You made it. You survived all the transportation nightmares, fashion crises and weather scares that accompany just about every major music festival, and now you’re scoping out the grounds with your friends, ready to absorb hour after hour of epic live performances.
The hard part is over, right? Wrong. You paid a boatload of cash to attend Coachella or Bonnaroo or Woodstock 50, but hours of your day can be wasted wandering from stage to stage if you don’t know which undercard bands and artists are actually worth your time.
From: London
Formed in: 2017
Signed to: Def Jam Records
Listen if you love: Halsey, Lorde, Charli XCX
See her at: Governor’s Ball (May 31-June 2, Randall’s Island Park, New York)
“I’m too scared to live, too stoned to die,” sings Suzi Wu, a daring U.K. newcomer who merges classic British punk attitudes with gloomy modern soundscapes — imagine if Joe Strummer was a 20-year-old woman writing about how the world sucks as she blasts skittering hip-hop beats from her basement. Wu’s new EP, Error 404, was just released last month, and it’s a striking follow-up to her brash introduction, 2017’s Teenage Witch EP, which scored the stone-faced singer a deal with Def Jam Records and earned her a heap of buzz in pop circles. Find her on Randall’s Island this year.
