Today’s all about women: Resilient or fragile, brutally honest or soaring high on the wings of their poetic lyrics, from here or from afar. The OFF Festival has always been host to many extraordinary women — on stage and in the audience — and 2024 is no different.
Edyta Bartosiewicz
If you remember the 90s in Poland, you likely know the albums Sen, Szok’n’Show, and Dziecko by heart and will rush the front row to sing along. For anyone else who missed the reign of Edyta Bartosiewicz, this is your chance to make up for lost time. One of Poland’s most outstanding singer-songwriters skyrocketed to fame with her debut LP Love, but her first Polish-language record — 1994’s Sen — was a cultural phenomenon, selling upwards of half a million copies. Her subsequent albums only cemented her status. Bartosiewicz disappeared from the music scene in the late nineties, only to reemerge in 2013 with the LP Renovatio. The world — and with it the music scene — has changed, but her songs remains as great as they ever were.
Sevdaliza
Equally fluent in the languages of sound and imagery, this Iran-born Dutch artist is peerless on the European music scene. Her music, at times mesmerizingly beautiful, at others impenetrable yet fascinatingly experimental, has drawn critical comparisons to trip-hop and Björk, though Sevdaliza marches to the beat of her own drummer. But the Björkian references are not entirely unwarranted, especially when you consider the intriguing and inspiring visuals that accompany Sevdaliza’s electronic explorations of identity and femininity.
Brutus
“Once more we sing along / This never ending song / Once more we’ll dance the hurt away,” Stefanie Mannaerts promises in the chorus of “What Have We Done,” one of the most poignant tracks we’ve heard in years. Belgium’s Brutus is a rising star on the post-hardcore scene, inhabiting a triangle plotted by Neurosis, Deftones, and The Cranberries. No one’s leaving this show unmoved.
Backxwash
The Zambia-born rapper from Montreal Ashanti Mutinta burst onto the scene in 2020, clinching the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s top music award, for her album God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It. She’s since come out with a whole trilogy of suffering: albums drenched in despair, fury, horrorcore, and trap metal. Backxwash’s live shows confront the audience with her own (and our collective) traumas. Whether it’s in the lyrics or the music, get ready for some heavy hitting.
Moonchild Sanelly
Hailing from South Africa, Sanelisiwe Twisha, popularly known as Moonchild Sanelly, claims to have invented a genre of music which she calls future ghetto funk. It’s an original blend of the regional style known as kwaito with global rap, along with dancehall, funk, and jazz. Moonchild Sanelly combines all of the above so deftly that she’s scored invitations to record with the likes of Beyoncé, Gorillaz, and Ghetts. Her newest track, a collaboration with Mxshi Mo, comes out March 8, while her upcoming album is slated for release before this year’s OFF Festival. Trust us: it’s well worth the wait.
Leenalchi
Korean pansori opera, but it’s pop? To describe Leenalchi’s sound as original is nothing if not an understatement. You’d think we’d featured performers representing every music genre under the sun, but this is unlike anything we’ve ever heard here at Three Pond Valley. Performing in their original lineup — one male and two female vocalists, synths, two bass guitars, and drums — Leenalchi blend tradition and modernity, East with West.
Annahstasia
Her voice may brim with soulful austerity, but her acoustic guitar weeps with the sound of folk and the blues. A self-taught artists, Annahstasia released her debut record Sacred Bull on her own, and soon landed an invitation from Lenny Kravitz to join him on tour. The Covid pandemic put the brakes on her career, giving Annahstasia time to reinvent herself — a transformation witnessed by her spiritual EP Revival. “Everything is heavy and has weight,” she says about her perception of the world and her songs, “but you can always see the weight as gold.”
Dominika Płonka
One of the most remarkable voices on the Polish music scene today. Płonka debuted in 2023 with the mini-album DD EP, which landed her gigs on club and festival stages. She deftly oscillates between r’n’b, rap, and indie pop — and, in her lyrics, between the poetic and the literal. The answer to the question posed by her EP’s closing track, “kiedy?” [when?] is simple: now!
