Pitchfork Music Festival London returned last week to England’s capital for its fifth edition. This year’s installment saw 81 acts across 20 events in venues including the brutalist concert hall of the Barbican, the iconic backroom of the Shacklewell Arms, and the experimental east London institution Cafe Oto. Five days of music created space for living legends like Laurie Anderson and Lonnie Holley to perform alongside artists who are charting the future, like underscores, Los Thuthanaka, and MIKE. Here are six highlights from the week.
Truck Violence - 93 Feet East, Tuesday, November 4
Truck Violence covered the Pitchfork logo backdrop at 93 Feet East with a hand-scrawled sign that read “Violence.” It’s the title of their superb and weird 2024 album, but also a blunt statement of intent: to batter the audience from the jump. Because this four-piece’s sludge-metal and post-hardcore is unrelenting, full of fierce drumming and gnarled riffs. But it is arguably Karsyn Henderson’s elastic voice contorting itself into yelps, whines, and growls that is the most effective instrument on stage. When guitarist Paul Lecours introduced a banjo for “I bore you now you bear for me,” he transported us to the band’s rural upbringing in Alberta. It’s like gazing at a photograph so long that you start feeling you were there.
Ali Sethi & Nicolás Jaar - Union Chapel, Wednesday, November 5
It felt like poet Ali Sethi and producer Nicolás Jaar’s paths would cross eventually, but it took Sethi getting on Instagram Live during lockdown and reciting Ghazal poetry, a form of medieval Arabic verse, over the spectral fragments of Jaar’s Telas, for a creative partnership to blossom. This is a story Sethi recounted during the artists’ spellbinding hour together at Union Chapel, as Jaar conjured up prickly electronic sounds with flickers of metallics, soft tinkles of piano, and subaqueous bass, the sort of sparse arrangements that allowed Sethi’s commanding and sublime voice to soar. The venue’s iconic east window—stained glass in the shape of a rose featuring medieval instruments—hovered above the two musicians.
Los Thuthanaka - ICA, Thursday, November 6
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is located on the Royal Mall, a ceremonial route from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square. It’s hard not to think of the symbolic proximity to these monuments of colonialism as the sibling duo Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton took the stage and blasted bass-boosted renditions of traditional Andean Huayño dance rhythms. The jolting drum shuffle of “Phuju” was followed by Crampton’s syncopated, jagged guitar, and a flurry of DJ tags were dropped gleefully by Chuquimamani-Condori. In matching bedazzled Aymara suits and cowboy hats, they presented a world interconnected and communal, fluid and dazzling. As they played DJ E’s “Until I Find You Again,” the crowd moved in unison to the arrhythmic drums and triumphant yet wistful accordion motif. The Mall outside had never looked so lifeless.
Oklou - Roundhouse, Friday, November 7
A small light searched behind the curtain at the Roundhouse. Soon, Oklou stepped out wearing a headtorch, peering out over thousands of fans. She was there to bring the crowd to the twilit rave promised within her diaphanous debut, choke enough. With small tweaks, she transformed her small studio recordings into hefty floor-fillers. Boosting the snappy two-step of “take me by the hand” unlocked the song’s danceability, and the prismatic title track was given a fist-thumping hardstyle breakdown that felt like peaktime at the club for bugs. As she sat on stage wearing what looked like a chainmail coif, a single spotlight refracted the light off her head like a disco ball. It was as if a million rays of light were emanating directly from her.
Erika de Casier - Roundhouse, Friday, November 7
After becoming an award-winning K-pop songwriter, featuring on last year’s inescapable “Bikini,” and being recognized as the doyen of the amorphous alt-pop coming out of Copenhagen, Erika de Casier put out Lifetime, a relatively low-key tape of self-produced trip-hop and R&B. At the Roundhouse she ran through nearly the whole album. Swathes of synths shimmered on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” while drummer Jonathan Jull Ludvigsen nailed the punchy boom-bap that shapes the album. The sepia-toned sky on the album sleeve was displayed on the backdrop, as if she casually sauntered straight out from the cover and onto stage.
underscores - EartH Hall, Saturday, November 8
Underscores’ unbridled imagination flows through songs about fictional towns populated with characters and side-plots. Equal parts Skrillex worship and pop-punk brashness, her music condenses the hyperpop of the last decade into laser-focused pop missiles. And, at EartH Hall, she delivered hit after hit. “You can sing the next one if you want,” she said, as if the crowd needed any encouragement to yell every word to “Spoiled little brat.” Underscores has a particularly ravenous fanbase, and her latest single, “Do It,” gets a rapturous response. As her set neared its end, the crowd cried for “music!” Maybe they were asking her to play her ridiculously catchy single “Music,” or perhaps the frenzied dopamine rush of the past 40 minutes just short-circuited their brains into a delirium. Music!