Most people are drawn to music festivals because of the bigger names on the lineup — in other words, the mainstream stars that occupy the zeitgeist. That’s a shame, because the most interesting alchemy seems to happen well before the sun starts to set and the A-listers show up.
I’m not talking about Chappell Roan’s 4 p.m. set on Sunday, which is both hilarious and criminal (any sane person should bet their life savings on it being the most crowded, viewed set of the weekend). What really caught me off guard on Friday was the parallel magics of San Francisco native underscores and the ascendant producer and DJ Knock2.
They couldn’t be more different: underscores, aka April Harper Grey, is indie rock seen through the looking glass, blending blasts of distorted guitar, synths and kick drums into a maximalist symphony of her own sarcastic wit. Knock2, meanwhile, is the second coming of Skrillex, weaving bass, trap, and techno music into a rollicking club set that would feel corny if it wasn’t so stupid fun.
The genre-warping brilliance within both young artists, and the serendipity of their placement on adjacent stages, imbued me with a realization: They’re going to be the next big things.
Underscores performed at the tiny Panhandle stage, with around 200 people in the audience. She led with the slow-burn ballad “CCTV,” off her latest album Wallsocket, building into a crescendo and falling to her knees as the drums and guitar burst in. The crowd started to grow as Grey launched into “cops and robbers,” in which she sneers about the way to go about crime: “When's the last time you saw someone with a ski mask and a gun? Get on the inside. You gotta do it, gotta do it, gotta do it like me…”
Grey knows how to work the stage, scampering to and fro and wailing like emo singers of yore. The crowd was in her hands by the time she got to her four-on-the-floor romp “Stupid (Can’t run from the urge), and as the drums blasted around me, I glimpsed a vision of the future of pop. Underscores reminded me of icons: The manic J-pop hues of Porter Robinson; the electric energy of Sleigh Bells and Jack White; the blunt and beautiful lyricism of Courtney Barnett. (No coincidence that those artists are mainstage regulars at massive festivals.)
At Knock2, staged 100 yards away at the Twin Peaks stage, I saw the other side of the future-pop coin. It’s hard to overstate how much the young Laotian, legal name Richard Nakhonethap, sounds like Skrillex — the San Diego native has that wizard-like ability to intertwine womp-womp bass music, trap beats, and full-bore techno slams into an hour of earworms. Of course it felt like the set was frequently pandering to our basest needs: Transitioning Justin Bieber’s cloying “Beauty and a Beat” into one of Fred Again’s biggest hits will leave that impression. But hell if it didn’t work like a charm, sending the teens and aging millennials alike into a froth around me. As the music swelled around us, a young man no older than 16 threw his arm around my shoulder, eyes wide with glee.
“LOCK THE FUCK IN, BRO!” he cackled.
Knock2 stomped all over the stage, demanding that people jump to the beat while occasionally stepping back to the mixer to line up a new track. Everybody obliged, even going so far as to open up a little mosh pit. As a veteran of the rave scene, I treat the liminal appearance of an organic mosh pit as a bellwether — surely, such revelry signals the rise of something great.
As I bounced with the mass of flesh and spittle, staring at the flurries of pyrotechnic fire and hearing the ear-splitting kick drums reverberate through the hills of Golden Gate Park, I realized that this kid could become the biggest DJ in the world soon.
By the end of the set, thousands of people stretched across the meadow behind me. It dwarfed the audience that underscores that drawn. And yet the ecstatic energy in the crowd felt the same.
People are going to talk a lot about 2024 is the year Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are crowned as the queens of popular music. But for me, the most surprising moment of the weekend already unfolded on Friday afternoon, thanks to a duo that deserve to be pop royalty, ASAP.
