Supersonic Festival has shared the first wave of acts playing its 21st edition this August into September.
Taking place across three days, the Birmingham event will this year feature headline sets from Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Gazelle Twin, Emma Ruth Rundle, and The Body & Dis Fig. There will also be performances from Senyawa, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Mary Lattimore, MC Yallah x Debmaster, John Francis Flynn, ØXN, Melt-Banana, Agriculture, Mohammad Syfkhan, Smote, The Shits, Upchuck, One Leg One Eye and The None. Further acts will be added to the bill in the coming months.
Looking ahead to this year’s event, Supersonic Festival co-founder Lisa Meyer said in a statement: “We were blown away by the love and recognition we received last year when we celebrated 20 years since the inception of Supersonic Festival. More so than ever, in these challenging and uncertain times, we are motivated with an urgency to seek out and champion the most important artists from the underground and to create opportunities for shared experiences with a programme that can bring joy and unite us.”
tQ’s deputy editor Patrick Clarke, who attended and reviewed 2023’s 20th anniversary edition for the site, added: “In the eight years that I’ve been covering leftfield and underground music for The Quietus, Supersonic Festival has been an event that swathes of artists would speak about with reverence, telling tales of this extraordinary festival that, for two decades, has provided perhaps the most crucial nexus point in Britain for the kind of boundary-pushing music that most excites me. I’d eavesdrop with envy as those who’d been at tQ longer than I have would reminisce about the dozens and dozens of times they’d had their eardrums shattered and their neurons rewired at a Digbeth weekender.
“When, last year, I finally got the chance to attend for myself, Supersonic lay waste to even those high expectations. Whether it was transcendence from the frontiers of the experimental folk resurgence via Shovel Dance Collective and Lankum, or some of the loudest and most righteous live music I’ve ever experienced via Divide & Dissolve and BIG|BRAVE – and a big helping of uncategorisable noise in-between – I was blown away countless times. Beyond even its extraordinary programming, however, it was Supersonic’s wider ethos that really stood out; their dedication to inclusivity, accessibility and community. As Lankum’s Ian Lynch put it to me recently, ‘Even the security guards are sound’.”
Supersonic Festival will take place from August 30 to September 1, 2024. Find more information here.
