Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
DAY 1 HIGHLIGHTS:
The very first performers for Pitchfork are mostly local Chicago outfits with a small but extremely dedicated fanbase, and they pack a potent punch.
Black Duck served indie rock instrumentals, using a gentle touch to start the festival off on a mellow note. Angry Blackmen, however, ratcheted the energy up, doing chants with the audience (“I say ANGRY, y’all say BLACK!”), punctuating their particular fusion of electronic and rap with yells and hollers. The security guards seemed really into it—I saw one head-banging from afar. “Don’t give up on yourself!” they said as they were about to depart the stage.
As a staunch supporter of the city of St. Louis, I felt a duty to attend the 100 gecs set even though I didn’t expect to like it very much, but it massively rocked. I mentally assign them into a category of music I call “Little Brother Music,” semi-derogative. The duo walked on to a truly wild edit of the THX logo sound effect. Laura Les delivered some of the best banter of the festival, at one point comparing 100 gecs to the Grateful Dead in terms of variations of live performances: “on this song, they actually both messed up!” A massive crowd gathered around the stage to hear them sing “stupid horse,” and I ended up running back several times to catch further glimpses of their set, as they succeeded in piquing my interest. Laura Les said “Chicago, the Hollywood of the Midwest…. this song is about the Hollywood of California.” I was charmed.
Black Pumas earnestly asked us to “give it up for rock and roll.” If 100 gecs is Little Brother Music, Black Pumas sounded like really good Dad Music. I had seen people online griping about the choice of headliner, especially how it seemed emblematic of the GQ-ification of Pitchfork. Truthfully, I thought they were a great fit for a summer festival, albeit a weird fit for a festival put on by a publication that prides itself on being critical and discerning. “It’s like if the New York Times bestseller list was a band,” said my festival companion. The crowd had thinned noticeably after 100 gecs.
Lead singer Eric Burton left the stage to sing in the little hermetically sealed part of the pit for a minute, the purple sky shining out behind him. Overhead a flock of gulls circled, blind to the human singularity of the moment …. or perhaps all the humans at Pitchfork had partaken in a collective psychosis known as Culture, that engenders meaning in the abstract, stitching emotions and community out of apparently random sound waves, creating something out of nothing.
We left in the night, crushed husks of human beings, in order to rest up and do the whole thing again tomorrow and the next day.
DAY 2 HIGHLIGHTS:
Saturday, of course, is the most intensive day of the festival, with stacked lineups overlapping with one another egregiously. It is also the most crowded. As such, it is the most stressful day to be covering the festival for an indie music blog, and it demands strict marshaling of energy and attention.
In one of the most devastating lapses of my journalistic career, I spent the entire Hotline TNT set in line for complimentary Nespresso iced double shots. The crowd for Saturday was huge, and the demand for free iced lattes was massive—the line was 40 minutes long.
I watched from afar as feeble little horse played a mostly sleepy set, accentuated by a fast-paced harmonic instrumental improv, after which the lead singer Lydia Slocum said, “our newest song!” Slocum said, “we’re so happy to be opening for Carly Rae Jepsen!” What sweet kiddos.
The Water From Your Eyes set overlapped with Wednesday and feeble little horse, the latter two also overlapping with Sweeping Promises. At the Water set, lead singer Rachel Brown was suffering from an asthmatic disease: “I may have a coughing fit, the doctor said it’s fine,” hypothesizing that it was karmic correction for sneaking in to pitchfork many years ago when they were seventeen. “All three days,” they said. “I don’t know if anyone else is seventeen and snuck in today, watch your back.” Despite visibly and audibly struggling, Water From Your Eyes delivered a solid set, with Brown speak-singing the song “When You’re Around.”
The lead singer of Wednesday, Karly Hartzman, acknowledged the overlap with good humor, saying, “it’s a little suspicious that y’all are here instead of Water From Your Eyes.” The Wednesday set had more screaming than in the record, and the band seemed a bit abstractly downcast. “Everyone’s a little unhappy today,” Hartzman said. “I know you guys have some anger and sadness you’d like to let out, and I do too,” she remarked before singing “Bull Believer.” Despite this, the band sounded great, even when guitarist MJ Lenderman broke a string and joined partway through the next song.
It was the point in the festival where everyone loses phone service, and people you’ve seen on twitter clutch at you to ask for whether or not you’ve seen their partner. The hectic day was taking its toll on me. I had seen all four overlapping indie rock sets and, according to the iPhone, had walked 12,000 steps. A truck with a screen that said WIN FREE WEED FOR A YEAR drove by the festival. I asked a bartender at a craft beer tent which beverage had the highest ABV and ordered based on that.
Someone in the crowd for De La Soul hoisted a giant inflatable blunt. “Hands up! hands up! hands up!” the band called, members coming out one at a time. The crowd sang along en masse; to be in the middle of it felt akin to an out-of-body experience. On the outskirts, however, the vibrations were different. “I would describe this as ‘8th grade gym,’” one of my friends remarked, seated on the lawn far away from the stage. I met a girl who urgently told me her shirt was made out of a tablecloth.
Sweeping Promises dedicated a song to the people of Palestine, and everyone in the band looked absurdly young except for the drummer, who looked absurdly old. I was so excited to see them and they sounded good as hell! By the soundstage a pair of folks with loud leg tattoos did watercolors. I said, “I love this! Is it inspired by the music?” And they shook their heads no.
Back in the Visit Austin lounge, Karly from Wednesday talked about watching a cow give birth in North Carolina at the Fourth of July Rodeo. When asked how to cope with the boredom of growing up in a small town: “Being creative,” she said, “and by that I mean doing drugs. Being creative about doing drugs.”
I spied a baby with no headphones sitting underneath a vape cloud blown by, I presume, the father. The baby lifted up a map of the festival with an open mouth. It made me think of the line from Solenoid: “nothing is strange to a child because everything is strange to a child.” Someone in the crowd wore a shirt that said Every Thing Ends…. LIVE WHILE U CAN. These images swirled through my mind darkly, like a flood of sewage. I contemplated my mortality with somewhat drunken grimness, which as everyone knows is the keenest despair a person can feel.
But I needn’t have worried. Carly Rae Jepsen saved my soul, and I was reborn.
An oceanic cheer went up from the crowd as she stepped into view, platinum blonde and glistening like a cliff dashed with sea foam. “Are you guys ready to run away with us tonight?” She jumped up and down during her first couple songs, giving the occasional kick for emphasis, telegraphing how fun is it to be me?? Privately, I marveled, this whole time the riff was played on a saxophone?
“Shouldn’t she be playing Lolla? Did she get confused?” I heard someone say. But she seemed right at home at Pitchfork, absolutely belting on “Talking To Yourself,” and hitting every note. Holding the pose, holding the note, as fog rushed up from the stage, like something out of a Greek myth. Handing out the mic to the audience during “Call Me Maybe,” dashing around like a deer in a meadow, gripping the mic with both hands, singing “Kollage” with an intensity that was so focused it seemed borderline erotic. Ancient peoples would have worshiped her as a god, I realized.
Her minidress sparkled like stardust. A lock of her hair snapped in the breeze, even as she stood still she was dynamic, an angel, biblically correct or not. In the corner of the stage, someone pounded on an insanely big drum set that resembled an arachnid. Behind her, the green line train of the CTA darted in and out of the trees. “This is my favorite time of night, right now,” she said, utterly sincere, and someone handed her a sword. It was giving Professional Pop Star. It was practiced, polished, prepped for the angles, photo-perfect. Cosmic perfection, in a complicated and overwhelming way.
As the twilight settled, the temperature dropped palpably, and it felt wonderful to raise your hands and sink your arms deep in the night. The moon rose, yellow and round like an egg yolk. My friends and I left with the crowd, stumbling home, holding each other’s hands too tightly.
DAY 3 HIGHLIGHTS:
I feel like I can’t remember Day 3 of Pitchfork very well despite the fact that I am writing this less than 48 hours after. The authorities later declared it the hottest day on Earth in recorded history.
Akenya started the day off on an extremely strong note, with really impressive singing. Every time I thought her range couldn’t get more expansive she proved me wrong. She and her live band performed psychedelic soul-inflected rock songs, and then she took to the piano to transition to more jazzy “intimate” songs, as she called it. I was enjoying the set immensely when I learned Joe Biden had dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, to very little note anywhere in the festival.
Next, I saw DIY folk icon Joanna Sternberg sing a solo set. They seemed genuinely pleased to be there, and gave little chuckles in between songs. I was shocked to find myself in tears as they sang “The Love I Give,” something about the purity of confronting pain straightforwardly struck me deeply. Sternberg played the hits, in between remarking about bugs: “that’s why I sweat so much, so the bugs can’t stick to me.”
Jessica Pratt was ethereal, I only caught a glimpse of her as I set off to eat dinner, but she sounded beautiful. Mannequin Pussy had started some bit that involved yelling PUSSY that I walked in on, which struck me as gauche and obnoxious, just like using AI to create one of your music videos…. lead singer Missy Dabice alternated between shouting and talking in a faux-sultry voice in between playing octane-fueled fast punk music.
MUNA yelled out, “Hi babies!” as a greeting. They played a dynamic set, with singer Katie Gavin wearing one of the craziest outfits I had seen at the festival, a super short super sheer dress with a yellow bra underneath. They were met with uproarious applause from the crowd. An older man wearing a cowboy hat grinned and spun during their second song. Loping all over the stage, they tossed multiple inflatable ponies out that bounced like bubbles in the crowd. “We are a queer band that really does want the revolution,” they said, before playing “Silk Chiffon.”
I was totally exhausted at this point in time, feeling physically and spiritually like the baby from Eraserhead. I didn’t see the Brittany Howard or Les Savy Fav sets. I didn’t think I had much to say about Alanis Morrissette; and then: surprise, surprise, here comes MUNA to sing “Ironic” with Miss Alanis! Everyone felt good about that.
The previous day one of my friends had said, “this must be hellish for you, seeing so many people who know you,” and it did in fact seem vividly like I had seen all these people before, in the near or distant past. Everyone who passed me possessed the faint familiar discomfort of an odd Hinge date, of seeing a distant relative suddenly grown old. Everyone I made eye contact with held it a second too long, as if they felt it too, trying to place me. I felt connected to everyone in a way that felt like it bordered on psychosis: we were the babies in neighboring incubators forty years ago, they were chilled bodies next to mine in the morgue. They were the nucleus next to my nucleus in the ganglion of the world’s last flatworm. They were a neighboring raindrop in the primordial goop. Pitchfork seemed to hold the whole world in a little spoon, and then stir it into a complimentary Nespresso iced latte.
Altogether it was a tremendous weekend. Perhaps the afterlife is one big Pitchfork festival, surrounded by all the people we knew and loved, repeated on and on forever; perhaps we will never live through another festival like it again.
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Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan | @ONEFEIISWOOP
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