Words by: Tee Tolmar
Photos by: Tee Tolmar
Barcelona in June, 3 days of Primavera Sound, and 151 artists to choose from. Not a bad way to spend a long weekend.
Primavera Sound has announced the lineup for its 25th edition, bringing its familiar mix of pop, rock, electronic music and everything in between to Parc del Fòrum from 3–5 June 2027. The celebrations begin with an opening party on 2 June before the main festival gets underway the following day.
And, as ever with Primavera, the difficult part is not deciding whether there is anything worth seeing. It is deciding what the hell you are going to do when Phoebe Bridgers, Doechii, FKA twigs, Turnstile, Robyn, Pavement, Massive Attack, Caroline Polachek, The Chemical Brothers and Fontaines D.C. are all on the same bill. Unless Primavera has suddenly discovered how to stop time, there will inevitably be at least three artists you desperately want to see playing at once.
The festival’s biggest names also include an unusually strong showing of women. Doechii, Phoebe Bridgers, FKA twigs, Hayley Williams, Robyn, Caroline Polachek, Bad Gyal, Lola Young and ADÉLA are joined by Tinashe, Kim Petras, Weyes Blood, Shygirl and plenty more across the rest of the lineup. It is a pretty spectacular collection of women competing for your attention across one weekend.
The Big Ones
Doechii will make her Spanish festival debut following an extraordinary few years in which she has established herself as one of the most compelling new voices in rap and pop. From Alligator Bites Never Heal to her Grammy win and increasingly major festival appearances, her rise has been difficult to miss. As Primavera will be her first festival appearance in Spain, this a particularly good opportunity to catch her live.
Phoebe Bridgers is perhaps the most exciting addition for anyone who has spent the last few months staring wistfully at other people’s descriptions of The Lost Tour. Her current shows are famously phone-free, meaning Primavera might be your first chance to hear Lost Weekend in the flesh and, crucially, post the obligatory blurry Instagram Story proving you were actually there.
Fontaines D.C. are back, and it is hard to imagine a more natural Primavera booking for a band that has grown from Dublin’s post-punk scene into one of the biggest guitar acts around. Their 2027 appearance comes as the band continues its Dopamine Chamber era, with a new album due this October, so there is a good chance Barcelona will get a fairly different version of Fontaines to the one that first made their name.
Hayley Williams is bringing her solo work to Barcelona rather than arriving with Paramore, giving her a festival stage entirely to herself. Her solo records have allowed her to explore a much broader musical palette than the pop-punk sound that first made her famous, while her live performances have established her as a magnetic presence in her own right. Of course, anyone who spent their adolescence screaming Paramore lyrics into a hairbrush is still going to have a moment when she walks onstage, but this one is her show.
FKA twigs is another particularly exciting return. Her 2025 Primavera set was one of those performances that was genuinely difficult to look away from, with extraordinary dancing, exciting choreography, and an impressive backdrop of metal scaffolding. She is bringing a whole new show to the 2027 edition, so anyone who caught her last time around will have another reason to get very close to the front.
Turnstile, meanwhile, are your insurance policy against spending the entire weekend standing politely at the back of a crowd. When the Baltimore band played Primavera in 2025, their 3am set was packed with moshing, crowd-surfing and people perched on shoulders despite the frankly unreasonable hour. They are back for the 25th anniversary and it is probably safe to assume the crowd will once again be less interested in standing still.
And that’s just six names.
Elsewhere among the biggest bookings, Massive Attack are getting another shot at Primavera after their planned 2026 appearance was cancelled by the festival’s infamous rainstorm. The Chemical Brothers will play Primavera for the first time and bring one of the biggest electronic shows of the weekend, while Robyn, Caroline Polachek, Bad Gyal, Lola Young and Pavement offer several completely different flavours of headline material. There is even a Sunday closing party: Primavera Bits, where Richie Hawtin, Four Tet and Dixon play together for the first time for an eight-hour show of alternating sets, because apparently three days was not enough.
Elsewhere, there are some genuinely unexpected bookings. Don Caballero are reuniting, while Simian Mobile Disco are returning to the stage for their first live show in eight years. Even once you move beyond the biggest names, there is enough here to keep the schedule busy for the entire weekend.
That is probably the best thing about Primavera’s 25th anniversary lineup. It is difficult to imagine getting bored. You can spend one evening watching a huge pop star, wander into a sweaty rock set, end up dancing to an electronic act you had never heard of three hours earlier, and still have half the lineup left to investigate.
And then there is Barcelona itself.
The festival’s home at Parc del Fòrum sits right on the city’s waterfront, meaning Primavera has always had the slightly unfair advantage of being a festival you can combine with an actual holiday. Spend the daylight hours eating your way around the city, wandering through galleries, sitting by the sea or doing absolutely nothing in the sun before heading towards the festival in the afternoon and staying there until the early hours. You do not have to sacrifice Barcelona for Primavera. Ideally, you get both.
For its 25th edition, that feels like a pretty good deal.
How to get tickets
Full festival tickets and VIP tickets are now on sale, costing €350 and €545 respectively. The festival is almost guaranteed to sell out within the next few months so getting a ticket early is a good idea.
There are a couple of discounts worth knowing about, too. Revolut customers get €20 off a full-festival ticket, and the Fan Sale price stays open to them for an extra 24 hours. People aged 18 or over who live in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area can claim 10% off full-festival tickets.
So, if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to spend a few days in Barcelona, Primavera has just handed you 151 of them.
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