Line-up The Cashbah Best Kept Secret 2025

Divorce are right in that sweet spot between the candid and the camp. The duo of Tiger-Cohen Towell and Felix MacKenzie-Barrow have a background in acting, which explains why their songs often feel like tiny scenarios playing out. Divorce have an uncanny knack for great melodies and winning hooks as a counterbalance, creating a warm-hearted closeness even when their music sprawls all over the place.

Two of the most prolific Dutch indie figures of the past decade also share another not so insignificant trait: they are romantic partners. Pip Blom's Pip Blom and Personal Trainer's Willem Smit form new joint project Long Fling, which sees them return to their scrappy lo-fi roots. Songs about "socks, shoes and staying home", where unspoken sentiment hides elusively between the lines.

Korean punks Sailor Honeymoon keep it all delightfully simple: great riffs and even better hooks performed with a spontaneous plug-in-and-play attitude. Not without its sharp edges either: “Bad Apple” takes aim at that one person in the friend group that turns out to be a complete a-hole, and “PMS Police”, well, that title should speak for itself. Sugar-coated discontent at its best.

There’s still so much unmapped territory within the indie rock spectrum, and Chicago’s Horsegirl have bitten a hefty chunk out of it. They found the sacred pipeline between Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, which not so coincidentally got them inked by legendary indie stronghold Matador Records. Horsegirl’s songs channel nostalgic serenity and blissful noise: like those first jolts of love and attraction.

Frost Children’s dazzling party anthems are like pulling a slot machine again and again: colorful, clamorous, vulnerable and delightfully random. Nothing's off limits within the flamboyant hyperpop-wonderland siblings Angel and Lulu Prost have created; a universe where disparate styles like screamo and electroclash miraculously overlap. Invite all your friends, colleges and evil exes up to the front.

Like a hefty rainbow-coloured hurricane, Kenyan producer and artist Kabeaushé hoovers up and absorbs everything they encounter. This chronic curiosity manifests into their own boisterous, warped brand of pop music. The jagged strangeness of Kabeaushé's productions is saturated with a surplus of sass and explosiveness. If you need a good workout, this is the place to be.

L.A. Sagne admit that they don’t talk much about practice. But when it’s time to play, you better believe this loud, frenzied Amsterdam quartet goes hard in the paint. Noisy punk rock is L.A. Sagne’s chosen vehicle to express modern anxieties, executed with the irreverence and swagger of a skunk in a perfume factory. When this bunch invades a space, chaos tends to follow rather quickly.

One thing is abundantly clear with Thai funk/psych rock collective Khana Bierbood (translation ‘Strange Brew’): they just sound so friggin’ good on stage. The Bangsaen Beach group has an infinite supply of mouth-watering grooves and radiant guitars, swerving and curling around each other like philanderers in courtship. A bath for your brain and a fairground for your feet.

Fast-rising Irish band Cliffords soundtrack a shared experience as vibrant, maturing, and unapologetically Irish youth. Their songs capture the complexities of love, heartbreak, and the self-reflective nature of our generation. What started as a bit of fun gradually manifested into a familial bond between musicians devoted to writing songs that detail the trials of love and sadness.

Build things up, break them down and do that again and again. That's the gig Dutch rock band Paceshifters signed up for. They embrace it with unwavering belief, with always that next hurdle to clear. Paceshifters have full autonomy to figure it out as they go, which allowed their high velocity grunge/punk heyday to evolve into a frayed and melodic alt-rock sound.

With an album title like ‘Slightly Hysterical Girls with Pearls’, Amsterdam’s Baby Berserk give a rather outré premise of their work. Sure, they may look like they're in the midst of a post-fashion show limo bender. But their art punk shenanigans teem with primal punk fury and burlesque comedy. Baby Berserk are endlessly entertaining, understatedly political and the best type of weird one can conceive.

When your lyrics hit so deep that it triggers a wealthy member of the establishment to slide into your DMs, you know you’re doing something right. Norway noise rock/post-hardcore/heavy metal behemoth Daufødt are a hard-hitting, highly innovative unit whose music directly reflects a world on fire. Life is indeed pain, and Daufødt are here to inflict.

Television used to be that thing that rots your brain if you watched it too much, but such concerns seem pretty quaint today. Brooklyn’s TVOD (Television Overdosis) defy the whole ‘too much of a certain thing is bad’ medley with catchy-as-sin, piercing punk rock anthems, which seem to be in endless supply. For this bunch will make you believe you can jump a damn mountain by the time they’re done.

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.