Music

The Primavera Sound 2018 Lineup Is a Work of Art

Unfortunately for other music festivals, Barcelona’s Primavera Sound has just announced its lineup. In doing so, it has potentially become one of this summer’s most-group WhatsApped destinations for music fans – and, in particular, the pissed up Brits who’ll be missing their precious Glastonbury while that festival is on one of its fallow years. Before I go on, I’ll let it speak for itself:

Plakaten til Primavera Sound 2018

OK, so, let’s see. There in the big print we’ve got motherfucking Björk alongside Nick Cave for what appears to be an extremely ~Legends Only~ Thursday night. They’re followed by The National and Migos on Friday (this, for me, is great billing from Primavera, and is also an example of the way they manage to make a festival featuring about a million genres work, with no set of fans feeling relegated). To top everything off, in what is big news in particular for a non-southerner like myself, Arctic Monkeys tie everything up on the Saturday. It’s not too far off from some of the great (and obviously similar) names we’ve seen booked for London’s All Points East festival, about which we got rather excited last autumn.

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The quality isn’t just reserved for the large names, however: in the slightly smaller print we’ve got such multi-genre gold as Arca, Jorja Smith, Superorganism, Abra, Mount Kimbie, The Internet, and Jay Som, and Primavera’s always-strong electronic music offering hasn’t faltered this year either, with a special Four Tet-curated section, a six-hour set from Floating Points, and a great deal more for the heads.

Primavera 2018 also does well on gender diversity, with a lot of woman artists, and bands featuring women given ample space on the lineup (Fever Ray, Chvrches, Haim, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Breeders, Lorde, and Beach House, amongst others, are all high profile acts on the bill). This shouldn’t really be worthy of pointing out, but unfortunately it’s rare that women get the space they’ve earned on festival lineups, so when they do it’s worth celebrating.

Anyway, now that you’re properly tempted (if you don’t have a Skyscanner tab open right now what are you even doing?), the info you need is that Primavera Sound 2018 takes place at Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum from 30 May until 2 June. See you down the front – mine’s a Fanta Limón.

Buy tickets to Primavera Sound here.

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