Line-up The Secret Best Kept Secret 2025

He might look like a dude pulling all-nighters in an expensive three-piece suit, Harrison Patrick Smith has done his diligent homework. The returns of all this prep is The Dare, Smith’s 2005-has-never-left reality filter taking us right back to an era of shutter shades, side bangs and sleaze. An open electroclash-forum to be your most debauched self. Neither your H&M nor your Balenciaga-pose shall be frowned upon.

Everyone in the world of electronic music knows the name Antal. This renowned Dutch DJ has been a true renaissance man as founder of record store firm Rush Hour. From vintage disco to cutting-edge techno, Antal’s curiosity for the unknown and undiscovered is never satiated. You always can count on him to handpick that elusive deep cut or obscure gem that unlocks new windows in both body and soul.

Dutch pop act of Droom Dit is pure passion unchecked. And you don’t need to speak a lick of Dutch to feel the resonant, expressive voice of Sam de Laat pierce through your very insides. Seeing Droom Dit perform is the equivalent of the floodgates opening up, drowning the landscape in tides of synth-wave, baroque pop and pulsating electronics. An experience that’s transformative, intense and above all… alive.

One person’s trash is another person's treasure. This saying certainly holds true for Congo collective Kin’Gongolo Kiniata, who use recycled objects to make drums, guitars, xylophones and whatever your imagination can dream up. It takes a certain level of artistry to make these things sound amazing as well, and Kin’Gongolo Kiniata truly crush it with their ingenious variant of Congolese rumba rock.

Cassandra Jenkins’s alternative folk is attuned to strange twists of fate and random encounters, often coalescing in such a magical way that one stops believing in these things called coincidences. Her songs build little rooms in time, exulting in both the cosmic and the everyday with peerless sensitivity and an unbridled curiosity for life.

Belgian rapper Brihang has a background in sculpting. His music brings similar qualities, patiently chiseling away to the heart of the matter. Life rarely cooperates with dreams, and it’s often those little detours that inspire his poetic, soul searching bedroom productions. Brihang offers food for thought on the familiar dilemmas, touching base on relationships, ambitions, craftsmanship and everything in-between.

Since we’re a festival in the middle of the woods, forest dwelling deviants Snapped Ankles should blend right in at Best Kept Secret. Their music might be bit more left of centre than, let’s say Fraggle Rock, but nevertheless, there is a fun feral energy to their overgrown psych kraut voyages. Rock concert or pagan ritual, you decide…just remember to drink full and descend!

Great things come in pairs: Rick & Morty, Ken & Ryu, Thelma & Louise. Belgian duo Lander & Adriaan are akin to the latter: ditch all their former projects with a blood pact and ride off the proverbial cliff with a joyous jazz/electronica blueprint. The middle duo, because their music packs a punch. And the former, because their entire stage set-up looks like some wacky science experiment. A headstrong, massively addicting affair.

Few DJ’s and producers underscore the ‘deep’ in ‘deep house’ quite like Danilo Plessow. His sample-based Raw Cuts series on his influential imprint Motor City Drum Ensemble gained almost mythical status among clubbers and tastemakers alike. Plessow harnesses a visionary ability to fuse samples with hardware – crafting club music from that same gut feeling and spirituality as the records it inspires.

Initially, Jacob Alon studied for a career in medicine. But as it turns out, they did become a healer, by means of a guitar and an otherworldly voice. Alon’s modern folk hymns fearlessly explore fantasies of imagined love and a deep sense of yearning when reality doesn’t quite match up with the fantasy. With just a handful of songs out, Alon has already established themself as one of music’s most remarkable new voices.

jasmine.4.t writes mercurial indie rock anthems that transcribe, in her own words, “unrepressed queer woman joy”. The Manchester artist’s debut LP You Are The Morning, produced by none other than boygenius-members Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, documents Jasmine’s personal roadmap of queerdom, meditating on intimacy, heartache, camaraderie and transfeminine life.

The Pill describe themselves coyly as ‘jank punk’, an umbrella term for everything messy, noisy and fun. Imagine your scrapped drafts of social media posts being converted into riotous punk anthems, and you get an sense of Lily Hutchings and Lottie Massey’s irreverent, highly entertaining song craft. Usually it’s random chaos that triggers it: from peeping tom scaffolders, car accidents to the burdens of being blonde.

Vocal harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place at a wholesome high school musical recital, juxtaposed with dazzling, nightmarish prog-jazz plunges?? Ugly stretch the idea of what constitutes a song to stupendous new limits, and they do it with startling exuberance and ease. The Cambridge-based unit is like a Pandora's box for the adventurous ear, rendering the good and the bad utterly obsolete

Within the simplest chord progression, Christian Lee Hutson materialises fully-fleshed out scenes and characters; both the small, magical mundanities and the larger hopes and dreams. His songs often depict wryly funny, hard luck tales within the promenades of Midwestern suburbia. This is a guy who rhymes ‘Morrissey apologists’ with ‘different colleges’, and makes it sound natural and poignant

The moods King Hannah put you in, Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle can pull you out of them just as smoothly. So what moods exactly? How about a bewitching brand of art rock that works splendidly in clandestine cocktail bars straight out of a spy movie. Don’t accuse King Hannah of pinning themselves down, though: songs like ‘Go-Kart Kid (Hell No!)’ break the suspense with a healthy dose of silly.

W.I.T.C.H. is the acronym for We Intend To Cause Havoc and that's a promise these tireless Zambian renegades of rock have kept since the mid-70s. A pretty impressive feat, considering how Emmanuel ‘Jagari’ Chanda and his brethren have repeatedly set a new bar for the chaos inherent of a good rock 'n' roll show. Zamrock is forever alive and well.

Heavy metal music isn’t just devil worship or being all mopey and glum. Newcastle’s loudest band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, for instance, waddle through the mayhem with an outlaw’s glee, forging an unstoppable supermutant strand of noise. Stupid, senseless fun can coexist with catastrophic psych passages, and these pigs laugh in the face of destruction, defiantly bulldozing right through it.

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.