Our First Year at Sound City!
- News, Sound City 2018
- 10th May 2018
Liverpool Sound City, what a weekend you gave us. This year was Kycker's first official year at Liverpool Sound City, and we were massively impressed. From the location, the weather to the the artists and the atmosphere, everything was perfect. Here's our run down of our weekend!
So after arriving on Friday night following a sunny drive over from our home city of Sheffield, we woke up fresh and ready on Saturday to take in the musical splendour of the day. The Baltic Triangle area was a perfect area for Sound City to take place. With it’s contemporary venues and bars, it was the perfect environment for showcasing new talent. Our first stop was to the Baltic Market in Cains Brewery Village, to the Pirate Studios stage, where we caught noise pop trio False Advertising and wrote a review of their awesome, loud set. Also on Saturday we caught some awesome indie and pop acts such as KOLARS, Airways, Picture This and Marsicans, some heavier acts including The Blinders and IDLES, and of course the immensely entertaining Calva Louise (pictured below) on the Modern Sky stage. The grand finale of the day was from IDLES at Constellations, which was absolutely manic. If you’re a fan of hot, sticky punk shows then give IDLES a look, you won’t go far wrong.
You can check out our reviews of KOLARS, Marsicans, Calva Louise and The Blinders here!
Sunday took us to The Baltic Social, which we took over for the entire day to show off our wide range of amazing emerging artists. Headlining the night was the infamous Hands Off Gretel, supported by Liverpool duo RIVAL BONES, rock ‘n’ roll unit Hot Soles, indie funk troupe I Set The Sea On Fire and more. Alice’s Night Circus opened the day with her unique, steampunk spin on pop, followed by electronic rock band LUPA, synth punk poet Lucie Barât, and Sheffield garage trio DARMA.
The entire Kycker team was in Liverpool on the Sunday, so we also got the chance to explore some more acts that we’d been dying to see, including Australian beach pop band Geowulf, pop rockers Sunset Sons and of course the amazing lo-fi jazz music of Puma Blue. We actually managed to catch one song from the Superorganism set at Hangar 34 totally by accident while we were saying our goodbyes, which was amazing. Their sound is such a middle finger to genre convention it’s actually quite hard to comprehend, but I don’t think we were supposed to comprehend it, and we didn’t need to to recognise how awesome it was.
There was some concern floating around the music industry earlier on this year, worrying that Liverpool Sound City would not be the same because of the different location. The location was perfect to turn Sound City into a hip urban festival, and make it stand out from all the other mid level festivals in the UK. Such a vast array of genres and underground acts made Sound City an awesome place for everyone, and we’re beyond ecstatic to visit again next year. Roll on 2019!
Autumn Palmer
Barry Whittaker-Gilbey
Joe Robinson
Josh Hubbard
Kiran Hungin
Frank
Lenny Bedford
