Supersonic Festival 2025, Birmingham review - a deep dive into the spectacularly weird and very wonderful

The annual Supersonic Festival is a major jewel in Birmingham’s musical crown – but not, it seems, one that is particularly valued by the city’s establishment and more powerful decision-makers. Based in the relatively bohemian area of Digbeth, and despite receiving international plaudits and recognition, time and again it is forced to fight for its very existence.

Each year, venues that have been traditionally used to house performances, events and workshops by this wonderful celebration are closed down. Rents for the remaining spaces spiral into the cosmos and property developers flex their muscles to try and push out an event that is emphatically not about family-friendly (even though there are kids’ gigs every time) conspicuous consumption. Yet each year, Lisa Meyer and her team manage to achieve the seemingly impossible and put on artists from around the world who uplift souls and create community for the outsiders and the musically curious who are quite happy to give mainstream entertainment a significantly wide berth.

So, it was again in 2025. Despite the background noise, the festival was once more a spectacular success that saw the likes of Norway’s Witch Club Satan rub shoulders with Jackie-O Motherfucker from the USA, local feminist metalheads Meat Dripper and many notable others to create an excellent celebration of music that isn’t ordinarily heard on daytime radio.

Friday

As ever, the first day of Supersonic 2025 was jammed with highlights that were varied yet head-spinning. My festival kicked off with a set by the supremely joyful Mermaid Chunky (pictured below by Joe Singh). Resplendent in kids’ dressing up box chic and working up a set that took in elements of folk, motorik, electronic beats, classic Disney tunes and old-fashioned fairground sounds, Freya Tate and Moina Moin put a smile on everyone’s face and got hips swinging and bodies moving. Their performance was trippy but raunchy, completely bonkers and brim-full of positive excitement. Built of loops, reverb and recorders, they even brought on a troop of dancers dressed in pseudo-Wicker Man pagan garb and who managed to ramp things up yet further to turn the stage into ritualistic celebration of everything fun.

As the evening wore on, Skloss cranked up the dry ice and let rip with their atmospheric dark psychedelia. Their woozy groove was loaded with reverb and loops and punctuated with weird and wonderful samples. The sound quality left a bit to be desired, but their set was powerful stuff that had the room heaving with bodies.

They were soon followed by the muscular jazz and hardcore noise rock mash up of Italian three-piece Zu, who brought on a cacophony of sound and stark stage lighting that felt like being hit in the face with a sonic brick. Blistering sax solos and a rhythm section that howled like a soundtrack to modern urban warfare, they blow away any psychic cobwebs and got the disc ball that was hanging over the crowd shuddering in terror. Their chaotic assault on the ear drums even managed make John Zorn’s most brutal tunes sound like lounge liquid fare but still had the room stomping to their spectacular and punishing grooves.

Saturday

As with most years, Saturday brought the noise to Supersonic. There was, however, a gentle easing into the day from Penelope Trappes’ ambient goth set. Slow and considered, beatless atmospheres were conjured up via electronics and cello soaked in reverb. It was a calm before the sonic storm though and was soon followed by the space rock sounds of local Birmingham feminist metalheads, Meat Dripper. Drone and reverb combined with witchy vibes and spiced up tunes like “Exterminate Her” and “Homegrown” in a set that was slow and low but which totally hit the spot. Eugene Robinson’s new outfit, Buñuel also ratcheted up the volume with their heavy and sludgy sounds. The ex-Oxbow man’s new four-piece punk-metal outfit blasted out a set that felt like being caught in an artillery bombardment in a packed mosh-pit. Rún similarly turned up the volume with drone-heavy pagan folk-psychedelic-motorik grooves, even spicing things up with metal saucepan percussion at one point.

Great as these sets were, however, it was difficult not to view these bands as warm up acts for Norwegian black metal feminists Witch Club Satan’s first ever appearance in the UK. Bare-breasted and taking to the stage like energetic goblins, their supremely theatrical show made quite an impression from the very start. Thumping percussion, cacophonous guitars and howling vocals swept over a rapt audience, as tunes like “Black Metal is Krig” and the stunning “You Wildflower” battered all-comers into willing submission.

Witch Club Satan’s music may not be everyone’s idea of relaxed home listening but, on stage at Supersonic, they were without equal. Briefly retreating to the wings as a filmed interlude played over ambient metal sounds, they returned almost completely naked and pushed things up another gear, making their revulsion of the genocide in Gaza absolutely clear with another sonic tsunami that was more powerful than a whole weekend at either Download or Bloodstock.

After another costume change, Johanna Holt Kleive, Nikoline Spjelkavik and the heavily pregnant Victoria Røising again returned to raise consciousnesses and to batter eardrums, as well as stagediving into the audience. There was nothing as shallow as attention-seeking shock rock here though, this was a spectacular show that was brutal and transgressive, but that steered well clear of cheap titillation and is unlikely to be bettered for some time to come.

Amazingly, the Scandi Sisters of Outrage weren’t Saturday’s headline act and, despite having a mountain to climb to avoid being shuffled into the shadows, Zambian-Canadian rapper Backxwash (pictured above by Joe Singh) stepped up with her storming hip-hop set. Clad in a distressed floor-length black dress, with wild dreads and frightening reverse panda face paint, she dominated the stage and took her set by the throat and shook it without mercy. Declaring war on inequality, racism, greed and war, she dropped bomb after bomb from her recent album Only Dust Remains, with “Wake Up” especially hitting the spot before she finished up with the title track’s more gentle call for hope, love and community.

Sunday

Sunday at Supersonic is usually “folkie day” and so it proved to be again in 2025 – until the Bug and Warrior Queen cleared the decks for next year with their ear-battering headline performance.

Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions eased everyone into the final day with an ethereal and soothing performance that featured atmospheric and beautiful ballads on banjo, harmonium and fiddle, before Jackie-O Motherfucker took a deep dive into their improvised and atmospheric freak folk sound. Tracks like “Hey! Mr Sky” and “Good Morning Kaptain” were lush and relaxed, trippy and stretched out, incorporating elements of gospel, folk and blues, setting us up for a last slice of underground weirdness in Digbeth. This included mind-expanding shows by Hedgling, who occasionally veered into sounding like three non-musicians playing instruments, including a sewing machine, that they’d never seen before; Dawn Terry, who repeated asked to be fucked against a tree over accordion-powered loops and drones; and a solo set of Nick Drake-ish tunes performed by a Kreator t-shirt sporting Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance.

Cinder Well’s show was lush and evocative, pulling on elements of traditional US folk traditions, played either acapella or accompanied by her guitar. Gentle and melodic tunes of love and loss, like “The Cuckoo” and “August”, were sparse but beautiful and sent plenty straight to her merch stand when she left the stage. Rich(ard) Dawson, on the other hand, put on a blistering set of Geordie pub folk rock that had the audience eating out of his hand, even though he had his open guitar case sitting behind him, as if he thought he might have to make a swift exit. There was no chance of that though and songs like “Jogging”, “Black Dog in the Sky” and “Black Triangle” all went down a treat.

None of this was adequate preparation for those who saw the UK debut of Sara Parkman, Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson’s spellbinding Funeral Folk collaboration though. Bringing together traditional Scandinavian folk music, drones and loops and esoteric neo-classical sounds, their set was initially unobtrusive and gentle with spoken word interludes. However, as things progressed, it developed into a howling crescendo of noise and feedback, bathed in clouds of dry ice, before finishing up as audience singalong. Their performance was seriously something special and was truly deserving of the standing ovation that it received.

Rounding off Supersonic 2025, however, was a particularly un-folkie set by festival regular the Bug (pictured above by Joe Singh) and Jamaican vocal powerhouse, Warrior Queen. Swimming in dense clouds of dry ice and illuminated by stark red stage lights, their show was a masterclass in modern dub sounds that took in dancehall and dubstep beats and Warrior Queen’s filthy but hysterically funny, patois-flavoured vocals.

Speakers, set up like monumental standing stones at the front of the stage, blasted out explosive beats that were soaked in reverb and amplified to levels sufficient to wake the dead. In the first part of a set that initially took tasty slices of the Bug’s repertoire from “Skeng” and “Dirty” to “Function” and beyond, the audience nodded their heads and shuffled their feet as the sonic tension grew. However, once Warrior Queen hit the boards, things went bananas as she howled for a “hardcore lover”, demanded that “Babylon burn up” and asked “do you want to hear my pussy talk? I’m feeling horny”. Screamed responses and pumping fists made it clear that everyone present was more than up for what the dynamic duo had to offer and by the end of an extended and spectacular “Poison Dart”, everyone was completely spent.

Exhausted and deafened, with cries of “Warrior Queen la-la-la-loves you!” ringing in our ears we finally hit the streets of Birmingham in the early hours of Monday, hoping that despite the on-going and relentless gentrification of this part of Britain’s second city, that there will more of the same again next year.

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