Reading Festival review, day three: Queen of alt-pop Billie Eilish closes the weekend in sublime but subdued fashion

Different pop is a curiously contradictory style born out of necessity to cater to an outsider teenage viewers whereas nonetheless protecting its head above the streaming waters. It’s extra of an aesthetic than it’s a sonic assemble. Pop music delivered with the visible signifiers of inexperienced hair, dishevelled garments, and tattoos, coupled with an environment of despond and anger laced with non-traditional pop themes: medication, intercourse, suicide, abuse, boredom. Admittedly, mainstream pop does its justifiable share of that too, nowadays (and alt-pop acts can’t realistically drop any extra F-bombs because it nonetheless must be on the radio) – but all Breakfast Present eyes are on the place this intriguing style goes subsequent.

As the most alt-pop day of Reading weekend, Sunday acts as a showcase of kinds. Rina Sawayama, for instance, goes the efficiency artwork route. Cavorting round Most important Stage East with a cohort of dancers in The Final Dinner Celebration’s clothes (see Friday’s assessment), she hollers her approach via the operatic pop drama of “Maintain the Woman” on her knees, as if laid low with the sound of her personal backing monitor. And she or he’s solely simply began her half hour of continuous metamorphosis.

Come “STFU!”, she is getting the crowd to flip the chicken at some unspecified “f***ing s*** happening in this nation proper now” to some Rage In opposition to the Machine-level grunge steel. Throughout “Comme des garcons (Like the Boys)”, Sawayama transforms from a subway-riding commuter hiding behind a newspaper splashing her personal slaying skill, right into a whip-swinging dominatrix dressed in scarlet latex S&M gear. By “XS”, she is donning a tasselled 10-gallon hat for an attractive pop line-dance. This, one suspects, was what Kevin Rowland was aiming for in 1999.

Pressured to step up in the pulse-raising stakes, Enfield’s Declan McKenna takes to the stage in a full swimsuit and fats tie but – oopsie – forgets so as to add a shirt. He has additionally, in reply to Sawayama’s dancers, introduced alongside a keyboard boffin who turns into phenomenally funky when handed a tambourine. It’s a noble effort to mix in with the different pop herd, but the singer-songwriter is a pure stand-out, resembling MGMT on a Bahamian break on “Sympathy” and, on new tune “Nothing Works” (fuelled by a pre-song tray of photographs), The Buggles, in , new wave type of approach.

His is an assured and lark-filled set, though he suffers a contact from the fashionable malaise of TikTok transience. “Brazil”, his Kooks-lite viral 2015 hit about FIFA corruption, is met with a forest of raised telephones and partitions of shouldered girlfriends. But the following “British Bombs” is performed out to the sound of half the crowd racing off to look at expertise present alumnus Becky Hill.

Becky Hill is a terrifying warning imaginative and prescient of what occurs if you dance in shut proximity to the mainstream satan: eventual, inevitable Voice-ification. Her massive funds Butlins present, earlier than a smiley face backdrop, options dancer solo spots in the first tune and extra by-numbers rave pop than you’d discover on David Guetta’s first laptop computer. For the writhing plenty, she’s a innocent chunk of roadshow – but for popular culture at giant, she’s the Ghost of Reading Future, bearing a chilling portent hard-learned from the late V pageant. When you go pap, you by no means return.

The Web’s Steve Lacy – Nosferatu tall, supermodel good-looking, shades like a superhero’s masks – pulls the day again on monitor along with his enthralling psychedelic soul and wild punk riots earlier than, at the different finish of the web site, an introductory voice-over encourages us to “get up and face the world as it’s” even when “ache and struggling is all that lies earlier than you”. Then Think about Dragons begin taking part in.

The band are courageous certainly to join the identical pageant as The Killers. Their Vegas forebears did the stirring bluster rock factor levels higher and at twice the tempo final night time. “My Life”, in explicit, comes throughout as a ponderous “Mr Brightside”, and whereas Brandon Flowers’ showman speak of whirlwind journeys and classes realized was often touching, Dan Reynolds – topless and pumped, as if stopping by between cage fights – invokes a heavier tone by punctuating the set with new age self-help recommendation and testimonials on the advantages of psychiatric remedy.

Nonetheless, their punchy testosterone temper rock and impassioned billow balladry is as toned as Reynold’s ripped pecs. “Believer”, “Thunder” and “Demons” land each sonic and emotional swing. “Your life is at all times price dwelling,” Reynolds implores the depressives in the crowd. “Stick with us, we want you.” Not lengthy after, “Radioactive” expands on the band’s relatively one-trick supply with some rave whomps and a coda whereby Reynolds takes to a piano to spool out “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” like Magic Mike auditioning for the Royal Academy.

Most important Stage East headliner Billie Eilish might do with a session or two on Reynolds’ (psychiatric) sofa. “I wanna finish me,” she mutters at the shut of “bury a pal”, having launched herself out of a gap in the stage. Dressed in shiny baseball garb, she finds herself on a stark black sloping set, bathed in pink gentle and doused in crepuscular, minimalist beats. Later, Eilish – who at 21 is Reading’s youngest ever headliner – briefly dons a crown in recognition of her standing as the queen of different pop, but in any other case her oppressive tone, buried vocal mumbles and whole lack of massive gig pizzazz – a signifier of the downbeat course of pageant headline units in the age of the bed room pop famous person – is considerably at odds together with her between-song encouragement to “have some enjoyable” and “go as buck wild as you need”. Certainly, relatively than from the high of a human pyramid, that is music finest loved from the consolation of a padded room whereas beneath the affect of heavy responsibility sedatives and round-the-clock surveillance.

A lot the identical present that she delivered to Glastonbury a pair months in the past, there’s little new indication right here of different pop’s subsequent course. Her Barbie soundtrack tune “What Was I Made For?” is a sublime piano ballad very a lot akin to the torch songs (like “idontwannabeyouanymore”) that she dots all through her set, or the seated acoustic section for “I really like you” and “Your Energy”, carried out alongside her brother, co-writer and “finest pal” Finneas. There are, nonetheless, 80 engrossing minutes of numbed emotional exorcism and noir-pop immersion that prods subversively at pop’s darkest prospects. “Oxytocin” is vampiric Latino pop; “GOLDWING” throbs alongside on subterranean jungle beats; “I Didn’t Change My Quantity” is funk music coming into its third month locked in a basement. The meditation break she provides us to “sit back” and “be current” earlier than the non secular chorale of “when the get together’s over” is pointless; Reading is already deep in the second. Wherever Eilish goes in her subsequent bout of alt-pop slumber, it’s coming too.