You can’t write about Green Man without mentioning its gorgeous locale – Wales’s verdant Brecon Beacons, where the towering hills and long, winding roads are dotted by sheep utterly undaunted by the cars making their way to the festival. The natural beauty isn’t the main draw, but then, it can’t just be the expertly curated music, comedy shows, or panels, either – how, otherwise, to explain Green Man 2025 selling out in just 60 minutes, long before its lineup was announced? The answer is that its appeal transcends billing, lying at that nebulous, indefinable intersection where people, music and nature coalesce to create, well – it’s just a vibe, isn’t it?
Green Man 2025’s headliners are impressive, certainly: Northern Ireland’s answer to the Beastie Boys, Kneecap; taut neo-indie rock troupe Wet Leg; Welsh electronic titans Underworld; and stormy, soulful art-rockers TV on the Radio. Yet, before I see any music, it’s the atmosphere I'm taking in: eating the best vegan steak and mash of my life, trying out a theremin at one of the many festival booths, and passing a host of children launching colourful diabolos into the air. Everyone I see is dressed to express – wearing flower crowns, fox ears, sequinned jackets, squirrel tails, Palestine flags.
Following Kneecap’s explosive set on Thursday evening, Wet Leg are the first highlight of the weekend, launching into their Friday headlining show with unexpected verve. As they power through songs from their dynamic second album, moisturizer – “catch these fists”, “liquidize”, “mangetout” – I overhear a nearby sceptic tell her friend she was wrong to have doubted their headliner status: “They’ve absolutely got it!”
TV on the Radio bring an air of majesty to their closing set at the festival’s main Mountain stage. Twenty years on from their debut album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, the indie rockers show their veteran status by playing a soulful, soaring mix of songs that evinces their muscle (a horns-bolstered “Province”, the brawny “DLZ”) and their tenderness (“Love Dog”, a gentle “Killer Crane”) before closing with 2004 single “Staring at the Sun”, which erupts in a joyful final dance party.
It's a full weekend of highlights, really. Saturday headliners Underworld provide a proper Nineties-style rave, loud and propulsive. Panda Bear’s set at the Far Out tent is gorgeous, marked by surfy harmonies and psychedelic visuals. MJ Lenderman’s dusty Americana sounds rich and consonant with the crisped yellow grass at the main stage, crunching through highlights like the ambling, woozy “Wristwatch”. Cassandra Jenkins’s cosmic late-afternoon performance in the Far Out tent is softly sung yet powerful, characterised by her lovely tenor. When folk-rock band Divorce offer to bring an audience member onstage to dance with them, the child – Leo – becomes a Green Man icon, getting the entire crowd bouncing and waving along with him.
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But there always seems to be one all-timer set at Green Man, where the right artist plays the festival at the exact right moment, making a small step onto the Mountain stage but a giant leap in terms of career performances. Last year, it was Big Thief; this year, it’s the Chappell Roan-esque Irish pop singer CMAT, who arrives at Green Man just over a week before her forthcoming third album, EURO-COUNTRY, seems poised to launch her stratospheric.
She’s already a star – the artist born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, all charisma and jaw-dropping voice, wins the biggest crowd of the weekend over with a cavalcade of loving references to Wales (including a cover of “the Welsh national anthem” – Catatonia’s “Road Rage”), and her chatty pop songs, including “Have Fun!”, “Aw, Shoot!” and “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”. To close her set, she conducts the crowd wielding a fan’s totem with a CMAT doll atop it, and is on the verge of earnest, appreciative tears when she calls the night “one of the best f***ing gigs we’ve ever played”. There’s little doubt she has many more of those to come.
