Primavera Sound 2015: 5 New Faves

In my last blog post, I told you all about my first Primavera Sound festival - the good bits, the bad bits, the cool stuff, the uncool stuff, and so forth. However, you may remember that I was tantalisingly reluctant to talk about the new bands that I'd discovered during my time at the festival, and that's because I was saving that blog for today.

Single Mothers (Pitchfork, Saturday)

Without further prolongment, then, here are five of my favourite new (to me, anyway) bands from Primavera Sound 2015. I'd strongly recommend that you kick-start your weekend by listening to all of them.

• We'll start, topsy-turvily, with the very last act I saw last week: Single Mothers, a punkrocky foursome from Canada. Thousands would disagree with me, but I thought they were the perfect band for 3.10 in the morning; they re-invigorated my tired ears (not to mention my tired feet) and got me to a place where I could jump around for one last time before going home. I particularly enjoyed the singer's complete disregard for his own wellbeing as he tumbled about the stage and in and out of the crowd.
  
  
• I mentioned The Shalalalas in Wednesday's blog, but screw it, I'm mentioning them again here: their sweet folk-pop sound had something of The Magnetic Fields about it (think The Wayward Bus or The Charm of the Highway Strip, but with a violin and an acoustic guitar instead of synthesisers) and so, as you can probably imagine, I'm very keen to hear more of them.


• Sadly, I only caught the first half of Torres's set - the fact that I even considered letting Interpol lose that clash should give you a reasonable idea of how good she was - but the few songs that I did hear were very good indeed. Mackenzie Scott (the woman behind the stage name) performed solo on Saturday night, with only a microphone and electric guitar separating her from her audience, and yet while I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a full band show, this stripped-back state of affairs did give her wonderful voice - which sounds kind of like a cross between Laura Marling and Nick Cave - plenty of room to impress. Great stuff.

Torres (Pitchfork, Saturday)

• Perro were one of the first bands I caught after getting my wristband, and their set on the Ray-Ban stage was the perfect appetite-whetter for what was to come. Their tunes were fast, punchy (largely thanks to the inspired inclusion of a second drumkit), and ever-so-slightly krautrocky, and their frontman was juuuust cocky enough to seem like a really cool rock 'n' roll frontman and not a massive dickhead.


• Fifth and finally, I must mention the mind-blowingly magnificent Fumaça Preta. With their fabulous outfits (the drummer was wearing a superhero cape; the bassist - pictured below - was wearing a morphsuit with a cloud pattern on it) and their furious, globally-influenced music, these guys captured the hearts and moved the bodies of practically all who witnessed them. Their all-too-short set on Friday afternoon was the most fun I've had watching a band in ages.

Fumaça Preta (adidas Originals, Friday)