At End of the Road the crowd is packed full of artists — Charlie Forbes of Shame, Tom Greenhouse of The Cool Greenhouse, Jazz Pope of Opus Kink. They were not playing the indie festival this year, but (we imagine) here for the stellar rising and familiar alternative acts that return year on year. End of the Road festival draws a similar crowd to Green Man in Wales, but it’s easier to snag a ticket. There were a lot of big names on the line-up including Caribou, Viagra Boys, Father John Misty and John Maus, but it’s mostly the smaller acts that really drew us in.
Larmer Tree Gardens welcomes a generally mature crowd to the Wiltshire/Dorset border, including families with teenagers in tow. A quick look around the main stage registers at least vaguely half of the crowd appear to be over fifty. The youngsters tend to be at weirder, smaller tents like the Boat or late-night secret sets at the Folly. In the rain, which punctuated this festival for 2025, it also made sense to seek shelter. End of the Road periodically marks the end of August in musical glory, however the next edition in 2026, which will also be its twentieth, will surprisingly run the start of September due to the way the bank holiday falls. METAL’s highlights for the festival about two or three hours from Bristol and London are as follows.
Friday
Dame Area
Intense, and sweaty at the front row, their industrial music reverberates from your toes to your throat pushing out of End of the Road’s sound system. The crunchy experimental audio of the Barcelona duo owes its excellence to Mágica Roja, the legendary old member’s club that played harsh experimental music verging on noise. One song at the festival seemed to feature a sound reminiscent of scuttling insects, paired with shouted lyrics. Dame Area’s music is dark, industrial and desolate. Entering Big Top tent for this through a tunnel was pleasingly disconcerting as ever. Scheduling put them on in the afternoon, which felt unconventional, but they played a secret set Saturday 1am until 2am which made us realise maybe starting the day headbanging was quite nice after all.
Mandy, Indiana
Before the start of their set at the Boat, a crowd was already waiting for them to start. The English noise rock band gave a both honed and frenetic performance with harsh angular experimental instrumentation and driving drums. The spinning disco ball at the small stage lit a young crowd including someone in a 365 party girl t-shirt who pulsed around singer Valtentine Caulfield, clad in an eyepatch post-surgery, who danced in the amongst the revellers. Urgent strange music is what End of the Road is great at showcasing, so this was another joy.
Saturday
The New Eves
Going from strength to strength since their The New Eve is Rising album release their daytime performance on the main stage, Woods Stage, is captivating. It’s never going to not be cool having a standing drummer, too. The New Eves are commanding. They’re also a band that you can tell are loving it, they’re smiley and gush, this is the biggest crowd they’ve ever played to. They’re going to go far with this Patti Smith type rock energy. Even an unknown new track they play gets cheers. The band are focused and so is their hushed, entranced audience.
Black Fondu
This artist is a discovery for some at End of the Road, at the small Boat tent where Mandy Indiana also played, which again the festival is awesome for. Black Fondu’s experimental, scratchy screams and jolting synthetic sounds make for a very edgy sort of rap music. It’s torrential rain at this point and in the crowd we play a game of who likes experimental hip hop and who likes staying toasty under the tent. In any case, there are lots of heads bobbing. At one moment that it sounds a bit Shygirl-esque with whispered warped vocals, the main take-away is this is a deeply experimental artist with some than necessarily themes in his work.
John Maus
We caught his secret set at the intimate Folly tent at midnight til one. John Maus is an icon and his performance angelic and brutal; it makes a lot of sense that his first release in seven years is titled I Hate Antichrist. A cult figure in the synth pop world, his soundscapes feel experimental and strange, with echoing Gregorian-style vocals and propulsive synths, particularly at this time of night. Transported to some sort of frenetic delirious state, the crowd feels as Berlin as it’s ever going to get at End of the Road this year, and Maus is a PhD holder in Philosophy from America.
Sunday
Squid
Their rocker drawl envelops us; they know how to put on a live show. Squid’s sound is disorientating, which is perfect for a crowd to enjoy, looking around to confirm we are all hearing something strange. Performing, Squid have clearer vocals than on recordings. Chatting to the crowd they share they grew up coming to EOTR and have performed a few times. It’s a great ambience as smoke rolls off the stage and draws a diverse crowd. Their hammering instruments are playful but there’s also a sense of unravelling and stretched out fatigue reflective of those dreading work on Monday. Their set soundtracks the sunset a little after 8pm. Finally, there is no more horrific horizontal rain.