Rotterdam’s most frenzied festival is back and the stormy weather seems to agree with said disarray. But within that chaos inherent, Left of the Dial occupies an interesting place, largely hanging its hat on booking relatively unknown artists. Among these unknowns were once Lambrini Girls, Divorce, deathcrash, Blue Bendy, Tramhaus, Deadletter and the Mercury Prize-winning English Teacher.
Yet for every act aiming to flourish beyond that sweet honeymoon phase, there are many of those forever lost at sea, perpetually teetering at the bleeding edge of becoming. I remember seeing this brilliant band called Stores back in 2021 who moved me to tears with strangely discordant pop. It was one of the most memorable things I’ve seen during this festival’s existence, but for whatever reason, they disbanded and fizzled out. Goes to show that at the very first gust, the fragile, mercurial ecosystem that constitutes a band can disappear without a trace.
In light of that thought, it feels rather shallow to talk about which of Left of the Dial’s 140 something acts – spread over a tons of locations across the city – will achieve some form of greater notoriety. The crosshairs should rather be on a celebration of creativity itself, for heaven knows, the weather is terrible, so to make it all the way to Rotterdam is a victory in its own right.
With gusts of wind going damn near horizontal, many carefully orchestrated plans are likely in shambles. Silver Gore for instance, couldn’t make it to Dutch shores in time. This prompted Left of the Dial to shuffle the deck prematurely.
Opening at Worm, producer/songwriter ultra caro made no attempt to challenge the chaos. Though her gossamer PC Music-kindred synth pop lends itself well to a polished pop performance, the French-born, London-based artist opts for the complete antithesis, fumbling winsomely through her set. Tracks often start anew on repeat after she performed them, giving ultra caro’s show more the air of a private bedroom routine – one where she’s experimenting with various vocal effects and synths as if trying on a new fit. And though she is disarmingly frank about the “sad” nature of her songs, her devil-may-care disposition about it all sparked a lot of warmth and levity.
Meanwhile, this fucking storm if huffing and puffing along with maximum force. It was wishful thinking to make it to Roodkapje with my umbrella intact, and indeed, I mosey into Fellatio‘s thrilling hullabaloo completely and utterly hosed. The calamitous, clanking fuckery of these guys has been turning heads at a pretty blistering pace and it’s easy to see why. Fellatio sounds like carnaval music according to Liars, Suicide, Fat White Family and Deerhunter in their rabid Monomania-phase (with an equally skeletal frontman in Abel, who looks like he’s screaming PTDS terror amidst the band’s warped promenades of noise). Fellatio are nightmarish and exhilarating at the same time: a bonfire bop in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Lord of the Flies.
The danger to miscast a band is especially present at a festival like Left of the Dial, and Cardiff’s Midding turned out to be far more than a mere The Jesus and Mary Chain/A.R. Kane throwback I initially pegged them out to be. This bunch is wonderfully mismatched, with all members looking like they come from entirely different bands. Among the five, there’s this young kid in a Bauhaus shirt, a punk rock girl doing the Maureen Tucker ‘standing drummer’ routine with rolling eyes and a flute/keyboard player who looks like he plays in a Foxygen-esque psych band – he seems to be very detail oriented concerning Midding’s overall stage sound.
The latter two seem to be openly at odds – the keen-eared flute guy cautiously complaining about the intrusiveness of the floor tom to the sound guy. It adds a palpable tension to a band with a thrilling plethora of sounds that wouldn’t look out of place on K Records roster – with some oddball pop elements of Beat Happening and Half Japanese bubbling up. There’s a magnetic shyness among the five musicians – the bass player even has her back turned to the audience the whole way. It’s all inexplicably cool. Fire Records should think real hard about signing them.
After a brief plunge into the high-wired sparkly power punk of youngsters C’est Qui, we head off to Salsability to see an unflinching, militant set by experimental hip-hop duo Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals. It was clocking quickly to us the Baltimore outfit were standing on business – no flowery metaphors, no impressionistic word salads. These guys throw unrelenting head hunting haymakers at every person and system making the world the shitstorm it is.
Their overall sound has a super thrilling retrograde quality to it – the no-frills, time-honored lyrical punch of Grandmaster Flash suddenly in cahoots with more cutting edge MO of a Death Grips or .clipping. They often borrow a ubiquitous pop hook – namely from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Suzanne Vega – to brand their raps definitively into the cerebral cortex. Though rousing and radical, there’s a palpable sadness lingering within Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals’ set – the picking up the tab for saying their piece.
On Day 2, we start at the Plato record store where Cistern, a serpentine four-member Canadian punk outfit, tune their instruments with baggy eyes. They play art punk spirituals as intricate and earthly as the bike roads of their scenic mountainside hometown of Squamish, BC. Their spin on bands like Women, Television and Wire feels moreish and homegrown: informed more by small town daydreaming than the telegraphed cool of some of their stylistic kith and kin. Once they noticed members of fellow Canadians Mock Media in the crowd, Cistern kick their set into a higher gear with quizzical mischief.
Over at Perron, boisterous Brighton troupe big long sun exude the rebellious whimsy of some runaways on a Goonies-type of seafaring adventure. In-between songs, their captain on deck Jamie Broughton seems to ratify this impression, calling his band “music for angry children”. The collective throws oddly telegraphed tantrums of noise amidst their spry psych pop spiels, adding to their jejune charm. There’s a lot to like here: the timeline of when big long sun remain deliriously unmoored or docked to more familiar stylistic shores seems entirely of their own injunction.
Off to Roodkapje to watch shoegaze-colossus No Joy conjure a storm of its own making. On records, Jasamine White-Gluz’s project embraces a more pristine songcraft, but on that stage, it snowballs into a true force of nature that’s both unruly and quite beautiful. That force is carried largely by a powerful rhythm section that includes Suuns-drummer Liam O’Neill working himself into a sweat. At Worm, October and The Eyes courts danger and grace with wanton urgency, channeling Patti Smith or PJ Harvey at their most devilish through a filter of no wave noise.
Back at Perron, noise duo Silverwingkiller serve up acid punk bangers that in theory should let the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Instead, it unravels as something shoestring and goofy, which I’m not sure was the intention. That being said, their drummer/beat programmer James takes it upon himself to instigate the moshpit, and with great success. Indubitably fun, but still needs a little cooking to meet its mark.
Sometimes, it’s that very lack of polish that instills the intrigue, like with Austria power pop phenoms Laundromat Chicks at De Doelen’s upstairs venue. The young foursome have a repertoire of undeniably great songs, yet sonically they are still a little bit a deer in headlights. For now they are adrift in limbo between Modern Lovers-styled wide-eyed jangle pop and the sprightly swagger of the Y2K garage rock boom. It’s up to them to pick a lane and bend said lane to their whims to do their magical songwriting justice.
The Hobknobs – a new project founded by Lewsberg’s Arie van Viet and The Klittens’ Yaël Dekker (with fellow Klitten Winnie Conradi on bass) – were remarkable at de Doelen. Though the music’s economic restraint is unavoidably similar to Lewsberg, it isn’t without sentiment. In fact, these songs actually invite a kind of pre-internet sentiment that’s incredibly intrusive, without so much imposing it on the listeners.
The use of tape-recorder for its sparse, grainy beats reinforces this, plus Arie and Yaël’s twee choked up vocal harmonies – fractured like glass objects on the verge of shattering – resonate like a harbinger of unbearably bad news. “War is coming”, Arie plainly states at some point, his resignation self-evident: the ensuing silence in the room is akin to that of a firing squad before an execution… before another placid lo-fi melody rings like a deft hand on your shoulder. The Hobknobs’ show at De Doelen was more disquieting and devastating than it genuinely had any intention of being, I think, and it was impossible to hold back tears.
After that show, we quietly tapped out to gather ourselves for the final stretch run of Left of the Dial 2025. At the legendary, briefly revived Waterfront, Lyon trio Eat-Girls don’t even need to play a single note to get us invested – for the coy French lilt of the term ‘it girls’ reveal them as inquisitive voyeurs with quite a sinister bite. Eat-Girls wield the pounce of Siouxsie, Blonde Redhead and Warpaint through the dream pop fog of Broadcast. Corrosive, propulsive and playful, already tailored perfectly for soirees of the subterranean variety.
At the Arminiuskerk, the young Glasgow coven Tanzana lean leisurely into the pagan dream pop paeans. Singer Freya Talbot shows out as an expressive, hyper-talented vocalist, often pawing into anguished states while seemingly on the verge of tears. Sonically, Tanzana prefer a more streamlined, atmospheric approach (chalk it up to their triphop-influences?) over loud-quiet dynamics, giving ample room for Talbot to explore her full vocal range. As Tanzana’s profile rises, and with a larger runway to cultivate their repertoire further, the sky is the limit. And shoot, they are very good already.
Zonbi provided one of the festivals most explosive sets, laboring through an absolutely intoxicating bricolage of avant-rock, free jazz and Haitian folk spirituals. At the center is vocalist/poet/sax fiend Dimitri Milbrun, surrounded by three band members dressed like regulars of a club of high rollers somewhere in Siberia. This set was absolutely bonkers, often jump scaring from smooth, lounge lizard atmospherics to full-on alt-metal psychosis like Faith No More at their best.
Milbrun is at the heart of it all, cleaving the band in two with his clamorous sax playing, commanding both bandmates and crowd like a witch doctor casting ancient enchantments. Like all great live bands, Zonbi seem to have that extra gear reserved to rev up the room into a new level of intensity. When the dust finally settled, the gratitude between band and audience members was as pure-hearted as can be.
Canadian prog punks Computer were likewise impressive at a packed Rotown, and the long queue waiting outside spoke volumes on how many souls wanted to see these guys sandblast the place to smithereens. Like with Squid, you’re at a loss by the abundance of stirring musical ideas magically coalescing – yet you struggle to find where their emotional core lies from a songwriting standpoint. Around the corner at Club Centraal, Sean Trelford is entertaining a windswept scene of just a few onlookers with a maladroit rendition of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”. Trelford ends his show with a non-plussed gratitude, with a speaking voice far lower than the quavering tenor that’s his singing voice. At city festivals like Left of the Dial, it remains a strange miracle how abruptly you find yourself in completely opposing sceneries.
The Roebucks deliver a delightfully herky jerky alt-country smörgasbord at Roodkapje, with singer-guitarist Lola Gordon looking like a Wild West saloon siren who is eternally bound to listen to the bar patrons hard luck tales. Really charming band who put a fresh spin on the more twangy golden oldies from bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Fleetwood Mac. Cowboy Hunters – despite their name – don’t have much common with all that, but their unruly set at Perron’s small room did bring an infectious lawlessness. Big ravey beats, punk rock attitude, and people pogoing arduously despite the room’s low ceiling: bands like Cowboy Hunters are always a sure thing.
The most menacing set of the weekend without question belongs to Servo, a Rouen, Normany-based wrecking crew of three, at Perron’s main room. This is growling, firebrand noise rock beast that seems to have risen up from the deepest crevice in hell. Singer-guitarist Arthur Pierre looks like Bob from Twin Peaks has taken possession of his body, unleashing squalls of effect laden noise with deadened gaze – pure pandemonium like Nirvana in their absolute prime. The vocals sound absolutely demonic, their rhythm section adds new meaning to the word ‘guttural’ – you can tell by the get-go these guys intend to lay this entire place to a smouldering waste. And like Zonbi before them, Servo always seem to reach a new plateau of hyper-proficient brutality.
At Worm, we endure a full 15 minutes of some obnoxious lad band the audience seems way too impressed by, to gather way at the front for Sheffield’s Good News. This trio plays inventive angular art punk that recalls the best days of ESG, Delta 5 and Devo (bass player Dan Philpott even does those signature ‘stop-start’ poses of the latter). This set was an absolute treat and – dare I say – a bold elevation/continuation of aforementioned 80s disco-punk stylings. The rhythm section of Philpott and drummer Erin Hoggard is supple, steady and crisp, giving vocalist & multi-instrumentalist Beth Aylward a strong foundation to frolic around with guitars, percussion and even clarinet. Deadpan yet piercing, with nothing but knockout tracks.
Though we intended to tap out here, curiosity killed the cat on our way to the afterparty at Waterfront’s legendary stomping grounds. For across these beautiful docks, magical sounds keep ringing out. Decking the big red Light Vessel V11, we floated downstream to Dreamwave‘s neo-psychedelic anthems, before catching the tail end of Search Results‘ frisky set. Comprised of three lovable oddballs, they churn out charismatic couch potato punk vignettes that seem to revel in life’s smaller victories.
The Dublin-based trio tore through their songs like a bunch giddy jackrabbits in an Adderall-withdrawal; one particularly sharp-dressed older gentleman at the front seems to visualise all sorts of shapes and colors inside their music. Here, it dawns on me that for every jam-packed victory performance, there are trillions of gigs just like this. Merely a handful of people of odd circumstance gathering to enjoy a fun idiosyncratic band devoid of any compromise or pretentiousness.
In tat or in tatters, nothing matters…as long as we’re dancing! All the way up till next year, at Left of the Dial 2026!
Photo’s: big long sun and The Hobknobs (Leah Wilhelmina), Servo (Lisa Ooijevaar), Search Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals and Fellatio (Mathijs de Jong), Search Results (Martijn Berlage).
