What a festival. It’s not just the booking, even though the booking is cool as hell. The people who put together the Primavera Sound Festival know how to pull in huge stars and spiky critical-favorite types, and it might be the only fest where you can see Chappell Roan and Chat Pile within an hour of one another. You can wander into a club space next to one of the rows of food vendors and find people freaking out to a set from a Brazilian funk DJ. You can see tons of artists, from tons of different places and genres and sensibilities, having truly gratifying career moments. That’s amazing, but it’s not really what sets Primavera apart. There’s other stuff to consider, too.

This was my first Primavera Sound Festival, my first time in Spain — or Catalonia, more accurately — and my first time seeing the Mediterranean Sea. Even in a vast concrete complex like Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum can look absolutely fucking beautiful when the whole sea splays out around it — when you can look over on the other side of the stage and see sailboats. The weather, the whole time we were there, was as close to perfect as weather can get. The crowd was high and unruly, as festival crowds tend to be, but you could still find yourself in a long, gratifying conversation with a total stranger just because the two of you both attempted to help the guy who was tweaking really hard after he got dropped crowdsurfing.

Also, Primavera goes all night. That’s key. A duo called 4am Kru — two British guys who don’t seem to actually touch any musical equipment but who jump around and cheerlead like crazy while jagged bursts of old-school hardcore techno come erupting out of the speakers — really only makes sense at 4 a.m. At Primavera, they come onstage at 3:50, and you might catch yourself having a holy-shit moment that you never anticipated. When you’re still sweaty from the Turnstile pit and you watch the sun rise over the Mediterranean? That’s an experience. American festivals can’t give you that. —Tom Breihan

Below, check out a rundown of our nine favorite performances from Primavera Sound 2025, presented in chronological order.

Charli XCX

Troye Sivan is a very good pop star. He can sing. He can dance. He looks great. He has a distinct sensibility and viewpoint and style. He has lots of big songs, more than you might remember, and it’s fun to sing along with them. He’s been performing for, what, half his life? More? He knows what to do. Still, the intricately produced, saucily staged Troye Sivan parts of Thursday night’s Sweat Tour spectacular felt like interludes, commercial breaks. They’re like Turnstile’s new wave songs — a chance to catch your breath before shit really pops off. There can be only one true main event, and it’s Charli, baby.

Charli XCX was a headliner at Primavera 2024, when Brat was just about to drop, and she returned to the festival as a conquering hero. She performed virtually all of Brat on the Primavera mainstage and only a few of her older tracks. Even “Party 4 U,” her 2020 song that’s going through a huge TikTok revival, didn’t get a spot in the Sweat Tour setlist. Troye Sivan had dancers and sets and general goodwill — it was his 30th birthday — but Charli had the instant club classics. Those Brat songs went off.

For Charli’s parts of the show, she was typically onstage by herself, wearing some combination of tiny underwear and sunglasses, occasionally holding a long-stem wineglass, often braying about how drunk she was. This was not the choreographed superstar routine. Instead, she reigned over the gigantic party by projecting pure attitude and having fun up there. She has real-deal pop-star presence, but it doesn’t come with any of the theater-kid energy that so often comes with pop stardom these days. The theater-kid energy isn’t even a bad thing, but there’s an extra charge when you see a huge bright shining star who could just as easily be your drunkest friend, except that your drunkest friend didn’t make “Vroom Vroom.” —Tom Breihan

Sabrina Carpenter

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet tour has been documented on social media ad nauseum at this point; she and her production team must’ve known they’d have to switch things up a bit for Primavera. The pop star brought a few welcome changes to her Friday night headlining set, from a pair of new sparkly outfits to an updated setlist and the live debut of her new single “Manchild.” Despite playing to one of the festival’s biggest crowds, her trademark sense of humor still shone through, from an out-of-nowhere dance party interlude to Ginuwine’s “Pony” to a t-shirt cannon “Juno” position. (No, Sabrina, I’ve never tried that one!) As per usual, however, she wrapped it all up with “Espresso,” a fitting energy boost for those of us aspiring to keep dancing until the sun came up. —Abby Jones

High Vis

@stereogum London’s High Vis, the baggy punk quintet and Stereogum Band To Watch alums, played a kickass late night set at Primavera Sound Barcelona tonight, the first show of an EU and UK summer tour. Here’s “The Bastard Inside” from their 2019 debut album ‘No Sense Of Feeling.’ #HighVis #hardcore #PrimaveraSound ♬ original sound – stereogum

I can’t write about the Turnstile set. Somebody else has to do that. I was in my animal zone for Turnstile. I was not in the right frame of mind to mentally record the details happening around me. High Vis are a different story, if only because I did not act a fool for the entire time they were on — only some of the time they were on. But as with Turnstile, it’s just immensely gratifying to see a band that comes from the DIY hardcore world coming out and ripping shit at a huge rock festival.

The whole deal with High Vis is: What if the Stone Roses made oi music? If that doesn’t interest you, then I’m sorry, guitar music is over for you. Find another interest. Collect Funko Pops or something. In the band’s formulation, the Stone Roses are really good at making oi music, or maybe Cock Sparrer are really good at making Madchester baggy. Frontman Graham Sayle doesn’t even seem like the most physical presence at hardcore shows, but when he’s got a bit more room to move around on a bigger stage, he’s a dervish — the kind of guy who can and will do the David Lee Roth jumping splits while coming across as David Lee Roth’s polar opposite. On Friday night, High Vis’ songs were sincere and urgent and powerful. On a festival full of great rock bands off on the side stages, they might’ve been the best of them. —Tom Breihan

Floating Points

I don’t gravitate toward DJ sets; the reason I dragged our group to see Sam Shepherd at 3 a.m. is because his performance was billed as “Floating Points (live),” and I wondered what that might entail. I guess the extra trappings onstage differentiated this from whatever Shepherd would normally do behind the decks, but functionally the distinction was moot. His crisp, incessant electronic beats were expressly built for dancing, and dance we did. There’s a brainy, geometric quality to this kind of club music, a cold precision that does not often connect with me in my personal listening. But booming out into the early hours of Saturday morning, its effect was as urgently physical as intended. In their native environment, sounds that often strike me as chilly were reframed as refreshingly brisk. —Chris DeVille

Kim Deal

I’d imagine that one would get tired of “Cannonball” after performing it live for over three decades. I was just shy of being born when the Breeders’ 1993 hit dominated alt-rock radio, but that hasn’t stopped bandleader Kim Deal from becoming one of my favorite living songwriters, a status she further cemented with her Saturday afternoon set at Primavera. It was the latest show on a run supporting her debut solo album Nobody Loves You More from last year. She opened the set with a few tracks from that album, complete with its horns and strings, before asking about midway through her time block: “How do you say ‘old songs’ in Spanish?” She then answered herself: “No bye, no aloha!”

Deal’s set became a reverse-chronological order document of her career, with a handful of beloved Breeders songs performed to crowd fanfare as her million-dollar smile beamed across the large Revolut stage. Last Splash staples like “No Aloha,” “Invisible Man,” and “Do You Love Me Now?” got added depth with the large band behind her, culminating in one epic rendition of her Pixies classic “Gigantic” as the closer. Right before walking off the stage, she pointed upwards and said, “Love ya, Steve,” a nod to the late Steve Albini whose legacy shaped Deal’s career as well as Primavera’s history. —Abby Jones

Chappell Roan

Lisan al Gaib. The chosen one. A legend taking shape right before our eyes. The last time I saw Chappell Roan, almost exactly one year ago, she was outside at a Richmond park — a show that got moved because the club where she’d been booked wasn’t anywhere near big enough to meet demand. That was a big show. People lined up on the banks of the river outside Brown’s Island and watched from the traffic bridge overhead. Roan told us that it was the biggest show she’d ever played, but that wasn’t the case for long. Brown’s Island can hold maybe 6,000 people. On Saturday night, Roan performed before the biggest Primavera crowd that I saw all weekend — probably more than 10 times as many people.

That night in Richmond, Chappell Roan was just beginning an absolutely monstrous year, a 1998 DMX type of takeover. I can think of very few people who have risen to her level in such a short time, and she doesn’t have the Disney-kid media training that’s supposed to teach stars on her level how to move through the world. That means Roan gives us grand-stage pop stardom with just a few layers of artifice peeled away. When she tears up while telling this vast crowd that she loves us, you get the feeling that she means it.

At Primavera, Chappell Roan sang pretty much every song that she could possibly sing. She sang 13 of the 14 songs on The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess (sorry, “California”), as well as the two post-album singles, the one unreleased song that she does at every show, and the Heart cover that she occasionally busts out. Ordinarily, this might seem like a baby act stretching — trying to build a full set when the material just isn’t there. But even the deepest of Midwest Princess deep cuts landed like absolute fucking smashes at this festival, and the actual hits were on another level. “Red Wine Supernova” has become a mass singalong to rival “Champagne Supernova.” Aerial footage of the “Hot To Go!” dance must look like a mass cult ritual. “Pink Pony Club” now registers as an all-time great pop song. Roan did all that on a stage built to look like an evil queen’s castle from an old fantasy cartoon, and she hit huge notes while playing her role with imperious confidence. She’s one of the best things to happen to pop music in a very, very long time, and this performance was one for the history books. —Tom Breihan

MJ Lenderman

@stereogum MJ Lenderman at Primavera Sound 2025 #MJLenderman #PrimaveraSound #Wednesday #concert ♬ original sound – stereogum

While Chappell Roan summoned hordes of bedazzled, sardine-packed Primavera-goers to the main stage area Saturday night, another young legacy act in the making rocked out on the amphitheater-like Cupro stage. I’ve seen Jake Lenderman perform too many times to keep track, both as a solo artist and as a member of Wednesday, but I’d never seen him appear quite as lively as he did at Primavera. Maybe it was the jetlag, maybe it was Barcelona’s amped-up atmosphere, or maybe it was the giant bottle of wine he and the Wind members were swigging from, but Lenderman seemed carefree as ever while still shredding just as flawlessly as you’d expect. That energy radiated into the crowd, the perfect mix of enthusiastic but not overly raucous. Now, if we could only get a twangy, lackadaisical “Pink Pony Club” cover… —Abby Jones

Chat Pile

Raygun Busch is the main attraction. Within one song, he had ditched his shirt and begun listing off his favorite train movies, having speculated that the stage’s naming sponsor Trainline was “Priceline for trains.” Busch stalks the stage with his own kind of awkward grace, reacting to the music with sudden lurches and pseudo-dances that would feel like a mockery of aggro hardcore frontmen if it wasn’t obvious that this is just how the guy moves. With the same weird, intuitive fluidity, he switches between absurdity and grave explorations of humanity’s darkest realities, barking and bellowing about killers in your home and people who just wish they had somewhere indoors to sleep.

Yet despite my eagerness to bear witness to Busch’s twisted standup routine again as soon as possible, I was even more taken with the violence his bandmates summoned: a series of throttling low-end bombardments that prioritized rhythm yet rarely missed a chance to splatter the band’s noise-rock with radioactive melody. Their churn was so enthralling that I decided to skip half of my beloved LCD Soundsystem’s set so I could stick it out with Chat Pile until the end. —Chris DeVille

Turnstile

There were some DJ sets afterwards that would carry revelers to sunrise, but for all intents and purposes, Turnstile’s 3 a.m. set Sunday morning was the grand finale of Primavera Sound 2025. The fest went out with a bang. Given the pop and experimental inclinations of the new Never Enough, it wasn’t clear to me exactly how Turnstile’s emphatic live show would evolve in 2025. The answer: It mostly didn’t change at all, and thank goodness. Within the swirl of discourse and branding remains a powerhouse punk band capable of sending your adrenaline soaring at a moment’s notice. The combination of crushing power-chord riffs and Brendan Yates’ piercing wails remains incredibly potent. The less explicitly hardcore moments made for nice respites from the chaos, and the simple, colorful imagery lent the set an accessible edge. But mostly this was the kind of get-in-the-pit exhilaration the band built its legend on. —Chris DeVille