So now that the festival has ended and the field stands empty besides those big tents, who else grabbed us at ArcTanGent 2025? Well we already said we simply had to be there for Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, we went there for Kayo Dot, we’ve told you all that, we’ve written the great big review already and yes, it wasn’t just about Sleepytime and Kayo Dot, there were others who have regularly featured on our pages or airwaves, bands like Ni, Slift, Melvins, Godspeed and the names most will already know, then there were the bands we covered rather a lot in their early days; Mew, Vessels, Adebisi Shank and such and yes, there were bands that we polite choose to not cover that much. You know what the policy is around here, on the whole if we haven’t got something positive to say then we just don’t bother saying it. Then there were the bands and artists who, before this year’s ArcTanGent, hadn’t really crossed out path in any meaningful way, Bands like Love Rarely who quite literally grabbed our ears while we were passing and demanded we pay attention, or bands like Lowen who we didn’t actually catch but who’s buzz at the festival we most certainly catch. I’ve lost count of how many people have mentioned Lowen either directly to us or on social media since their performance at this year’s festival… 

Here then are five bands we didn’t know too much about (or indeed in some cases, like Love Rarely, we didn’t know anything about) before hand who really are on our radars now…

Before you read this piece, the actual review of the festival is here, it might make sense to read that piece first – ORGAN THING: So ArcTanGent happened and how good was it! The extremes of the bands, the people, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Kayo Dot, the freedom of it all. Now that was how to do a music festival…

1: Lowen – a twist on the word lion apparently.  Jules McBride, currently of Rustorm and once of the mightly Pulkas, a band who’ve we’ve shared a lot of history with here, was one of the many talking very positively about Lowen’s performance at the much loved festival, here’s a bit from a response he sent here in response to our review;  “….we had the honour of witnessing the mighty Lowen (female fronted Iranian band), which was a particularly joyful moment… and yes, ArcTanGent is absolutely our favourite festival. This was our fifth year, and we already bought tickets for next year before this year had even started. We don’t care who’s playing, it’s always a wondrous voyage of musical discovery, and genuinely uplifting experience…”.

There’s an interesting piece on Lowen, witten by Matt Mills, on the Guardian website today that will fill in some of the colour and yeah, it would be fair to say the good metal flavoured bands do get a little lost in the crowd these days (I reckon we get at least a couple of dozen extreme metal albums sent in most weeks, sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees). The London based band led by Nina Saeidi on vocals – she sings in English, Farsi and extinct languages such as Sumerian. She also uses the tahrir vocal technique, a wobbling wail distinct to Iranian classical music alongside her folk instruments and those lyrics the demand attention – released a very impressive album late last year, and yes we are only just catching up with it for the first time post ArcTanGent, which is of course is how it should work, the delight of discovering things at good festivals, here’s last year’s album via Bandcamp

Who else? Well we mentioned Love Rarely already, we really had never heard of them, besides a very quick bit of pre-festival research and a quick listen that hadn’t really prepared us, it wasn’t really until we happened to be passing their soundcheck that we really took notice (second best soundcheck of the festival not far behind that performance piece that was Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s captivating check)

2: Love Rarely – Now they do have a dynamic sound, their hardcore bite and their alternative math rock most certainly did grab our ears, here’s what we said in the main review; “Did that bit there sound a bit Cynical Smile? Probably a way too obscure reference now, but we did put out that Cynical Smile album back there and if we did hear a moment then the comparison was intended as compliment (and it really is time to make a stand). 

Love Rarely hail from Leeds and they did indeed provide infectious energy, ArcTanGent really did need them to make their noise in the middle of it all. Love Rarely are a band weaving together their intense hardcore noise and their intricate melodies rather well and actually there’s a healthy bit of time signature interplay here and there as well. Love Rarely were damn good and in Courtney Levitt they have a big personality fronting it all as she effortlessly transitioned between her raw snarl and her melodic side with a demanding sense of occasion. Not come across Love Rarely before, more of them please…”  Bandcamp

3: Tangled Hair – hadn’t realised London’s Tangled Hair were still around, I guess for some they will be a new name, it does feel like we’re dicovering them all over again for a first time even if it really is for a second time around – “Tangled hair are a three-piece band from South London that uses guitar, bass and drums to create intricate music, centred around their group dynamics. Their influences include indie rock, nineties emo and post hardcore. Tangled Hair have been playing music for ten years, they have shared a stage with Braid, Owls, Tera Melos, American Football and Toe”.

Seems their most recent release is a number of years old now, it still sounds rather fresh to these ears. here’s the Bandcamp thing for 2011’s Apples and here’s the Tangled Hair Facebook page

4: meth. really are a band we should have been covering lots more over the years, but then we hadn’t seen them live before. not until until they completerly ripped eveything up in such a relentless way –  Meth were intensely intense! Meth were relentlessly strong. Yeah, I know they have a full stop at the end of their name but it really does mess with attempts to write about them. The guy who came out of their late afternoon pit at the end of their relentless set said that was enough for a few hours as he made for his tent, he may well have had a point, Meth were brutally good, colourfully so, they were more than that though, there was a lot going on under the hood, a depth to the almost overwhelming experimental  onslaught of it all. 

Here’s the Chicago band’s 2024 Asymmetrics album “a collaborative split, which ultimately became an amalgamation of musical chairs and a social experiment”, read more about it and listen to it via Bandcamp, and there they are up there holding a flower, “meth. is an experimental heavy band from Chicago”.

And here is something they, meth, did all by themselves…

5: Overhead, The Albatross – Now we missed the Dublin Post-rock band’s set, a set that, probably, from our unscientific watching and listen to what people have been saying since the festival ended, was one of the most talked of sets from this year’s ArcTanGent. The band’s name is a from a Pink Floyd line, which I guess gives you a little idea but then again maybe not? They’ve been around since 2009, although their second album only came out in 2024, and so so many people have been going on about the “dramatically breathtaking way their set ended” last weekend that we needed to go check a little more closely on what all the fuss was about….

There’s some November 2025 UK dates listed on their Bandcamp page where you can also go and listen to the aforementioned 2024 album I Leave You This, a rather beautiful album, an album that peacefully glows in an uncluttered, dreamatic way (dreamatic? That was a typo, I meant to type dramatic but dreamatic works better. A post-rock instrumetal album they is never as obvious as so many self-declared post-rock bands are – cleansing, refreshing, beautiful, clever without ever having to tell us how clever it is, warm, bright, wonderful, I see what all the fuss was about.

And that’s the thing about ArcTanGent, there’s the bands you know and love already, and then there’s the bands you only had at best a vague idea about… (sw)

arctangent.co.uk (next year’s tickets are on sale)