Festival Republic Presents Snow Patrol + Rag'n'Bone Man + Supports

Performers

• 

  Snow Patrol

  Northern Irish alt-rock outfit Snow Patrol broke into the mainstream with their 2003 major-label debut Final Straw, followed up with the multi-platinum success of 2006's Eyes Open, which featured the international hit single "Chasing Cars," and continued with two more multi-platinum records, A Hundred Million Suns (2008) and Fallen Empires (2011). After a six-year hiatus, the band returned with the UK Top Ten album Wildness in 2018.

  Now comprising the trio of Nathan Connolly, Gary Lightbody, and Johnny McDaid, the band have emerged from the process of writing and recording their extraordinary new album, The Forest is the Path (September 13th 2024), perhaps a little battered, but maybe, just maybe, a little wiser and certainly more humble from the experience.

  Love, loss, regret, self-doubt, denial, delusion: anyone afflicted by any of these experiences, emotions and afflictions - and isn’t that all of us? - might be well advised to gird themselves before listening to Snow Patrol’s new album. It’s not a record for the faint-hearted, to be sure - but it may just be a salve for the heart that hurts.

  Lyrically, it’s by far the most laid-bare and most unsparing of the band’s albums (which is saying something). Phrases leap out and ambush you, constantly. “I’m only lost if you don’t look for me.” “I’m not going to lie to you anymore, after these lies. Then no more.” “I want to be in love without being loved in return.” “I’ve told myself a million times who you weren’t, so I can finally forget who you were.” “Love is just pain in reverse.”

  As those lyrics suggest, The Forest is the Path is an album rooted in reflection, introspection and interrogation. One of its key building blocks, says Gary, was the idea of love from the distance of time. “I was going on really long walks and just having these ideas and then diving down into them. I haven’t been in a relationship for a very long time, 10 years or more, so love from a distance to me meant the way a relationship sits in your memory from a distance of, say, 10 years. That’s not something I’d previously thought about as a way to write about love. So it’s like, when you’re in love, you’re standing in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When you’ve broken up with that person, you’re out in the street. You can still see the building, but you no longer have access to it. And when it’s 10 years later, you’re standing in Brooklyn, looking across the East River at the Manhattan skyline.”

  It’s a theme addressed unblinkingly and unflinchingly on the album’s first single, The Beginning, a song that builds from a Bryan Ferry-like verse to a huge chorus that will be incendiary live. “That’s kind of a summing up of this album,” Gary continues. “It’s a way of looking at various mistakes, the hurt that I caused, from a place where nothing is hurting anymore, except the memory when you pull it back into your mind. The memory itself is full of hurt but everything around it isn’t. You’re holding in your hand this ball of fire, but you’ve got gloves on.”

  “Seamus Heaney said, a few years before he died, that he was still finding out what poems meant that he’d written 30 or 40 years before. As soon as I heard that, something was unlocked inside me. Like, I get it now. I’m not supposed to know. And that’s kind of what this album is about.” He looks at Nathan and Johnny. “These two gentlemen here were responsible for so much. Those moments on the album that make your heart soar way, way above you, like a fucking halo. The architecture and the landscape are so crucial on this album. They elevate it beyond anything we’ve done before.

• 

  Editors

  Marrying dark angular rock with a sharp pop sense, English band Editors emerged in the early 2000s as part of the post-punk revival that also included contemporaries Interpol, White Lies, and the Cinematics. Following their 2005 debut, The Back Room, they scored a pair of U.K. chart-toppers, including In This Light and on This Evening, which found the band incorporating more synth pop elements. They furthered that digital push on 2015's In Dream, before striking a balance between rock and electronic with 2018's Violence.

  Formed in 2003, Editors became one of the leading bands in the post-punk revival that swept America and England in the early 21st century. Originally dubbed Snowfield, the group comprised four music technology students from Stafford University -- singer/guitarist Tom Smith, lead guitarist Chris Urbanowicz, bassist Russell Leetch, and drummer Ed Lay -- all of whom had relocated to Birmingham after graduation. A series of a well-received club dates and demo recordings earned Editors some attention from British labels, and the group soon signed with the revitalized Kitchenware, the venerable indie label once home to Prefab Sprout.

  Kitchenware issued the band's debut single, "Bullets," in early January 2005. The record reportedly sold out in one day, and its sound earned comparisons to the dark, dramatic atmospherics of contemporary bands like Interpol and Bloc Party (not to mention veteran outfits like Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen). Editors' follow-up single, "Munich," made them darlings of the U.K. music press, and just weeks after their standout performance at the annual Glastonbury Music Festival, the band issued a third single, "Blood." Their much-anticipated debut LP, The Back Room, followed in mid-2005. "Munich" was reissued in January 2006 to ramp up support for the album, which entered the Top Five in the U.K. and eventually earned platinum sales. A U.S. tour with stellastarr* coincided with the American release of The Back Room in March, and a Mercury Music Prize nomination followed in July.

  Editors' sophomore effort, An End Has a Start, came out the following summer, preceded by the Top 10 single "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors." Like its predecessor, the album went platinum in the U.K. and maintained the band's modest audience in America, where they returned in September 2007 to launch another stateside tour. Editors remained on the road through the middle of 2008, playing a slew of festivals in the U.K. and opening a string of European shows for R.E.M. before the year was up. By this point, the band had grown tired of their sound, however, and 2009 found them tinkering with synthesizers and industrial music. After enlisting the help of producer Flood (known for his work with Depeche Mode, U2, and Nine Inch Nails), they decamped to the studio to record In This Light and on This Evening, which unveiled their newfound electronic fixation upon its release in October 2009.

  Eager to build on the success of a second U.K. number one album in a row, Smith immediately began to write material for a prospective fourth full-length. By the time the In This Light and on This Evening promotional tour had ended in late 2010, the band had enough new songs to enter a London studio, with Flood once again behind the desk. The majority of the band wasn't satisfied with the initial results of these sessions, and by early 2012, Smith, Leetch, and Lay had asked Urbanowicz to leave Editors when it became clear that the vision they had for the band's future wasn't shared by their guitarist and founding member. Very shortly after Urbanowicz had departed, the band were offered a high-profile festival slot in Werchter, Belgium. They honored this commitment, bringing in ex-Yourcodenameis: Milo guitarist Justin Lockey and Airship member Elliott Williams to their lineup, bolstering the band's sound and laying the foundations for the straight-ahead rock approach that their fourth album would ultimately take. Recorded as a five-piece in Nashville with Jacquire King as producer, The Weight of Your Love was issued in June 2013 and nodded to the ambitious, guitar-led, stadium-filling sound of U2 and R.E.M.

  In 2015, Editors delivered their fifth studio album, the self-produced In Dream, which featured background vocals from Slowdive's Rachel Goswell and included the singles "No Harm," "Marching Orders," and "Life Is Fear." They toured extensively behind the effort before returning to the studio for their sixth LP, 2018's Violence, which featured the singles "Magazine" and "Hallelujah (So Low)." A version of the album originally recorded with electronic producer Blanck Mass was issued a year later as The Blanck Mass Sessions. The short set featured alternate versions of seven tracks from Violence, adding the previously unreleased song "Barricades." ~ Jason Ankeny & James Wilkinson

• 

  Amy MacDonald

  Musician🎤🎸.Winging it since 2006. 12 million records sold along the way ❤️📀 My new album 'is This What You've Been Waiting For?' out now!

• 

  The Amazons

  21st Century Fiction. Out May 9th. https://theamazons.ffm.to/zons

• 

  Nieve Ella