The “best band out there” from Ireland, a Detroit electronic-music sensation, and a musical visionary from London. We’re opening the OFF Festival 2025 lineup with a bang. Tickets are now on sale.
The first headliner of next years’s OFF Festival Katowice (August 1–3, 2025) is Fontaines D.C. Recently hailed by Elton John as the “the best band out there right now,” Fontaines D.C. have also garnered acclaimed from the NME and won the 2023 Brit Award for Best International Group. They’re returning to the OFF Festival seven years after their first performance. It was here in Katowice, at the music festival organized by Artur Rojek, that the Dublin quintet played their first Polish show, before the release of their first LP.
“I clearly remember Fontaines D.C.’s first show in Poland, at the OFF Festival,” Rojek recalls. “Just as I remember the astonished reactions of the audience to this little-known band at the time. It was exactly the kind of musical surprise that brings people to the OFF Festival. You come here to discover and explore new artists, to fall in love with music. So I’m all the more excited that we’ll come together for another Fontaines D.C. show, seven years later, after they’ve gone from an obscure festival sensation to one of the hottest bands in the world.”
At the OFF Festival, Fontaines D.C. will be performing their first Polish show since the release of their fourth full-length record, Romance. It comes at a particularly interesting moment in their careers, as they expand their post-punk sound with hip hop, pop, and alt rock, on a release the NME calls “their most considered and intricately crafted work yet.”
The first weekend of August, Katowice will also host a performance by the acclaimed electronic act from the Motor City, Snow Strippers. The duo met on Tinder, bonding over their shared love of the 2000s, raves, and EDM, trance, techno and electropop. They’re still going strong at sold-out shows and festivals all over the world. Their fanclub includes Lil Uzi Vert, who’s expressed his admiration for the act with two co-produced tracks. Tatiana Schwaninger and Graham Perez’s music draws frequent comparisons to another duo, Crystal Castles, but they like to tell audiences to ignore labels, instead inviting them to come to their shows and feel “something.”
The excitement continues with a set by the musical visionary Geordie Greep, who’s making his return to the OFF Festival in August, joined by a different lineup than before. In 2019 he played in Katowice with Black Midi, which was hailed as “the most progressive band in London.” Six years later, similar superlatives are being applied to his first solo album, The New Sound, where jazz and prog rock collide with the sound of a Latin-American big band. Recorded in Brazil and England with a team of over 30 musicians, the LP is impressive in its breadth and sound. Critics have praised it as “fascinatingly enthralling” and wondered how material this intense is going to sound live. We’ll find out at the OFF Festival, August 1–3.
