Pitchfork’s Guide to Primavera Sound Barcelona 2024

Image by Chris Panicker, photos via Getty Images

Staged amid the crown jewels of European architecture and culture, Primavera Sound routinely adds a monster festival lineup to the long list of reasons to throw it all in for a week in Barcelona. Here, we highlight some hidden treasures to be found beneath headliners Pulp, SZA, and Lana Del Rey, including restorative jazz, apocalyptic folk, and dystopian club bacchanals. Plus, we pay tribute to the festival’s de facto house band, Shellac, who were scheduled to return before the death of frontman Steve Albini.

Primavera Sound Barcelona begins Wednesday, May 29, and stretches through to Sunday, June 2, at the city’s Parc del Fòrum.

Aya (Thursday, May 30)

Laced with late-night poetry scrawled in her iPhone’s Notes app, Aya’s skewed club music doubles as a snapshot of her life, and her DJ sets do something similar; mic in hand, she might regale audiences with off-the-cuff interjections and stream-of-consciousness monologues while dropping heater after heater from club music’s most visionary fringes. Her technique is as radical as her selections, mixing glowering drones and pulverized breakbeats with artists like SOPHIE, Autechre, 3Phaz, and Show Me the Body—as well as, if we’re lucky, her own cover of the Cure’s “Lovesong.”

–Philip Sherburne

billy woods (Thursday, May 30)

After steadily leveling up across more than two decades, the label is a bastion for uncompromising artists looking to get weird, loose, and honest.

New York rapper billy woods has no shortage of material from which to choose when he takes the stage in Catalonia. In recent years, he’s released collaborations with producer Kenny Segal (Maps), Armand Hammer bandmate Elucid (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips), DJ Preservation (Aethiopes), the Alchemist (Haram), and Moor Mother (Brass), as well as the solo standout Church. The Backwoodz Studioz founder has a commanding stage presence, barking his righteous words proudly to rapt crowds.

–Matthew Strauss

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops (Thursday, May 30)

Like many great Mediterranean festivals, thoughts of Primavera Sound conjure images of tank-topped crowds downing cold drinks beneath the unforgiving sun, and sea breezes cooling tired bodies cutting shapes in the wee hours. Not so much, however, a somber ambient masterpiece like The Disintegration Loops, an ode to decay and, by extension, mortality, that the artist composed on September 11, 2001, watching smoke rise from the Twin Towers. But that totemic piece is what William Basinski will be playing for the audience in the shelter of Parc del Fòrum’s auditorium, offering a rare chance for reflection—and, sure, maybe even a bit of slumped-in-the-seats shuteye—amid the hedonistic crush.

–Philip Sherburne

Sofia Kourtesis (Thursday, May 30)

The electronic songwriter-producer discusses the painful path of caregiving that led to her most freeing work yet.

Bring your waviest, one-of-one dance moves to Peruvian producer and DJ Sofia Kourtesis’ life-affirming live set, where “How Music Makes You Feel Better” is more than just a title of a song from her recent debut full-length, Madres. Kourtesis is the kind of performer who unites any crowd in sympathetic harmony without saying a word: Her spritely and unselfconsciously beautiful tracks combine the rhythmic efficiency of her home base in Berlin with Balearic-tinged euphoria. If there’s a better way to pass your time seaside in Barcelona, I’ve yet to hear of it.

–Anna Gaca

HiTech (Friday, May 31)

HiTech want to see the whole room jumping. The rap and production trio of King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops are breakout stars of Detroit ghettotech scene, a style that fuses classic techno rhythm and ambiance with the quick loops, silly voices, and high-energy dance styles of contemporary club rap. Their turn-up tracks are fast, fun, and designed to move a crowd. As King Milo told Tone Glow last year: “I want people to feel like it can be ten, twenty, thirty, a thousand people there and you can unlock, just jazz out.” Catch them in person while a label dispute leaves their fantastic 2023 album, Détwat, inaccessible on streaming.

–Anna Gaca

Jessica Pratt (Friday, May 31)

This is the first time the hauntologic, hypnagogic folk San Francisco singer-songwriter will be playing live with a full band. There will be no extended kraut jams or drum solos (I mean, probably not), but the music from her latest album, Here in the Pitch, deserves a more filled-out sound. Jessica Pratt will take center stage with her nylon-string guitar and channel the haze of California, the ’70s studio sound of Brian Wilson, a cloudy day alone strolling the boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro thinking about how time connects us all.

–Jeremy D. Larson

Jessica Pratt’s fourth album of hypnagogic folk music hones her mysterious song to its finest point.

Mica Levi DJ Set (Friday, May 31)

In soundtracks like Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest, Mica Levi has given Hollywood some of the most unsettling sounds ever to haunt the silver screen. The UK producer has taken a warmer approach in their unconventional R&B productions for Tirzah; their DJ sets (one fall somewhere in the middle, twisting classic instrumental grime records into long, slowly building arcs, and making the most of the CDJ’s loop and FX buttons to cut their source material into disorienting shapes—dissonant string passages, sullen a cappellas—smeared in otherworldly echo.

–Philip Sherburne

Crumb (Saturday, June 1)

The New York psych-pop quartet Crumb play with a lot of different styles: downtempo, kosmische, lounge, funk—and all with a strong focus on Lila Ramani’s subconscious songwriting. They’ll be playing a lot of material from their new album, Amama, which is their biggest and best album to date. Expect deep grooves, phaser effects, people covertly hitting the vape, and chill-out vibes with a creeping paranoia.

–Jeremy D. Larson

Lankum (Saturday, June 1)

Lankum’s 2023 opus, False Lankum, starts with a lullaby and segues into the sort of nightmare you might want to live inside. Formed more than a decade ago as a relatively traditional Irish folk group, the quartet has since turned to the musical dark arts, cloaking hypnotic ballads in perilous drones, doomed thrums, and other eerie accouterments. In live sets that mix originals with revisitations of folk standards, the band’s fantastical tales ring out through the gauze, chronicling woebegone characters doomed to ancient ill fates. At a festival beloved for its positive vibes and beating sun, Lankum promise a refreshing chill.

–Jazz Monroe

Model/Actriz (Saturday, June 1)

Who knew feedback could skronk the way it does on Dogsbody, the debut album by Model/Actriz? For years, prior to its release, these New York rock experimentalists electrified local crowds with their hollow-eyed, uncompromising, surprisingly danceable post-punk. Now an international audience is catching on, and having played last fall’s Primavera Weekender festival in the resort town of Benidorm, they’ve been promoted to the big event. Don’t expect to hide at the back with your arms crossed, either: Singer Cole Haden’s confrontational performance style can make a packed room feel like a one-to-one encounter.

–Anna Gaca

Nala Sinephro (Saturday, June 1)

In this Rising interview, the composer talks about mystical synth frequencies, the racist undertones of certain jazz institutions, and why she doesn’t want to be known as “the harp lady.”

Nala Sinephro stands in quiet counterpoint to London’s riotous jazz scene, and tends to provide similar moments of reflection on a festival bill. The Belgian Martiniquan multi-instrumentalist specializes in languid electronics and harp soundscapes that crest in waves of harmonic clarity, resulting in brief epiphanies that materialize and recede like a green flash at sunset. As she enters her next phase, stay tuned for—well, almost anything. As she told Pitchfork in 2022, “I made some heavy metal music last year, playing a bit of guitar as well. I also made a weird, folky indie record. I might play bagpipes for five years. The more people try and call me ‘the harp lady,’ the more I’ll end up making that heavy metal album.”

–Jazz Monroe

Shabaka (Saturday, June 1)

At the jazz flautist Shabaka’s set, what you’ll hear first is a lot of shhhhhhh. Maybe someone will wooo! And another person could tell you to shut up in a foreign language. But when a hush eventually falls over the crowd, Shabaka will lead his band through a series of new-age and spiritual jazz improvisations largely pulled from his debut solo album, this year’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. Tap into the master woodwind player’s wavelength, his breathwork, his subtle, patient, and unshowy style that can bend into jazz or psychedelic meditations.

–Jeremy D. Larson

Shellac

Steve Albini and his band Shellac were scheduled to perform on the Thursday of this year’s festival. Upon the shocking news of Albini’s death, Primavera Sound said, “We have lost a legend, a friend, a member of our family. What are we going to do without you, Steve? After having welcomed them at 15 editions of the festival, it is impossible for us to imagine a Primavera Sound without him, because no band explains us better than Shellac.”

Remembering the 61-year-old guitarist and engineer: a craftsman, a gourmand, a hater, a reformist, a poker champion, an icon of the underground.

Under Albini’s aegis, Shellac were veteran festival refuseniks, steering clear of the utopian vistas and beaming faces because, as he put it, festival setups do not serve true appreciation of the music. Primavera Sound, in his view, was the exception, and Shellac became its unlikely house band. This would have been the grisly trio’s umpteenth appearance, another riot of pummeling riffs, good-natured cynicism, and hefty low-end to flush out remnants of the previous night’s excess. Instead, we remember the good times, like their performance at last year’s Primavera Porto, a Thursday afternoon onslaught at the Vodafone stage. (I would love to have been in the room when Albini first heard about those sponsorship deals.) It started with “The World Series of Dick Sucking” and rolled through new songs like “Scrappers,” introduced with a sweet preface about their intention to honor, not shame, street-scrap collectors. We may not see their likes again, but there are few better places to seek them out than at the festival they made their second home.

–Jazz Monroe

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork