More about: Positivus

Spread across two days, Latvia's Positivus Festival welcomed headliners Megan Thee Stallion, Jamie xx and A$AP Rocky, amongst sets from notable artists Sofaygo, ansis and black midi (to list just a few). Landing in Riga on Thursday 14 July, writer Laviea Thomas was there for Gigwise...

Here are ten of the best moments from the weekend.

The silent disco

Starting our day at silent disco (yes, in broad daylight), we took a glide through this tent to hear one radio station playing Kiesza ‘Hideaway’ and the other...the Friends theme tune. It’s safe to say I got out of there at a rapid pace, though upon returning in the evening it seemed that both DJ's had miraculously improved their taste in music. With the dark sky rising over us, and a large number of festival-goers screaming their lungs out, it quickly became apparent just how much better and livelier silent discos are in the evening. This tent quickly became our home during the gaps between each act. 

black midi

Playing second stage are experimental quartet black midi. Across the last four years, black midi have prided themselves as being one of the UK’s most intriguing, courageous, progressive punk outfits. With a stomping UK and US fandom, it was really interesting to see them play this festival to a much smaller crowd, with just as eagerly excited fans taking it all in their stride. A comical voiceover hollers at the screaming fans awaiting the band's arrival: “Hailing from London, England, United Kingdom; the hardest working band in show-business; the reigning, the defending, and the undefeated and the undisputed, super colossal-weight campaign of the world, black-Hellfire-midi.”

The crowd absolute lap up this theatrical intro, and just like that black midi walk onto stage, opening their set with the helter skelter ‘953’, the opening track to their debut album Schlagenheim. They're on a mission to wake up Riga with some old gems: following is super-chilled and thrilling ‘Speedway’. Playing the festival on the day of their brand-new album launch, it was a blessing to see the band play some of their old stuff too, including the colossal ‘John L’, but nothing quite beat hearing the scorching sound of ‘The Race is About to Begin' from Hell Fire. An obliterating set from black midi and glorious beginning of this incredible weekend. 

SoFaygo

Friday saw a couple of rejigs to the line-up, one of which included experimental trap artist SoFaygo moving his main stage set to 8pm. Strutting onto stage is a producer (who goes by the name Backwards) tasked with revving up SoFaygo’s audience. “Latvia make some motherfucking noise”, he shouts, and so we do. Backwards spins into Sheck Wes’ iconic ‘Mo Bamba’ which did sadly see a vast crowd of white folks singing it word for word...but we’ll get to that later. Despite that hiccup, it’s fair to say Backwards had every single person in that audience pumped for the arrival of SoFaygo. Signed to Cactus Jack, SoFaygo reminds us he’s the youngest artist on their roster, and slows the pace down with nonchalant, and autotune heavy ‘Everyday’. Exclaiming that this show will be his last European show, fans all raise hearts into the sky for unreleased track ‘Tiger’.

Yves Tumor & Its Band

Yves Tumor is like if Prince and Jimi Hendrix were to procreate: the most gracious, delicate and sensual character I’ve seen to come out of the music industry in a very long while. Catching a glimpse of them mid-set after SoFaygo, Yves Tumor are a band I’ve been wanting to check out for as long as I can remember. Friday night saw them take to second stage with heavy shoegaze-through-psychedelic riffs and sensational vocals. Their set was honestly mesmerising; no other act really compared to them on Friday night, Yves Tumor brought out a tranquil nonchalance to their set that made you fall into a hypnotic state. 

Jamie XX

Under blazing tropical strobe lights, Jamie XX had thousands of fans vibing to ethereal chimes. A track that stood out the absolute most is ‘Gosh’; seeing thousands of people swaying in complete happiness, the rainbow-coloured strobe lights, and the stars shining above our heads, ‘Gosh’ live was a total cinematic experience. 

ansis

Ansis is a Latvian rapper whose energy and musical flow is completely addictive. Having checked his main stage set on the Saturday, it’s fair to say I wasn’t disappointed. The energy was immaculate; it’s always great to catch rappers who aren’t a generic breed of the UK and US. Ansis is an incredibly talented artist, and it was amazing to see how rap is not only perceived in Latvia but distributed. Songs that really stuck out to us were ‘Sports’ and ‘Bimini': these tracks were such quintessentially hip-hop hits and welcomed hard trap beats. Ansis had a river of fans literally jumping in unison and singing his lyrics word for word. 

Black Country, New Road

Respectfully, this was the most boring set I’ve possibly ever been to. As all fans of BC,NR know, in January their lead singer and quite literally core member Issac Wood left the band. In Feburary, BC, NR released a brand new album, which saw them take a gigantic shift. Despite not being a fan of the album, I still wanted to catch their set, with anticipation that hearing this live I’d maybe take a liking to their new direction — or even get to hear the odd instrumental from their previous album. But I was, unfortunately, excruciatingly disappointed: their entire set felt completely bleak, the only moments that didn’t feel like this were driven by the sombre harmonies. 

Megan Thee Stallion

This entire moment felt completely surreal: the roar from the audience was the loudest it had been all weekend. A hologram of a horse galloping boisterously appears as the stage backdrop, shortly followed by her logo. “If you’re a real hottie let me hear you say 'real hot girl shit',” Megan screams into her mic and the crowd screams back. Playing a mixture of her best work: ‘Freak Nasty’, ‘What’s New’, ‘Cry Baby’, ‘Simon Says’, ‘Thot Shit' and of course, ‘Savage’, Megan Thee Stallion boastfully shows how to whip up an undefeated festival set-list.

Commanding the audience to raise their middle fingers for ‘What’s New’ fans go wild as they throw their phones onto stage. Picking them up one by one, Megan takes videos of herself twerking, with thousands of screaming fans working as an entertaining backdrop. Calling to arms to the left, right and back of the audience, Megan engages with every single soul enjoying the show, and even calls out the press stood up on VIP: “don’t be acing boujee" she yells, followed by laughter. I think I can speak for a lot of us when I say the fear of her not showing up on the Saturday was real (after issues with her plane delayed her set), and to see her bounce onto stage Saturday night, with a set-list of complete dreams was a complete privilege.  

Thundercat

Thundercat’s set was a mesmerising concoction of smooth funk basslines, sensual sax and gentle vocals. Dedicating ‘Dragonball Durag’ to Megan Thee Stallion, this track was presented with an array of beautiful sounds. Much like Yves Tumor’s set, Thundercat felt just as euphoric and tantalising. I initially discovered Thundercat via TikTok single ‘Funny Thing'; having not put much more thought into more of his material, I quickly forgot about him as an artist. However, having played this song amongst many others at Positivus, I quickly realised just how showstopping he is live. 

A$AP Rocky 

Where to even begin! Saturday was absolutely rammed from the moment we stepped onto site. With fans rounding up for two of Saturday's largest acts, it’s fair to say the anticipation for A$AP’s show was quite literally tangible. The staging for his show was unreal, with a gigantic blow-up robot pinned in the centre of stage, this entire set was filled with frantic strobe lights, bursts of smoke, flames, and confetti from start to finish. The graphics on stage were glitchy and the wave of hands in the audience in front of us never died down. Between the vibrations of the music, and the adrenaline-driven fans erupting with excitement, the platform we were stood on was moving so much it felt like it was going to break: it’s been a couple months since I’ve been to a concert with this much adrenaline.

A$AP came out with a set-list of dreams too: During the second track into his set (‘A$AP Forever’) he shouts: “this is gonna be a legendary show tonight!” And that it was. At one point A$AP had three mosh pits going at once (the circles just kept growing), eager fans lobbing their bras onto stage so A$AP can hold them up to the sky like souvenirs. Playing a snippet of his brand-new single with Tyler the Creator and Pharrell ‘Riot' and unreleased ‘Taylor Swift' A$AP treats his fans to a bunch of new and old content. 

***

All in all, Positivus was an incredible experience, and really showed me just how different festivals are abroadL you hardly stumble across teens completely off their faces, most of the site is pretty spotless, including the streets of Latvia, which were remarkably clean with hardly any bins in site…There’s really only a couple of tiny issues I had at Positivus and that was the numbing feeling of being the odd one out, the majority of the population being white. No, really: alarmingly white. Between a young teen yelling “Ethiopia” at me, to just thousands of white fans quite literally screaming the N word during SoFaygo’s set, these small things really raised alarm bells to me that society has a lot more work to do when it comes to addressing racial ignorance. We are taught about racism in schools yet are never taught how to actually combat it in today’s society. 

Having been supported by such an incredible team of writers, PR’s and festival organisers all throughout the weekend I can honestly say I had an epic time covering this festival, and despite these things, really enjoyed the architecture of the beautiful city of Riga too.

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More about: Positivus