For our 12th consecutive edition: it’s that time of the year again! Vodafone Paredes de Coura 2025 takes place from August 13 to 16, at the usual spot: the Taboão river beach, right off the village of Paredes de Coura. Daily tickets (€60) and full festival passes (€130) are still available; between August 10-12 there are free shows at the town centre, too.
It’s no secret that we enjoy a, let’s say, more “horizontal” festival where there are no clear headliners, and the 2025 edition almost delivers that. The “undercard” – God only knows how much I despise that expression – has been the best selling point of the festival for a few years now. This is probably the edition with the strongest balance between whoever plays at the daytime slots and the headlining artists. The only obvious marquee names here are Vampire Weekend (closing the main stage on the first day), Air, and Franz Ferdinand (both playing the last night of the festival).
The other night slots are taken by two Paredes de Coura favorites (Alaskan rock band Portugal. The Man and one of the highlights of the 2017 edition, King Krule) and three potential rising stars: French singer Zaho de Sagazan (nice surprise, great stage presence last June at Primavera Sound), TikTok sensation Lola Young, and unlikely guitar hero Mk.gee. But perhaps you already know our favorites are often playing to smaller crowds earlier on; you’ll find more about our top ten picks later on.
Before, some extra info for first-time visitors. The four-day pass includes free camping for the whole week. Here’s a very comprehensible list of FAQs that are extra useful in case you’re camping. These are also a testament on how the conditions for campers have improved from the old days of having to walk uphill for 20min to find a supermarket. Unfortunately, that also means a lot of people would not bother to visit the village of Paredes de Coura itself; make sure you take your time to support local businesses as they rely a lot on this week’s extra income.
In case you’re 1) a princess, 2) old, or 3) both (that’s us), there are quite a few short rentals scattered around the area, if you don’t mind driving. If you’re not short on cash, you can easily find houses with a pool on it. Must be so nice, eh? Unfortunately for the lazy heads, shows at the main area of the festival start one hour earlier than usual (4:30 pm). After an edition that saw some headliners take the stage around 2 and some bands start after 4am, this is a win for the earlyist faction of the crowd. Time for what most of you come to this post for: the printable timetables, of course.
Below you’ll find our top ten picks for this year. We’ve also created a special playlist for this year’s festival with songs from twenty of this year’s artists. Hopefully you’ll find reasons to arrive a bit earlier or leave a bit later. See you there!
bbb hairdryer (Mon 11, 22:00, O Festival Sobe à Vila – Super Bock stage)
Our top pick for the pre-festival days at the Paredes de Coura town centre is bbb hairdryer, a noise-rock trio-turned-quartet self defined as satanic trans guitar shit. Raw hardcore energy filtered through an eclectic indie rock-ish lens that wouldn’t feel out of place in the late 90s Kill Rock Stars catalogue. Have a listen to the Revolve-issued A Single Mother / A Single Woman / An Only Child to know what I mean.
Being Dead (Wed 13, 16:30, BacanaPlay stage)
A band that can be best described as if Kevin Barnes would mix the better parts of the Beatles with surf rock on early of Montreal material. If this was 2004 and Pitchfork were still deciding who’s taking off for indie stardom and who should not quit their day job, Being Dead would definitely not be opening the smaller stage (this year regretfully sponsored by an online casino). A Best New Music-worthy review used to be the only thing you’d ever need to be a popular band.
Will that translate to thousands of people flocking to the festival at 4pm under a scorching sun? I doubt it, but not many new indie rock bands would be worthy of that. Seeing them playing for a packed small room at Paradiso’s London Calling festival in Amsterdam was a treat. Let’s do it again.
Cass McCombs (Wed 13, 19:40, BacanaPlay stage)
Wednesday evening is peak hour for bolachascore music. It’s no secret that Cass McCombs is one of our favorite songwriters; it’s also been a handful of years since the last time he’s been around. For the first time in Coura, he arrives two days before the release of his new album Interior Live Oak; we’re expecting the live debut of some of its 16 tracks.
MJ Lenderman (Wed 13, 20:40, Vodafone stage)
MJ Lenderman is our headliner. He’s currently one of the most in-demand artists in indie music, and it’s an absolute miracle that that’s a fact. Because the road he traveled to get here was paved with the commercial and critical failures of incredible musicians whose careers never really took off when the masses had no time for a specific type of songwriter blurring the lines between country and indie rock. The patron saint of these songwriters, being, of course, Jason Molina, the classic case of a musician who’s been mostly appreciated after his death.
That lineage manifests especially live on stage with his backing band, the Wind. Their live record, Live and Loose!, feels like the third part of a trilogy started with Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night and continued by Molina with Magnolia Electric Co.’s Trials and Errors; the last time I’ve seen them on stage on a festival setting at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound really felt like the Wind was fast morphing into peak Crazy Horse. Kids of all ages singing along both close and far from the stage, some of the most fun I’ve had in a festival for a long time. I’d be very, very surprised if some other set ends up being my highlight of the fest.
Glockenwise (Thu 14, 18:00 BacanaPlay stage)
Twelve years later, the boys – now men – from Barcelos return to Coura to let us all know what they’ve been up to. 2023’s Gótico Português is a mature art pop work from a band commonly associated with their hometown’s garage rock boom of the early 2010s. Their Portuguese-language records (together with the sleek Plástico) almost sound like they were recorded by a completely new and, let’s be honest, much more interesting entity.
Maruja (Thu 14, 01:50, BacanaPlay stage)
Maruja have been lingering on the British underground for what sounds like the best part of the last ten years, but they’re yet to put out their debut LP. Pain to Power will finally be out next month. It will be very hard to live up to the hype generated by their frenetic live shows, though. Their fault. If you’re still not bored by the endless stream of edgy rock bands coming from UK and Ireland the last few years, this is not the band that will cause your burnout.
Cassandra Jenkins (Fri 15, 18:00 BacanaPlay stage)
After seeing her “quiet” sound being carried away by the wind on a huge stage at Primavera Sound, it was somewhat a relief to see Cassandra Jenkins being booked for a smaller stage where we can properly appreciate the intricacies of her music. A true songwriter’s songwriter, we’ve seen Jenkins thrive before as part of Craig Finn’s and Eleanor Friedberger’s backing bands, and we’re delighted to see her meticulously crafted sound take her on new heights.
bar italia (Fri 15, 19:50, BacanaPlay stage)
Brought back to the lineup after an unfortunate late cancellation last year, bar italia are playing unusually early for a band that I’ve never seen on stage. Not because I wasn’t there, not because I was standing behind the tallest audience, but because they’re constantly playing pitch dark stages, adding to some kind of mystery around them that has mostly been dispelled with their rise above obscurity.
The British trio has been relatively quiet as of late, as two of the members focused on their sideproject Double Virgo (check out Shakedown on their bandcamp); nonetheless, their standalone single “Cowbella” released last month could be a sign of new things to come.
DIIV (Sat 16, 18:55, Vodafone stage)
DIIV were hardly a “smaller name” at any medium-sized festival of the past decade, but it feels like they’ve fell off the pecking order in recent years, far from headline slots and into indie mediocrity. This is perhaps made obvious by the fact that they’re playing this early. Judging by their latest record, Frog in Boiling Water, and the club shows they’ve played across Europe around the time of its release, this is yet another case of audience and critical tastes being somewhat detached from what my ears are interpreting. As someone who was never impressed by the telecom-commercial indie rock of Oshin, I believe their shoegaze turn (the aforementioned album and its predecessor, Deceiver) to be their best work.
Sharon van Etten & the Attachment Theory (Sat 16, 20:40, Vodafone stage)
Ok, we’re cheating here. Sharon van Etten is obviously the most important artist in this year’s lineup, and, of course, deserves a mention in this article. Her reinvention as an 80s-tinged rock singer might not be the career arc fans of her earlier work were wishing she would go for, but it works. And it will be fun to see SVE take on a big stage that she would perhaps not be able to dominate with her folkier sound.