Mutual Benefit | 1:00
Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Friday and Saturday.
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Diiv | 1:45
On 2013’s Sunbather (Deathwish Inc.), San Francisco’s Deafheaven launch black metal out of dungeonlike clubs and gray arctic wastes and send it screaming across a cloudless summer sky. Spindly tremolo picking and chest-rattling blastbeats piggyback on soaring postrock riffs that rocket toward the sun, while George Clarke’s larynx-searing shrieks reach desperately after them. Deafheaven bundle black metal up with shoegaze fuzz, cathartic bursts of emo, and angelic ambient loops, creating a thrilling, coherent whole—the music often glides gracefully across sharp segues, from roaring and frenzied to glacial and moody. Sunbather is massive—its seven tracks total 60 minutes—and its longer cuts have a reach as vast as the cosmos. —Leor Galil
Dum Dum Girls | 3:45
UK electronic producer Jon Hopkins begins the 2013 LP Immunity (Domino) with street sounds and keys jangling in a door lock, and ends it with a humming voice fading into deathly nothingness. These cues surround a hermetically sealed hour of elegantly structured techno, infused with bursts of warm color and loping house beats. Hopkins has recorded with Coldplay, and as you’d expect from someone with experience crafting mainstream music, he excels at propulsive, melodic fare—but he’s also collaborated with Brian Eno, and he takes us to more interesting places when the pleasing house beats fall away into pure, glowing ambience. —J.R. Nelson
Slowdive | 6:15
