Outbreak Festival London review: hardcore’s biggest day out ever
While the Manchester-born event has diversified in genre, its London debut as part of the Lido Festival shows the same energy and community that made its name
In the decade and a half since its inception, Outbreak has become one of the UK’s best and most successful cult festivals. Founded in Manchester, the hardcore festival has slowly but surely risen to bigger and bigger venues in the city and made itself the UK home of one of the last true musical subcultures.
The day before its biggest ever Manchester event – two days at the BEC Arena – Outbreak makes its London debut as part of Victoria Park’s Lido Festival. While starting as a strictly hardcore event, in recent years Outbreak has followed genre-less trends and incorporated rappers, softer rock bands and emo outfits at its events.
While it’s a somewhat risky move due to significant and ongoing purism in the genre’s fanbase, it’s helped the festival grow in size while keeping its core hardcore ethics in tact. Head to Outbreak London and you can see slacker rock bands (Momma), crossover rappers (Danny Brown) and lo-fi indie heroes (Alex G) grace the main stage to appreciative if slightly reserved crowds.
The tents, meanwhile, host the festival’s bread and butter – hardcore titans Knocked Loose, frenzied Australian bunch Speed – and are hugely oversubscribed as a result. Though a greater span of genre is on show here, every non-hardcore band booked by Outbreak has to subscribe to their aesthetic – endearingly rough around the edges, slightly left of centre and doing things differently.
In recent years, there have also significant and somewhat tedious conversations over whether today’s headliners, Turnstile, are even a hardcore band anymore themselves. As frontman Brendan Yates tells the crowd mid-way through their set, the band’s first ever gig outside the US was at Outbreak in 2013, and they’ve grown alongside the festival ever since, playing countless Outbreaks as they rose from buzzy genre crossover hopefuls to bonafide rockstars. They are the biggest group the scene has ever produced, and a huge reason why Outbreak has managed to scale up to this level and fill the same park Charli XCX will play the next day.
The set – a mix of their pure hardcore beginnings and arena-filling recent work –subsequently feels like a victory lap for the scene. Pulverisingly heavy at times, it also features a flute interlude from jazz great Shabaka Hutchings and a cameo from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes on the anthemic ‘ALIEN LOVE CALL’.
Though Turnstile’s show, and Outbreak’s first London outing as a whole, doesn’t give too much indication of where hardcore is going next, it provides a true celebration after over a decade of toil.