Optimus Primavera Sound – our top acts

Primavera’s little-sister festival is in its third year, and we’re excited about the healthy sprinkling of Australian acts within the outstanding line-up:

It’s shaping up to be an exciting year for European summer festivals. After a cold and wet winter in the UK, pounds, euros and whatever else we can find behind the couch are going towards funding a mid-year music trip. One in particular that had our ears pricking up last week was Primavera Sound, Spain’s illustrious summer festival. With the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel, Pixies, Kendric Lamar and Queens of the Stone Age on the bill, we have crowned it as the one that’s NOT TO BE MISSED.

But as we all know, trying to organise ourselves to summer festivals is always tricky business and something is bound to go wrong…

Perhaps it’s your grandma’s 80th on that weekend or you didn’t manage to scrounge the 190 Euros for the tickets or Jimmy was wasted and booked the flights on the wrong day. For those of you that can’t or don’t make it to Primavera for whatever reason, never fear! With great power comes great responsibility and for a festival to release such an impeccable lineup, surely they have a back-up plan.

And here she is. The aptly named Optimus Primavera Sound (which we went to last year).

Much like what Sunset Sounds was to Falls Festival in Australia, Primavera will host little sister festival “Optimus Primavera Sound” in Porto Portugal the following week. Now in its third year, travellers and locals alike have embraced this bite sized Primavera as an integral addition to the Portuguese music scene:

“Primavera, please never change your mind. Expanding to Porto was the best thing you could’ve done for this city and for European music fans. Thank you” – Portugese music blog Bolachas.org

Aforementioned acts like Neutral Milk Hotel, The National, Pixies and Kendrick Lamar will be heading west for Optimus and tickets are currently selling at just over half the price of the Barca festival. Headliners and dollarbills aside though, we’ve picked out a few ‘not to be missed’ artists heading to the Porto festival:

SLOWDIVE
After a 20-year hiatus, 90’s shoegazers Slowdive have confirmed they will be playing in both Barcelona and Porto.

WARPAINT
Female fourpiece War Paint will be bringing their lush psychedelic sound to the coast after having released their self titled album in January:

We are also really excited to see a nice representation from Australian artists such as Jagwar Ma, Courtney Barnett and much loved psychedelic ragamuffins, POND:

Tickets are on sale right now for just 105 Euros so if you fancy on being on the lovely Porto coast at summers wake, drinking cheap and extremely strong wine singing “Where is my Mind???” I have one thing to say to you:

“We are here. We are waiting.” – Optimus Prime.

Full line up and tickets can be drooled over here.

Words by Sophie Metcalfe