Rotterdam’s Left of the Dial festival has now completed the line-up for its 2025 edition. The festival takes place from 23 to 26 October with 150 artists participating across 25 stages throughout the city. The good people of this festival do everything possible to make it one of the most enjoyable multi-venue festivals in Europe including encouraging all artists to perform at least once, making the journey worthwhile for them and assisting festival attendees with their schedule planning. With the high calibre of new and emerging artists participating in a number of genres, The Decibel Decoder is previewing some of the highlights with two main caveats:
1. These previews lean into the noisier and more danceable end of the music spectrum.
2. With 150 artists performing, these previews are a snapshot within a category.
Part 3 focuses on 8 highlights from Rest of the World (outside the UK and the island of Ireland).
All bios provided by the artists to Left of the Dial.
C’est Qui (NL)
Dutch band (French name) ‘C’est Qui?’ That’s French for throwing someone out of a window. They produce fast garage punk with enough groove to give your hips a little swing too.
Computer (CA)
Computer is a Vancouver based post punk band that focuses on expressive instrumentation and cathartic live performances.
Gloin (CA)
Gloin “make driving, dark post-punk” (BrooklynVegan), adding noise rock and industrial elements to their music as they tackle themes of bewilderment, dread and anger. Using bombastic rhythmic constructs, savvy arrangements and fervid melodies, the Toronto outfit put forth solemn tracks about perseverance and self-determination that are cleverly subverted through sarcastic commentary, courtesy of their sense of humour.
PISS (CA)
PISS is a noisy, genre-bending 4-piece punk band from Vancouver B.C. The band combines music, poetry, sound collage, performance art, and various mediums of visual art to address complex themes that blur the line between personal and political. Powered by a combination of expert musicianship, energetic live performances, and a crystal-clear vision of a safer underground community, PISS writes punk music that aims to transcend the limitations of a well-established genre by pulling inspiration from a wide range of unexpected influences: literary giants, philosophers, filmmakers, painters, psychoanalysts, activists, children, members of a German anarcho-feminist militant group, and audience members from their shows, to name a few. These voices represent varying ideological beliefs about gender-based violence and enable PISS to create art that depicts challenging and controversial issues such as sexual violence and enculturated gender norms without reduction, romanticisation, polemics, or dogmatism.
Public Circuit (US)
If electronic music is sacred theology, New York City band Public Circuit are the pagan heretics driving the genre forward with an indomitable will to live. After joining forces in early 2023, Ethan Biamont, Sean Holloway and Nelson Fisher released their second album Modern Church via à La Carte Records in September. On Modern Church, Public Circuit dismantle and reassemble post-punk with surgical precision. Gone is any pretense of retro revivalism—what remains is something sharper, darker and entirely their own. With a newfound sense of collaboration amongst all three members, this is a record that dances in the flicker of candlelight and fluorescent glare alike, channeling an austere pulse of angular electronic instrumentation and raw percussive rhythms, all bathed with the high-gloss ache of sophistipop into a sound that’s equal parts ritual and revolution.
Servo (FR)
French band deals in the kind of dark, post-punk noise-rock that storms with ease between gloomy, hypnotic moments and bouts of powerful, motorik noise. SERVO’s sound finds an unstable home between heavy, droning psych-rock and gothic postpunk; forlorn, jangling guitars and deep, austere vocals breaking down into piercing blasts of feedback and distortion. The new album came out in early 2024, and the objective is still the same : the music is to serve the live. The show has to be powerful and immersive. Each track is blessed by brutality and heavyness. The place left after the storm can be filled with details and complexity, as predictable than unexpected. The audience is captured, hypnotized and no one can escape.
The Empty Threats (AUS)
Kaurna-based quintet The Empty Threats fuse Australian post-punk and noise rock into a metallic rainbow of snarling bass, frenzied guitar work, restless percussion, and electric clarinet. Unleashing unadulterated party rock; unmasked, wild, dirty and free; their shows are an anti-religious spectacle that unifies the audience and band through the power of mindful rock n roll.
The Family Men (SE)
The Family Men got their music spanning over a variety of genres and the band’s will to experiment make them hard to pin down – one thing is certain: the offer is a raw and unfiltered expression. Samplers, broken electronics, metal percussion, tape loops and distorted-to-death guitars are some of the key elements that make up the band’s sound. Their multi-faceted live show quickly gained popularity in the Gothenburg music scene and has since taken them out of their native city, and country. By utilising feverish VHS projections, excessive amounts of guitar feedback and a ferocious energy that is matched by few, the group is reaching out there. Lead singer Gustav Danielsbacka often performs in the crowd and shows are known to be very, very loud and in all, really different from all you’ve ever seen. Get ready for noise and assault.
For more information on Left of the Dial including artist, venue, playlists and schedule details as well as all the extras taking place during Left Of The Dial please check the website.