Best Kept Secret 2025 blokkenschema dag 3 - zondag 15 juni 2025

Even in yer olden days, you sometimes daydream of being young lovers, hittin’ the road and leaving the turmoil of the world behind for some sweet (mis)adventures. If one band channels this wistful sentiment, it’s The Backseat Lovers. They pen grainy indie rock anthems that channel a rough-and-rumble roots rock earnesty, yet exude a youthful, indie rock swagger all the same. The best of a ton of worlds, really.

Smart guy once wrote ‘To be out of place is what love is for’. Alt country greats Wilco have been out of orbit in their entire illustrious run. How many peers vault between spine-chilling kraut-prog (‘Art of Almost’), ashen country soul ballads (‘Jesus, Etc.’), and thorny noise pop (‘EKG’) with such dumbfounding consistency? Thankfully, when it comes to getting with the program, Wilco keep trying to break our hearts.

Deftones are their own realm, their own mood, their own yardstick. Enigmatic, atmospheric, seductive, intoxicating, and hard-hitting, a rare combination of qualities few bands – if any – have matched. For a good three decades now – from outcast millennials to the TikTok-generation – we have been mesmerised by the group’s impassioned heavy-melodic spells. And at Best Kept Secret, we feel like more.

Acclaimed Ugandan-British artist Michael Kiwanuka's work is miraculous in its simplicity and frankness: a voice smooth like honey, yet resonant and full of stirring conviction. Indeed, Kiwanuka’s distinct blend of soul, R&B, folk, Afrobeat and psychedelic rock sounds plenty otherworldly for the words to hit home, helping all who hear them carry on.

Elephant are what you call a storybook-type of band: four tight knit friends cut from different sides of the same cloth, intent on giving the attuned ear that warm embrace it so craves. These guys have a special knack for crisp alt-country/dream pop gems, where the most pristine melodies scatter into jammier bits like bolts of lightning caught inside a mason jar.

As a 10-year-old, Josh Edwards went to Latin-America on vacation and there, a lightbulb went on in his young mind. Edwards would follow through on this fascination with a pilgrimage of sorts, studying flamenco in Spain and mastering the charango in Bolivia. As Blanco White, he performs soothing yet urgent songs with that unmistakable hot-blooded reverie.

In the songs of Katie Crutchfield – aka Waxahatchee – strength and sensitivity are like two peas in a pod. This acclaimed alt-country artist enchants even the simplest of expressions with lifetimes of experience. Yet somehow, her music also comes across like casual conversation with a loved one on a back porch. Waxahatchee makes you feel like ‘them good old days’ are happening today.

Personal Trainer are no longer the young guns frolicking around the corner, but a band in their prime on second full-length Still Willing. Thank heavens, adulthood isn't making these Dutch indie greats more conservative – quite the opposite in fact. The beloved Amsterdam 7-piece is more adventurous than ever, with deeper urgency anchoring Willem Smit's songwritting. 'Still willing' is indeed an understatement.

You would have had to escape to another dimension to avoid Djo's viral hit 'End of Beginning' in 2022, a song that resonated with millions of people around the world. Other than being a beloved actor, Joe Keery is proficient at penning immediately satisfying synth-pop bangers, proving himself to be a jack of all trades. To be all that and still somehow be underrated? It truly is the strangest thing.

What do you call that thing when you adopt ‘big pop staples’, warp them into your own weird leftfield plaything and, fortuitously, it achieves the same level of acclaim as the ‘big pop staples’ you’re deliberately queering up? Magdalena Bay live to tell this tall tale with their masterpiece Imaginal Disk, an abundantly fun, conceptual electro-funk romp that infiltrated the mainstream like a glitch in the system.

YĪN YĪN are giddy magpies, cherrypicking the juiciest bits from myriad musical forms. Psychedelic rock, dark dub, Thai funk and Anatolian disco: if it has a fingerlickin' good groove, this Dutch fellowship will be quick to concoct their own immediately satisfying version of it. No opportunity to punch a cowbell, bongo drum or massive gong is left unchecked.

The name Dummy may be a red herring once you catch wind of this LA band's intricately-composed psych rock/shoegaze/ambient pop exoduses. Each song is like entering a new level with its own physics, shapes and wavelengths. An emotionally resonant, adventurous act whose ideas swirl with the density of a neutron star.

Indeed, SPELLLING’s Chrystia Cabral is a Queen of Wands: an artist who enchants everything she touches. Her fluid musical lingo often feels like something born from a parallel reality or post-apocalyptic outpost – eighties gothic, sci-fi prog, synth pop, psychedelic soul and classic rock, sprinkled with mischief and dramaturgy in equal measure. There’s nothing quite like SPELLLING, and missing out is a massive L.

Rummage Nate Amos’s Bandcamp page for his longtime solo-project This Is Lorelei, and you’ll quickly realise literally no genre is out of this guy’s reach. We already got that memo when Amos’s other outfit Water From Your Eyes sandblasted Best Kept Secret last year. These days, Nate Amos the songsmith takes point on This Is Lorelei – one foot anchored in the roots, the other in the radical.

BIG SPECIAL’s truth hits like an infernal garbage dump truck of discontent. The British duo of Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney bellow out their misgivings on injustice with massive slabs of post-industrial and post-punk. Hicklin isn’t your dime-a-dozen declaimer-on-the-soapbox either; he's blessed with a resonant, operatic set of pipes that channels the gravitas of a King Lear.

Toronto garage rockers Wine Lips have opted to title one of their records 'Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party'. This fact alone should render the rest of this little bio obsolete. But once you have a taste, you gotta guzzle down. In case you haven't noticed, Wine Lips don't do moderation: cartoonishly fun psych-pop, acid rock, and noise prog – as explosive as a hundred ACME dynamite sticks.

Youth Lagoon – the rekindled longtime project of Boise artist Trevor Powers – embraces listeners in an intimate sonic diorama. Powers' fever dream melodies seem to break apart as quickly as manifest, and his threadbare voice teeters between a childlike wonder and adult sorrow. Music that’s fragile and fragmented, but hits you in the feels like a speeding monster truck.

Fcukers are the perfect afterparty-after-the-afterparty band, where you choose a faded hoody and sweatpants instead of your finest threads. Where you grab a bottle of cheap wine and chill on the balcony. Where friend groups rub shoulders with adjacent friend groups. The music sure does reflect it: infectious electro-pop romps that keep things relatively minimal, imbuing their slam dunk hooks with maximum bite.

Here's a tantalising hypothesis: can brass instruments and thumping four-to-the-floor club sounds fornicate and create something novel and thrilling? Dutch trio Brass Rave Unit did more than just entertain the thought, buffing up this enticing formula to adrenaline pumping effect. Brass Rave Unit morph trumpets and saxophones into unruly textures, and like to carry around a big ass drum for good measure.

Ghent-based punk band Maria Iskariot draw inspiration from malleable questions rather than cast-iron answers. Singer/guitarist Helena Cazaerck has a background as philosophy student and journalist. Not to mention she built her own treehouse (!) in the middle of the forest. The group’s energetic punk anthems appeal to the radical thinkers, dogged dreamers and chronic second-guessers

Is it that classical feeling, divine intervention, or some voodoo bullshit? Point being, a band calling themselves The Thing wouldn’t want to taint too much of the magic. If Grand Funk, MC5 and Zeppelin regularly blare through the tour van speakers, one has no business second guessing a good jam, as it often arrives unspoken and mysterious. Great rock ’n’ roll from certified road dogs, it’s a thing to cherish.

Rocket’s conception reads like the indie rock equivalent of The Goonies. Bassist/vocalist Alithea Tuttle's dream of becoming a dancer shattered by injury, before a pandemic prompted the idea of starting a band of friends. Rocket then dusted off a 1970s mixing console at a local garage sale, sparking their DIY ethos. All that’s missing is a treasure map: retracing 90s alternative rock within a fresh, frisky framework is close enough.

With shoegaze breaking into the mainstream, we’re now witnessing the genre rapidly disperse into vast, novel variants. Philly group They Are Gutting A Body Of Water (TAGABOW)’s inventive take sounds like music festered and fermented in a dusty basement for decades – eroded, discordant songs dwelling the junkyards of dream pop, lo-fi bedroom folk, showtunes, IDM and video game samples.

Gouge Away are kind of like Florida, the place singer Christina Michelle was born: it smolders and swelters, there is death, plus the odd tropical storm. And periodically, something sharp snaps at your ankles. Certainly, the group’s formidable, feverish post-hardcore/shoegaze hybrid reflects likewise aggravating situations. Rock music that’s dangerous, tough and resourceful, creating an art form out of the act of winging it.

Split System blast out fist-pumping, stupidly catchy punk anthems at such a torrid pace, they couldn’t even be bothered to frame their records in any sort of pretentious concept: they are simply called Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. You’d think that by now, said formula would have grown stale, but the Melbourne-quintet keeps knocking it out of the park. The rowdiest social gathering at Best Kept Secret might just belong to Split System.

Merce Lemon’s charming alt-folk episodes surrender to impulse and randomness, juxtaposing the playful with the profound. Lemon’s desire – to paraphrase one of her songs – is to ‘spill it out’: whether it's writing about the migration of crows or her tendency to play the G-chord too much. Her songs magically capture those little thought bubbles that blindside and slip into oblivion