READING Festival is returning to town this summer, bringing with it some of the biggest names in music and rising indie stars-in-the-making alike.
Below is our run-down of unmissable headline acts well worth catching at this year’s Reading and Leeds Festivals–we’ll be sharing some of our deeper cuts and lesser known acts from the bill later in the week.
Please note that some of the music included below features very explicit language from the outset.
Chappell Roan
One of this year’s most anticipated headliners is Chappell Roan, who last year proved the adage that it takes ten years to become an overnight success.
Roan was catapulted to the very top of the music game when her 2024 single Good Luck, Babe! became an instant hit, garnering extensive airplay and widespread acclaim.
Singles from across her ten years of working her way up the industry exploded to full public prominence, and Good Luck, Babe! became Roan’s first top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as her first top ten hit.
Following performances at Coachella and Lollapalooza, and winning a Grammy award earlier this year, amongst numerous other nominations, Roan is now set to bring her heady mix of dark electronic and pop influences to the stage at Reading Festival.
With her immense popularity and acclaim, Reading Festival is likely the best chance many in the south of England will have to see Roan, as her other headline appearances in the UK for the rest of the year are limited to shows in Edinburgh, which have largely sold out.
With most of her UK dates on resale, and many of her other appearances taking place in Europe and the Americas, Reading Festival is arguably the place to see Roan in her full glory without having to travel half-way across the planet.
Lola Young
Lola Young is another artist who took the world by storm at the end of last year when her song Messy went about as viral as it’s possible for a song to go.
With consummate vocal talent and earnest, approachable songwriting, many hailed Young as the Amy Winehouse of the TikTok generation, and with good reason.
Despite this, Young has wasted no time in defining a style all of her own, and was one of only two British female artists to reach number one in the music charts last year (alongside Charlie XCX), and one of the youngest British female artists to top the charts for nearly a decade.
Messy was also this year’s biggest streaming single from a British artist across the world as of April.
Her upcoming set at Reading follows a victory lap of television appearances including at the BRIT Awards and The Graham Norton Show, and having taken to stages at Glastonbury, Coachella, and Radio 1’s Big Weekend.
With a headline tour set for later in the year and a hotly-anticipated follow-up album due in September, Lola Young is a certified one-to-watch, unmissable fixture at this year’s Reading Festival.
AJ Tracey
AJ Tracey has been a highlight of a numerous festivals, not to mention headline tours and other appearances, since he came to prominence in 2016 and with his major commercial breakthrough, Butterflies, in 2018.
The single reached the top 20 UK singles charts, and was followed up with his 2019 self-titled album which reached number 3 in the UK album charts.
Since, he has been a staple of the global festival scene, combining assured, infectious rap and trap, drill, and grime influences into the perfect live rap concoction.
He has also collaborated with music royalty including Giggs, Dave, Skepta, Gorillaz, and Nelly Furtado.
AJ Tracey marks his return to Richfield Avenue following incredible performances on Reading’s main stage in 2021 and again in 2022, as well as multiple Glastonbury appearances (including this year).
Bakar
Since his surreptitious entry into the music scene a decade ago, Bakar has made huge strides in making a name for himself and risen to stardom through his revivalist indie output and melding of genres.
With sleeper-hit Hell n Back, Bakar earned the title of the longest rise to the top of the Triple A Billboard charts in history, reaching the number one spot after 27 weeks in the running.
Since, he has seen exposure as part of the Arsenal F.C. collaboration with Adidas, in the soundtracks of taste-making videogame series FIFA, and even as a model in campaigns for Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton, and Prada.
Bakar continues to defy expectation and genre alike, with tracks such as I’m Done and his latest release, Searching, continuing his trend for rejecting stagnation and commitment to evolving his style.
This year also marks his return to the festival following an understated but immensely impressive appearance on the BBC Radio 1 Dance Stage back in 2022.
Amyl and the Sniffers
Since they burst onto the scene in 2016, Amyl and the Sniffers have dispensed with frivolity and set about the pursuit of punk supremacy with alarming focus.
Hailing from Australia, the band kicked things off in earnest with their debut, self-titled album in 2019– immediately garnering an ARIA award for the best rock album of the year.
While their approach is gutsy, angsty, and unashamedly louche, their output is riddled with a creeping infectiousness which belies their devil-may-care attitude and acidic, corrosive, guitar-drenched sound.
In short, Amyl and the Sniffers may be a good old-fashioned punk band, but that doesn’t mean they dispense with modern sensibilities; in fact, the band is a finely-tuned balance of conscientious iconoclasm.
Last year’s full-length outing Cartoon Darkness encapsulated this dichotomy perfectly, most obviously in tracks like Jerkin’ which, while confrontational, was accompanied with a video celebrating the human body by featuring a number of nude performers.
Despite the supposedly shocking surface of the video, it was a rallying cry for the normalisation of the mundane reality of the human form, and a treatise to the redemocritisation of the body.
This year marks their Reading Festival debut following appearances at Glastonbury, Coachella, Primavera, and Green Man, and is set to be unmissable based on their track record– especially for fans of R&L’s rockier roots of yesteryear.
Look out for our indie picks, including deeper cuts from this year’s extensive line-up and even a Reading local who will be taking to the stage at the festival, later in the week!
Reading Festival returns to Richfield Avenue from August 21-24, with headliners Hozier, Chappell Roan, Bring Me The Horizon, and Travis Scott.
More information and tickets are available via: readingfestival.com
