Manchester Psych Fest hits new heights in its 13th year
With heavy hitters like Allah-Las, Ty Segall and Angine de Poitrine, the one-day festival delivered its most ambitious event to date.
Photo: Adam Edwards
The problem with making a festival incredibly good, as with Manchester Psych Festival in 2025, is that it’s hard to top it. Where do you go from last year’s lineup featuring Goat, PINS, Helicon and much more? You go BIG — and that’s what the team at Psych Fest did for this year’s edition.
First, they added some huge headliners in the form of The Beta Band, Ty Segall and Stereolab, alongside artists who could headline the festival in any other year, such as White Denim, Gwenno and Allah-Las. Another few dozen excellent bands filled out the schedule across venues in double figures — absolutely stacked.
And then they added the world’s most viral band for good measure. Indeed, the majority of chatter before the festival was about Angine de Poitrine. Where would they be playing? The Apollo. And how difficult would it be to get in to see them? Incredibly. Their late-afternoon set, likely designed not to clash with any headliners, proved to be the must-see set of the day. Apparently, anyway — I couldn’t get in.
Photo: Adam Edwards
What I was doing instead was heading to see Bleech 9:3 at the O2 Ritz, one of Manchester’s longstanding (and best) venues. Already a massive crowd with 20 minutes to go, the Irish band didn’t let the audience down. There were 20+ photographers in the photo pit for the first three songs — a suggestion of the group’s nascent popularity — and their energy matched their burgeoning reputation. The crowd were very into it, and I ended up heading somewhere less claustrophobic after the first two songs.
On the way from the Ritz to the next venue, there’s a brief stopover at the festival’s HQ at Circle Square, Oxford Road. The hub is the place for collecting wristbands and passes, but there’s other stuff here too: crafting and food trucks, an AdP-themed photo cutout board, and an admirable splash of colour amongst the towering Oxford Road student flats. It’s a nice change of pace and was a reminder that this is a festival, not just a series of venues that can occasionally feel disconnected due to the sheer size of Manchester’s city centre.
This feeling persists for GHOSTWOMAN at Projekts Skate Park. Projekts as a venue is brilliant — under enough cover to (mostly) protect you from the Manchester weather, yet open and outdoors enough to remind you it is a festival. Plus, there’s the novelty of watching live music while standing at the top of a drop-in you’re at least 20 years too old to be near. This would be all for nought if the music wasn’t up to par but, thankfully, the Canadian-Belgian pair are brilliant.
Like many bands on the poster, there’s a strong ‘70s-surf-rock thread through the music, and what they lack in additional band members they make up for with volume. They’re ace. Less abrasive live than they sound on records, they put the ‘psych’ in Psych Fest and deliver a fantastic set to a crowd that are perhaps made up of a lot of people who couldn’t be bothered walking back to the main Oxford Road strip, but will definitely be leaving as fans.
The venue is the furthest away, but with a Bundobust pop-up and some excellent trendy bevvies set up there (not to mention one of the best line-ups of any stage), you could genuinely set up camp there for the day and go home happy.
The downside to such a stacked lineup is the inevitable missing of other great bands. The Beta Band vs. Ty Segall vs. White Denim is a hard choice for music lovers — is this year’s lineup a case of too much of a good thing? These worries melt away once you’re actually watching your chosen acts.
When you’re one of a few thousand people in Manchester Academy later that night as Segall closes with a mash-up of his own She and a Stooges song, you realise you’ve had a fantastic time and make peace with the alternative headliners you couldn’t see this time around. The strength of the lineup is a real testament to the promoters’ hard work in building the festival to this level while keeping the intra-city psych vibes just right.
There’s talk in all the photo pits of the best acts of the day. One photographer thinks Ty Segall’s secret set at The Abbey can’t be topped by his headline show later that night, while another is genuinely ecstatic to have seen Automatic earlier on, and a third agrees, suggesting Adult DVD’s set is up there too.
For me, the undisputed highlight of this year’s festival was Allah-Las. Psych rock, garage rock, surf rock — all of the above — put through the band’s lo-fi California filter as they packed out Manchester Academy. They played the festival back in 2023 too, in an afternoon slot at Albert Hall. But tonight the venue is packed, and the band deliver an hour of sun-kissed, West Coast vibes (other cliches are available) — enough to ward off any thoughts of the approaching autumn for the couple of thousand Mancunians in attendance.
The band’s set opens with Ultramarine from new instrumental album Sirenas, which was released a few days before their appearance in Manchester. But, with six albums in total to draw material from, the setlist weaves through the last fifteen years of the band, highlighting how consistently good their music has been since the start.
Behind the band, a huge red sun beamed from the stage, casting warm red light over the crowd, matching the music. LAHS provides a few songs, along with the penultimate jam Could Be You from Calico Review, but it’s the self-titled debut’s Busman’s Holiday and Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind) that are rewarded with the biggest response. This crescendo naturally leads to Catamaran, one of the all-time surf bangers from the same record, to close the set and leave the crowd feeling a little warmer and a little sunnier than how they first arrived.
GHOSTWOMAN
Bleech 9:3
Allah-Las
All photos by Adam Edwards.
