’s nowhere better to help us snap out of those unhealthy headspaces than the sweaty floor of a great gig.
And if it’s great gigs that you’re after, then there’s nowhere better to be than The Great Escape.
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After all, there’s a reason why we keep telling you that it’s the best new and emerging music festival on the planet.
And that, quite simply, is because it is.
We saw far too many breakthrough bands and soon-to-be solo superstars to mention – or, frankly, as the late hours of the night turned into the early hours of the following morning, to remember with any semblance of journalistic reliability. So, we’ve trawled through our collective brains (and camera rolls) and cherry-picked a few of our standout sets from The Great Escape 2025.
Intrigued, dear reader? Well, you should be. Read on, then.
Coach Party
If you were looking to spend your Thursday afternoon being consumed by the kind of high-energy, instantaneous, and ridiculously catching alternative rock music that’ll make the next generation of young ‘uns want to pick up a guitar and try this for themselves, then could could’ve done a lot worse than catching Coach Party’s set.
The Chess Club signees delivered a powerful performance, with highlights coming in the form of new single Girls! and frontperson Jess Eastwood’s seeming determination to ensure that every person in the at-capacity crowd felt like they were being personally attacked during some of the set’s more lyrically intense moments.
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lavender
Atmospheric, intrinsic, and melodic alt-indie was the order of the day on the sun soaked Republic Of Music side stage on the Friday afternoon – and if any band were built for that weather, it’s lavender.
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Badger
Bangers galore, really, innit? Take a plethora of UKG and Bass House hits, throw in a cheeky (and insanely viral) feelgood remix of Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘These Words’, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a party in the early hours of the festival’s Friday morning.
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Keo
If there was one ‘must-see’ band of The Great Escape 2025, it was probably Keo. Even accounting for a strict one-in-one-out policy, if the size of their pre-gig queue is only half an indicator of the success that’s coming their way over the next 12 months, then we think they’re going to be Pretty Damn Big. And for good reason, too – their songs are instantaneous slices of uber-catchy indie-pop, propelled along by throbbing bass lines and choruses that were scientifically designed to embed themselves’ in the listener’s frontal lobe by the time they reach the end of a track.
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Sunday (1994)
Mildly angsty alternative rock, complete with melancholy melodies and the kind of lyrical content that seems custom-built for Lana Del Ray’s fans? Sold. We think that they’re going to be huge.
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Chloe Slater
If anyone can currently lay claim to being the rising star of British Indie, it’s probably Chloe Slater. The Manchester-based singer/songwriter has spent the last year building a sizeable (and vocal) social media following, helped along the way by a burgeoning catalogue of omnirelatable indie-rock anthems. And if her set at The Great Escape was anything to go by, it turns out that she’s pretty good at performing said anthems live, too. Soaring vocals and crashing cymbals combined with a guitar tone so crunchy, Angus Young himself would take notes – it was, dear reader, really quite something.
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