Art via Evan Solano
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
One of the biggest live music stories of the year, although likely unfamiliar to readers whose tastes align with that of this website, was UK dance music breakout Fred Againâs recently-wrapped â10 shows in 10 weeks in 10 cities.â These pop-up tour dates â announced with less than a weekâs notice, at venues with capacities far below demand, and featuring star-studded lineups â have generated immense buzz. He drops a new song in conjunction with each show, with features who often take part in the performance. While itâs reasonable to feel cold to Fredâs music itself, the context around these releases is easy to get swept up in, as I learned earlier this month when I was brought along by a friend involved in the San Francisco stop.
Fred Again could easily be described as âcoworker music,â especially in the Bay Area where his therapeutic style of house and garage is constantly circulating in every techie workersâ too-expensive bluetooth headphones. Yet as online discourse is designed to do, that characterization flattens the depth of intentionality and curation that he delivers to the audience who buys what heâs selling. The values underpinning these gigs are essentially the opposite of what most artists at his caliber are prioritizing: a deep focus on the local talent in each city, ceding the spotlight to the supporting acts, and a push for phone-free experiences instead of optimizing the show for short form feeds. Iâve seen artists I love burn far more resources to achieve a whole lot less.
The show didnât make my list (although opener Hamdiâs infectious hour of dubstep came close), but it did embody a majority of the tenets that make live music such a fruitful concept to routinely write about now for my second year in a row. The energy in the city felt activated, the folks I danced around seemed especially receptive to experiencing each artistâs vision, and for a few hours even a venue as universally loathed as Cow Palace felt like the only place everyone wanted to be. âCrowdsâ is a term often used in a pejorative context, but I was reminded that being part of a mass communal gathering is about as joyous an experience as you can have on any given night.
Below are the 10 crowds I took part in that were particularly resonant in 2025.
On record â including his peerless 2025 releases, both solo and as part of Armand Hammar â woods raps like a cardiothoracic surgeon performing open-heart surgery without anesthesia. Everything is precise, gruesome, and with a grim prognosis. On stage itâs much of the same, the rapperâs authoritative baritone delivering exacting assessments of our sick American condition.
I often felt a disconnect watching in this dismal year artists continue their tightly choreographed stage shows as though everything was business as usual. âBusiness as usualâ for billy woods, however, means speaking directly to our times, whether in his verses or during asides between songs. Itâs a privilege to be able to bliss out right now when you have the chance, but concerts donât inherently have to be escapism. Hearing the forceful austerity of woodsâ catalogue in person felt like breaking free from streaming-era doom scrolling and plugging back into a heavier but more grounded reality.
Blake Mills plays the guitar like a magician transforming a deck of cards into a rabbit. You can appreciate the stunning arrangements he and revered bass legend Pino Palladino laid down on their second collaborative album That Wasnât A Dream, but watching them recreate their hallucinogenic lullabies before your eyes is an entirely different experience. Mills stretched my understanding of what a guitar can be, doing seemingly everything besides strumming the instrument throughout the performance.
Backed by drummer Chris Dave and saxophonist Sam Gendel, each member of the foursome shared this creative instinct for defying expectations, pushing one another into unchartered territory without straying from their shared frequency. The real magic was in how all that technical wizardry never came across as overly showy, but rather as immediate and intuitive as the pop records Mills and Palladinoâs credits are all over.
Porter Robinsonâs most recent trek, in which he did his own Eras Tour-style showcase of each of his three albums in reverse chronological order, underperformed across the nationwide amphitheaters he attempted to fill. Itâs a bummer when such a fully realized production doesnât get the reception it deserves, but that didnât matter in the moment for those who did get a chance to watch Porter and his band blast their way through his quietly influential catalogue.
Porter has deftly fine-tuned both sides of his sound into a hybrid electronic rock show, with crowd singalongs that pop like confetti cannons balanced alongside EDM drops that barrel their way to the center of the Earth. I was primed to be one of the many who missed the tour, put off by the impersonal venues with sticker-shocking ticket prices, but was fortunate to accidentally find myself in Seattle at the same time he had an affordable festival date my friendsâ were already attending. I can only hope Porterâs team reads this column and gets some insight on how to make sure his next outing doesnât land like the proverbial tree in an empty forest.
The fourth law of thermodynamics, proven again and again over the last decade of the music industry, is that everything that breaks apart eventually comes back together. 2025 was a banner year for nostalgia-driven band reunions, from the Format, Alabama Shakes, and Grizzly Bear for the indie heads to Oasis for the knuckleheads.
In that context, the Rilo Kiley reunion slipped under the radar as a âsure, why not?â Jenny Lewisâ beloved breakthrough band played smaller venues and in tinier font festival slots than I would have expected given their influence and time away. Yet that didnât diminish the force they brought back with them to the stage, delivering their zippy guitar melodies, twee twang, and confessional narrative storytelling with hardly any visible signs of age. I have and always will be largely skeptical of reunions, but there are always the exceptions that prove the rule.
The fifth law of thermodynamics is that your favorite band will never be properly appreciated until after they break up. Given the aforementioned state of band reunions, I have hope that this wonât truly be my last chance to see Porridge Radio live. But that this beloved indie rock outfit has chosen to bow out for now is a real blow to a genre they have stood apart within. Their spotless Secretly Canadian run will age into the canon, and along the way many listeners will bemoan the impossibility of experiencing newly discovered classics like âBorn Confusedâ and âSick Of The Bluesâ as part of a cathartic crowd sing-along. I think about all the artists I once had the opportunity to see and passed on for whatever miscalculated reasoning at the time (Prince, DâAngelo, Mac Miller). At least I wonât have to add Porridge Radio â who based on their San Francisco date are calling it off at the height of their powers â to that list of regrets.
Charli XCX rose to the almost impossible occasion expected of her during her main stage Coachella performance. While Brat jetted her to the pop A-list, the albumâs tour routing provided precious few opportunities to see Charli deliver a full-set sans interruption from Troye Sivan. For her sunset slot â with a more packed crowd than either Green Day or Travis Scott, the bigger font headliners performing after her â Charli made sure to squeeze every drop of the spotlight focused singularly on her.
Charli performed the fullest live realization of Brat to-date, from extending the albumâs many instant classics with seamless codas of their remixes to bringing out all the guests who carried the era alongside her (Lorde, Billie Eilish, and a more welcome in this context Troye Sivan). She dropped, strutted, and worked angles across the stage without breaking her stare on the livestream cameras, fully aware that she was creating even more iconic cultural ephemera in real time. She then proceeded to sorta-kinda tie a bow around the Brat-era, announcing a summer ahead of other great musicians and filmmakers for her fans to put an equal amount of fervor behind. I appreciated Charliâs demonstration of a more magnanimous model of pop stardom, one that doesnât have to mean endless vinyl variants to keep the charts and social media fixated on a never-ending release cycle.
Mannequin Pussy made this same list last year, when lead singer Marisa Dabice hypnotized the last ever Pitchfork Festival crowd with a persona equal parts coquettish ingénue and firestarting revolutionary. In the time since the band released their career-best fourth album I Got Heaven in 2024, they have caught the attention of increasingly larger promoters, performing on the biggest stages at mainstream festivals this year and touring stadiums with the Foo Fighters in the next.
I was skeptical if their âloud bark, deep biteâ would hit with as much potency at a bigger venue, but it felt even more thrilling to see them push buttons with higher stakes. Keenly aware that she was addressing an Amazon-sponsored livestream, Dabice pointedly cursed âevery billionaire who has collectively made our lives shittier and shittier.â Each of her several incisive monologues were just as euphoric to hear live as the bandâs mellifluous thrashers, both sides of the performance making up the most vital and action-inspiring performance I witnessed this year.
The setpieces alone would have made Lady Gagaâs second headlining set at Coachella (but first with sufficient time to prepare), an instant classic in the festivalâs history. She sang atop a towering victorian dress turned birdcage, battled her alter ego on a lifesize chessboard, ballroom danced with skeletons and sang while buried alive under a mountain of sand â just a few of the brilliantly executed ideas she packed into her marvel of a tour opener for her comeback record Mayhem.
It was like a horror-tinged Cirque de Soleil with a running meta-commentary on the cost of fame â high art not without a welcome heap of crowd pleasing callbacks to previous highlights from her career, a fireworks spectacle during âBorn This Wayâ, and Gessafelstein coming out to do his demonic gargoyle bit for the excellent âKillahâ. I often catch the headliners at Coachella more out of professional obligation than personal expectation, but Lady Gaga proved that miraculous things are still possible at the largest commercial scale if you have sufficient ambition, vision, and talent.
Vampire Weekend was the best band you could catch on the road in 2024, pulling up to every stop with a dynamic setlist that made room for a rotating cast of musicians, highlights from across every nook and cranny of their catalogue, and impromptu covers performed with a good sense of humour yet at an improbably higher caliber. Each performance was built to vary, which made their show feel thrillingly alive â marrying jam band sensibilities with a catalogue of canonical bangers, like if Phish actually made good studio albums.
The only band that met that same standard for me in 2025 was Darkside, who answered the question of what if the Grateful Dead got really into ketamine and synthesizers? The band constructs their headlining shows like an experimental DJ set, fusing together moments from their excellent catalog into more expansive renditions and stamping their signature on unexpected selections, such as Cherâs âBang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).â
They weave all this covered ground into a dynamic progression backed by an understated yet immersive light show. Yet like the best live ensembles, Nicolaas Jaar, Dave Harrington, and Tlacael Esparza are an organic force that play off one another in real time, building hypnotic grooves layer by layer that compel you to move and then rearranging the pieces into entirely new shapes that stop you in awe. You never could predict where the three might turn next, and you got the sense that neither did they â audience and artist all equally lost in the ride.
Samuel Shepherd has among the most fascinating careers in contemporary music, a neuroscience PhD-turned-label-head who then broke through as an electronic music producer with an album that felt more like jazz. He managed to position his career as Floating Points in a way that made just as much sense in high art exhibits as it does at Boiler Room â as comfortable playing the glue between Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra as he is adding muscle to one of Fred Againâs 2025 loosies. He is constantly breaking new ground, both for himself as an artist and for listeners who never know what side of him to expect. Last September, I watched as he lit up a warehouse with a frenetic but fairly routine techno set at Portola. A year later at the Fox Theater, he upended my perception of what a live electronic show could be.
Stopping in Oakland for the sole West Coast performance of his live AV show, Shepherd partnered with his long-running collaborators Hamil Industries, light designers Will Potts and Ed Warren, and painter Akiko Nakayama to set a high-water mark for the marriage of sound and visuals. Nakayama mixed together inks and paints under a microscope projected onto four vertical panels, showcasing a natural but surreal world beneath our depth of vision that took on gloriously unexpected colors, shapes, and movements in intuitive harmony with selections from Shepherdâs most club-focused album Cascade.
The union of distinct mediums interacting with one another on the shared stage â a trick that has become something of a Floating Points signature, with his soundtrack for the HBO anime Lazarus and contributions in the world of ballet â has made every show with pre-rendered visuals now feel woefully insufficient. I was transfixed not only by the ecstasy of the performance, but by the realization that even with all the live music Iâve been fortunate to enjoy to-date, there are always new dimensions to the experience I continue to discover and look forward to chasing in the years ahead.
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