Can Primavera Sound Keep Sidestepping The Festival Gentrification Trend?

The latest SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS B-side explores the evolution of music festivals after my visit to the best one in the world

My debut book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it now. In the run-up to publication, I’m sharing some “B-sides” from the book here at Substack, among other goodies like soundtracks for each chapter. Previous installments have involved Yo La Tengo, the musical legacy of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, online sessions like Daytrotter and Take Away Shows, and indie rock’s Canadian Invasion. The latest B-side, out today, is about music festivals.

I was so worried I would miss the Pixies reunion. When the indie rock legends announced in late 2003 that they'd be heading out on the road together for the first time since their ignominious 1991 breakup, I was already planning to spend the spring quarter of my sophomore year studying abroad in Pamplona. As inconsequential as it might sound, 20-year-old me was dreading the prospect that this massively important band—a pillar of my personal canon, who'd become exponentially more popular and influential in absentia—might tour America while I was in Europe, robbing me of the chance to scream along with "Debaser" in person. So the news that Pixies would tour Europe first was a relief, and the revelation that they'd be stopping in Spain while I was there was cause for elation.

This is how I learned about Primavera Sound. Taking place annually in early June, the Barcelona music festival has always boasted an impressive assortment of performers rooted in indie and alternative rock, with a sprinkling of other eclectic hipster-friendly sounds, a steady stream of DJs, and a schedule that keeps the good times rolling all night. In 2004, that involved alt-rock icons PJ Harvey and Primal Scream, grime rising star Dizzee Rascal, and a euphoric performance from dance-punks !!! in the last hours before dawn. For me, the centerpiece of the weekend was camping out in front of the main stage as Friday night progressed from the Raveonettes to Franz Ferdinand to Mudhoney to Wilco to that heavily anticipated Pixies set. Fresh off A Ghost Is Born and triumphantly breaking in what would become its definitive six-man configuration, Jeff Tweedy's band upstaged Black Francis and friends. It might be the best Wilco set I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. But perhaps the greatest revelation was Primavera itself, an event so appealing I thought I must have dreamed it up.

By the time I returned in 2016 on assignment with Stereogum, Primavera had evolved into the greatest music festival in the world and expanded its imprint to a sister event in Porto. The lineups were consistently stellar, and the flagship Barcelona fest had relocated to Parc del Fórum on the banks of the Mediterranean. LCD Soundsystem were the big reunion that year, and I got to see them work their magic on both a packed club and a sprawling field of revelers. Sigur Rós closed out their set with a larger-than-life bombardment that sent me sprinting through the crowd, punching the air like my team had just won a championship. When Brian Wilson (RIP) played "God Only Knows," I teared up at the sight of a child on their father's shoulders, thinking of my own young daughter back home. My all-time favorites, Radiohead, used a rare third encore for an even rarer performance of "Creep." The excitement extended well beyond headliner scale. Ty Segall, John Carpenter, Savages, Kamasi Washington: the fest was an embarrassment of riches.

In the decade since then, Primavera has continued to be the class of the music festival ecosystem. There was some logistical chaos in 2022 as the fest returned from a pandemic-imposed break, but year after year, no other event assembles more artists I love. That remained true this year as I made my third visit to Primavera Sound, this time with several Stereogum co-workers in tow. The lineup was an underground rock fan’s dream, packed with big-tent phenoms and cult favorites: MJ Lenderman! Chat Pile! Fontaines D.C.! Beach House! LCD Soundsystem! Turnstile! Stereolab! TV On The Radio! IDLES! Wet Leg! Kim Deal! ANOHNI! Los Campesinos! Momma! Cap’n Jazz! The list goes on and on. The curators killed it as always. Yet there was something noticeably different about the top of the 2025 lineup, a rubicon-crossing approach to the headliners that felt like Primavera had served me up an epilogue for my book.

Oh hey, yes, my book. SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin's Press, and you can pre-order it right this second. It's about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century — or, more concisely and less precisely, how indie rock went pop. The book covers a lot, including but not limited to The O.C., MySpace, music blogs, American Apparel, the rise of the "indie" pop star, and the decaying of the online indie infrastructure via streaming and social media. If you are a fan of any of the bands I've already mentioned in this post, you will love the book. If you're a fan of indie music at all, no matter what that term means to you—its slippery, goalpost-shifting definition is a big part of the story—I guarantee you will see your life reflected back in these pages.

Parts of SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS touch on the role of music festivals in the evolution of Big Indie. I discuss how fests became a physical space to experience hyped-up blogger favorites: a meeting ground that fueled a mixing of styles that had already been accelerated by the internet and, by extension, a contributor to the morphing and flattening of these genre-jumbling sounds into sleek, user-friendly lifestyle music. But as Primavera Sound 2025 reminds me, there's more to say about fests and how their evolution has dovetailed with that of indie rock.

This year, in a major coup, Primavera booked all three of last year's Main Pop Girlies as its headliners: Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan. I love all three artists, and I was thrilled to see them all perform last weekend, so don't mistake this as one of those anti-poptimism screeds that pop up like weeds on Substack. But it felt like a noteworthy milestone to see this particular fest—which has been mixing pop into its assortment of big-font attractions for years—go all-in on pop stars at the top of the bill. It's a move that has something to do with the ever-changing fabric of "alt" music but maybe even more to do with the changing nature of music festivals.

Way back in 2013, when Phoenix headlined Coachella, I wrote a piece for Stereogum examining the festival headliner economy. Phoenix headlining Coachella was a surprising development. I spent many years obsessing over It's Never Been Like That and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, but even in 2013, at the peak of their cachet, they did not have that wow factor working for them. It felt like Coachella, an event that had built its reputation on critically acclaimed titans and prestigious reunions, was scraping the barrel. That same year, former UK powerhouses Blur and the Stone Roses had to share headlining duties one night. (The year's other headliners, Red Hot Chili Peppers, will presumably be headlining festivals until they die.)

Surveying the landscape a dozen years ago, my takeaway was that American mega-festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza, and Bonnaroo were running out of bands who could inspire large numbers of people to shell out big money. The music industry simply wasn't producing rock stars anymore. That left an open lane for pop stars to slide into. By definition, the biggest pop acts are household names in a way that bands like Phoenix and the Stone Roses have never been in the United States. It should theoretically be easier to get people to congregate for them. Near the end of the article, I wondered, "Have we not approached the frontier of Ke$ha conquering the desert, of 'Firework' lighting up the Chicago skyline, of Britney going ham down on the farm?"

For various sordid reasons, neither Kesha, Katy, nor Britney will be headlining Coachella-scale festivals anytime soon, but in essence my prediction was right-on. At a time when rock was declining, parasocial celebrity worship and social media clout-chasing were on the rise. Fests have always been a chance for festival-goers to brag, "I was there," a la James Murphy. Bringing more A-listers into the mix incentivized a broader cross-section of people to partake in that game, creating a feedback loop of celebrity escalation and influencer influx. It's not that these festivals are no longer catered to "real music fans"—though reading Lolla lineups sometimes feels like staring into the void—but even the more eclectic mega-fests have morphed into a different kind of cultural event.

Primavera has largely sidestepped this phenomenon. Even when the fest has leaned hard into non-rock headliners—as in 2019, when the lineup boasted 50/50 male/female gender representation—Primavera has never seemed to suffer an identity crisis. It has maintained best-in-class curation that appeals directly to the eclectic-yet-accessible hipster-nerd lizard brain, always reflecting the evolving preferences of the music-geek cohort that makes up its target audience. This is an event so interwined with the late, great anti-sellout zealot Steve Albini that it named a stage after him when he died last year hung giant banners reading “STEVE ALBINI FIRST” around the festival site this year. Every year, I see the lineup, and I think, "Holy shit." This year, I thought, "Holy shit," but I also thought, "Hmmm. That's interesting."

The best festivals are attuned to a specific taste; they are designed for somebody. Fests start losing the plot when they begin to cater to everyone and no one. The concern about featuring three pop stars at the top of the bill is that it might represent the start of a transition from an event with vibrant personality to a faceless corporate monolith, not unlike the formerly vital Brooklyn creative hub Williamsburg’s gradual transformation into a mall. On the other hand, one big storyline in my book is that the indie-centric audience that flocks to Primavera every year has warmed up to certain pop stars significantly over the last couple decades. This trio of headliners all fall into that bucket. Booking them together, coming off the year they all just had, was an undeniable triumph. It also made me flinch just a bit.

This isn’t the first time Primavera has leaned in this direction. The top of the 2019 lineup was full of pop stars, rappers, and R&B singers—Erykah Badu, Future, Cardi B, Janelle Monáe, Robyn, Solange, Rosalía, J Balvin, FKA twigs, Carly Rae Jepsen—but many were of the boutique, critically acclaimed variety, and even the biggest superstars among them maintained a certain edge. It still felt alternative, for lack of a better word. At the same festival, Primavera teased a Pavement reunion. It suggested that the pop influx was not an unstoppable runaway train but rather a resettling of tectonic plates, reflecting a reality where headliner-worthy rock artists are going extinct, where the most artful and likable pop stars can be accepted as part of the eclectic hipster music firmament without overtaking it completely. That’s a difficult balance to strike, but Primavera has pulled it off thus far.

This was Prima’s biggest pop swing since then. For 2025, the fest went out and got the artists who took over the mainstream discourse last summer. All three of those bookings made sense for this festival to various extents. Charli is a Primavera veteran who had a huge victory lap moment with Brat last year after a long tenure on the underground-mainstream divide. Chappell is a grassroots success story with aggressively progressive politics, and anyone with ears has recognized her as a genius songwriter. Sabrina works with pop-goes-indie/indie-goes-pop mastermind Jack Antonoff and flexed her writerly bona fides on last year’s Short N' Sweet. They all make fantastic music. Yet collectively, they seemed to push the fest a little closer to Coachella territory.

Some commenters on our Stereogum report from the festival expressed those kinds of sentiments. "I had a blast but the gap between the headliners and the undercard felt bigger than ever," wrote one person. "Don't get me wrong, all of those shows were incredible, but the crowds felt very different to my last few Primaveras. I can't help but wonder if some of the magic of the festival has faded with the addition of huge names like Sabrina and Chappell." Someone responded, "I don't remember ever having to deal with so much crowding and people camping out for a single headliner before." Personally, I don't recall Primavera commissioning a Powerpuff Girls statue representing the headliners any other year.

The fundamental character of the festival had not changed, but its center of gravity had shifted perceptibly. The main stage crowds were harsher and denser. A little bit of toxic stan energy had leaked into the premises. Fortunately, that energy was released in service of some of the finest pop stars working today, artists who did not clash with the well-established Primavera ethos. Chappell and Charli gave spine-tingling performances that I will never forget. (Sabrina's show was nice but not on the same level.) In a weekend filled with amazing sets by everyone from High Vis to Haim to the Hard Quartet, these headliners were exclamation points as intended, not albatrosses.

For now, Primavera can be marked safe from music festival gentrification. It’s still appealing to the same listener bloc it was two decades ago. Yet the experience reminded me of the apprehension our Stereogum readers had when we, an indie-focused site, began giving some oxygen to big-time pop artists. To me, it made perfect sense to cover mega-stars alongside indie obscurities. My thought back then was: I like them both! Why can't they coexist? The skeptics' concern was that by turning our attention to the same superstars as everyone else, we'd lose some of the unique character that drew people to the site in the first place and perhaps squeeze out the kinds of artists we built our brand on.

I don't think that has been the case with Stereogum or Primavera so far, but I understand why someone who feels at home within a certain musical space would be concerned about factors that threaten to irreparably alter that space. It happens all the time. Opening up your little corner of the world to the masses can be a slippery slope. For Primavera Sound, that risk has often paid off. Still, I'll be curious to see who they book for 2026. Was this year just a fun blip facilitated by a cultural moment in which exceptionally cool pop stars took over the zeitgeist—or, in a culture that's obsessed with scaling up, have they opened a door that cannot be closed?

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.