2023 was a landmark year for Primavera Sound Porto: the tenth coming of the festival was also its first without their lifelong naming sponsor, the first four-day long edition at Porto’s Parque da Cidade, and a new main stage and festival grounds’ layout were tested for the first time. Ditching the gorgeous, secluded meadow where the ATP stage once sounded like sacrilege. But the new layout, including previously fenced off areas of the park that are closer to the sea, undoubtedly makes things smoother in a festival that started to feel too crowded, as per last year’s experience. We could do without the smell near the new main stage, but let’s blame the weather for that.
Tag: The Mars Volta
Primavera Sound Porto ’23: our top picks
After a year’s hiatus (three, actually – thank you covid) to attend the shitshow that was last year’s first weekend in Barcelona, we’re now back to regular programming. A lot has changed since last time we were at Primavera Sound Porto, including the name: there’s no naming sponsor anymore, which will probably confuse people who, for some reason unknown to us, used to call this festival by its sponsor’s name.
The festival grounds are also changing for the 10th edition: capacity has increased to 45k, there’s a new main stage (Porto stage), the old main stage is now called Vodafone (still side-by-side with the Super Bock stage, with alternating shows), and the good old ATP stage (known as Binance last year) is gone, replaced by the Plenitude stage somewhere else. There are also more bands than before (up to 5 bands per stage per day), and, exceptionally, there’s an extra festival day on Wednesday, just so Kendrick Lamar can pay us a visit.
Be sure to download our printable timetables (PDF and XLS). Make sure you keep them on your phone for easy and offline access, too. Below you can find our picks for this year – there’s a lot of guitars there, sorry about that.
Bolachas 2022 Recap
This year we’re going full Aquarium Drunkard (AKA the only music year end list worth reading). Except, these are just one person’s choices (unlike Bolachas Now Playing, which is a team effort). And he’s only doing this because it’s a slow week at his real work. Meaning, “going full Aquarium Drunkard” is, really, just adopting the format: a list of 100 un-ordered records bound together in groups of 4. Plus a short tweet about each of them. There are a few Spotify playlists at the end of the post, plus Bandcamp links to those records whenever available.