Have you ever seen yourself out of the corner of your eye? It's disorienting. This happened to me during Turnstile's headlining set on the first night of Kilby Block Party, the indie-ish Salt Lake City music festival that lives up to its word-of-mouth reputation. These days, a Turnstile live show is a production, one befitting a real-deal festival headliner. The people in the band are all charismatic human whirlwinds who carry themselves like athletes, but they know that they're not the real show. The real show is the crowd — the roiling oceans of people that go the fuck off whenever Turnstile touch the stage.
At this point in their absolutely wild career, Turnstile can't erase distinctions between band and crowd in the same way that they once could. You can't stagedive, for instance, when a vast gulf separates the stage from the kids up against the barrier. So Turnstile find other ways to put the crowd at the center of the spectacle. They travel with an expert visual team, including veteran skateboarding photographer Atiba Jefferson, and they surround themselves with giant screens that broadcast the bedlam in real time, turning it into a movie. That's how I became the next contestant on that Summer Jam screen.
I'm tall. Like, very tall. When people find themselves standing behind me, they talk about me like I'm a weather event, like I can't hear what they're saying. Usually, I stand toward the back or off to the side — in the zones where people can get past me and find another spot if they want, though not in the extreme back where chatter overwhelms music. I don't hold back for Turnstile, though. For Turnstile, I have to be in it. My thinking is: I'm moving around, you're moving around, we're all moving around. I'm not just planting myself somewhere and offering a view of my back to whoever's unlucky enough to stand behind me. The way the dice fell on Sunday night, I was among a sea of very short girls, who were as fired up as everyone else. This probably made me stand out more.
At the end of some song, I forget which one, I had my hands up, sort of pointed at the sky, and I saw a looming white monolith on a screen in my peripheral vision. This was me. I was onscreen. I froze. The camera cut from me to the band, then back to me. I just held the pose. My mind was racing, but I was part of the show now. When I met the video guys after the set, they said they kept putting my onscreen because they liked my Orioles jersey, so maybe being tall had nothing to do with it. Maybe I was on that screen more than I realized? Yikes. Anyway, I looked like this. (Shout out to Stereogum Discord user Souva for taking the photo and letting me use it.)
I've seen Turnstile a lot of times over the past decade or so. I've written a lot of things about them. I love that band, and it felt amazing to see them rock that huge crowd, getting so many kids so fired up. It's been a dramatic, fucked-up year for Turnstile. Some of the lyrics on last year's Never Enough sound a little different to me, now that I know a little more about some of the fucked-up drama that was really never any of my business in the first place. But even when they got that TMZ attention, Turnstile never slowed down. Right now, they're pretty much only playing festivals, but they're playing a lot of them. I hope all of their sets are as transcendent as the Kilby one, and maybe they are. But there's something special about Kilby.
Kilby Block Party is a relatively new festival. The first one, in 2019, was an actual block party, intended to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Kilby Court, a stalwart local venue. It's grown bigger since then, moving to its current location at the Utah State Fairgrounds in 2022. I've been hearing about this fest for a while. The location is astonishing, for one thing. I'd never been to Salt Lake City, and it feels incredible to watch bands while surrounded by snow-capped mountains, or inside a tiny stadium that seems to be built specifically for rodeos. The booking leans hard into indie rock without being too dogmatic about what that term means. My guy Ryan Leas covered the fest for Stereogum a couple of years ago, and he and everyone else made it clear that this was something worth checking out, even if Salt Lake City is nowhere near your bucket list. Allow me to join that chorus. Kilby Block Party is one of the good ones. As far as the current American festival landscape goes, it might be the good one.
It's not Pitchfork. Nothing else ever will be. For many years, the Pitchfork Music Festival was an annual highlight, a circled square on my calendar. It was the right size, and it was booked by human beings — people who I knew and worked with. If you were a music writer, you'd go every year, and you'd see all your old music-writer friends, or you'd make new ones. You'd see some bands you loved and some you thought were annoying. It was the best. Kilby Block Party is probably a little bigger than Pitchfork. It's not in Chicago, though it does have the benefit of being in another big city that's pretty easy to navigate if you're from out of town. There's no giant mob of music critics in the VIP section, though god knows that could change. But Kilby did give me that old Pitchfork feeling like nothing since fuckass corporate overlords ended the Pitchfork Festival.
Kilby isn't a boutique festival, one of the small situations that cater to specific niches, but it's not trying to be Coachella, either. It's clearly booked by human beings, and you can get a pretty good idea what those human beings are into. Not all of the acts at Kilby employ guitars, but all of them fit loosely into the vaguely defined taste matrix of indie rock. There are no rappers and no dance DJs, though at least a few of those could've done very well. There's a healthy hyperpop representation, a smattering of heavier stuff, a touch of nostalgia, and a sharply curated undercard that pulls a lot of the best music that websites like this one cover.
In past years, nostalgia was a much more prominent part of the Kilby experience. Since moving to the State Fairgrounds, most of Kilby's headliners have been all-stars of the '90s (Pavement, Weezer) or '00s (Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD, Justice). Last year, they went even further back, booking New Order and Devo. This year felt like a much more transitional youth-movement situation. There were veteran acts on the bill — Modest Mouse, American Football, Grandaddy — but they weren't the main focus. There was one reunited-ish act among the headliners, but it was the xx, and all three of them are well under 40. I think the members of Turnstile are all in their thirties, if not younger. Lorde is 29. They've all been around for more than a decade, but they're not nostalgia acts. A few years ago, you would've had to explain yourself if you referred to any of them as "indie rock," but they all fit comfortably into that strange and ill-defined category today.
The specter of the '90s still hangs over Kilby, at least judging by how many Nirvana shirts I saw in the crowd. But this year's edition was for the kids who sometimes seem to wish they grew up in the '90s. There were so many hacky sack circles in the crowd, for instance. Is that still what they do out on Utah? Hacky sack? Or is it a self-conscious revival of a dead tradition? Either way, that was fun to see. I'll take hacky sack over TikTok activation tents or whatever. It wasn't a festival for people like me, who were alive and cognizant in the '90s and who want to go to festivals like the ones we had back then. I'm glad it's not that. You can go to Kilby and get excited about music, which is not something I can say about the larger, seemingly algorithm-generated fest lineups that come out every year.
So let me tell you about some music that got me excited. Early on day one, Die Spitz brought the joyous rumble. It would've been cool to get some actual metal at the fest, but very little actual metal has their sense of youthful abandon. Show Me The Body were jagged and celebratory, and they made that little rodeo stadium levitate. Father John Misty is a known quantity, but it's great to be reminded what a performer he is, how his expansive arrangements come to life in a setting like this. (In an unlikely twist, he might've been the single loudest act of the weekend, and he made that work for him.) Automatic have an icy electroclash cool that doesn't dissipate even in the afternoon sun, and Smerz's playful monotone gains a whole lot of life when you can watch the playfulness at work. Jane Remover hits much harder when she's got a big crowd that's really fucking with her, as this one was. It was a whole lot cooler seeing her at this fest than opening for Turnstile to crickets last year.
The Last Dinner Party are an ideal festival act, with enough visual and musical flair that you might get a fresh shot of energy just from watching them. Dehd's sprightly jangle gave me Girls flashbacks, which I wasn't expecting but which I was very happy to experience. Ben Kweller made a strong argument for himself as one of our best working songwriters. Early on Sunday afternoon, I was nursing the worst hangover I've had in years, and I wasn't in the mood to get excited about much. But sitting up in the metal bleachers of the mini-stadium, This Is Lorelei's songs hit me a lot harder than they ever had before. That shit sounded awesome, and it helped me forget to feel miserable.
Later that day, Hayley Williams played her first festival as a solo act. She said she was nervous about it. I don't believe her. Even just playing the songs from her new album, never touching the Paramore hits that she's always got in her back pocket, Williams brought verve and joy and absolutely tremendous vocals, and now those new songs sound like hits to me. I knew I liked all these acts, more or less, but now I know that I like them better than I realized.
I missed a lot of stuff that I wanted to see because of standard festival factors — conversations that I didn't want to cut off, hunger arriving at inopportune moments, sudden drops in temperature. It got really cold on Sunday, and the out-of-towners were caught completely off-guard. Every single merch table ran out of cold-weather gear. I didn't properly appreciate the xx's return because I partied too hard, even though they sounded great. My fault. Plenty of acts had a way of becoming background music. Plenty of others had cutesy gimmicks that didn't capture my imagination.
I'm working on this theory that there's a certain strain of bright, polite, shimmery alt-pop that serves the same function as stuff like Grand Funk Railroad did in the early '70s. Those early-'70s hard rock bands were goofy and anarchic, and these current bands are not, but they play similar roles: They're very, very popular among young people, and critics either haven't heard of them or regard them with haughty disdain. You wouldn't know it from reading websites like this one, but the fresh-faced young Floridian crew Flipturn is huge. They played a packed-out mainstage to general bewildering rapture. I don't get it! Which is fine! I didn't dislike them or anything. I just don't have a way in. That's for somebody else.
One of the fun things about festivals like this is that you can sample something that's for somebody else, figure out whether you're into it, and move on with your life. I had never, for instance, heard of LA electro-poppers Between Friends, two siblings who apparently were on America's Got Talent at some point. Speaking to kids in the crowd, though, Between Friends were a big draw. I figured they'd sound like Flipturn. Nope! Instead, they're on some performatively sleazy electro-pop shit. I don't know how many Gecs figure into their equation, but I figure it's at least, what, 60? 60 Gecs? I was talking to someone who said Between Friends were the worst group he'd ever heard. I thought they were pretty fun! They were on at the same time as Ben Kweller, so I didn't stick around for more than a few songs, but I wasn't even remotely mad at it.
When a festival really works, it's not just the booking; it's the way everything fits together. Kilby has four stages, and it's scheduled so there's only ever two bands playing at the same time, minimizing tough decisions. When the headlining set starts, that's the only stage with anything going on, so everyone converges near the biggest stage. When the machinery works, you can appreciate the smaller things. I liked the sign language interpreters who were really, really into their jobs. I liked the presence of seagulls, which was a little confusing until I realized that Salt Lake City is named that because there's a salt lake there, duh. I liked the way clouds encircled the mountain peaks in the distance when it started to rain. I liked making friends in the beer line and then hanging out with those people for another couple of days. The whole experience really just put me in a good mood, and I am not always in a good mood at music festivals.
Case in point: Lorde's headlining set on the final night, which would've been a letdown at most fests. I was fired up for Lorde, but she really just staged a version of an arena show, rather than tailoring her set toward a festival audience that might not already be in the superfan zone. Like: How do you do "Royals" as the second song in the set, and then only sing like 45 seconds of it? Why do you have dancers up there doing abstract choreography? Why are you referring to your career as "my art project"? She played a lot of songs that I loved, and I loved hearing them, but the presentation and the rain took away from what could've been some real glorious moments.
But on the endless sodden trudge out of the State Fairgrounds — leaving any festival is a nightmare even if everything else about the fest is good — I heard a girl talking about loving Lorde's set, being brought to tears multiple times. Lorde's set seemed built for Lorde superfans, not for me, merely a Melodrama superfan. But that meant that girl had a great night, and the rest of us still got to sing along to "Liability" before getting back to our regular lives. I'll take it. If you have the means and the inclination, I'd advise you to check out Kilby next year. Maybe you'll see something great. Maybe you'll even see yourself.
