End Of The Road is a festival that keeps its promises. The cultured leftfield shindig – where croquet tournaments break out in forest glades and peacocks roam the trimmed lawns of Dorset’s Larmer Tree Gardens, unbothered by the experimental folk, rock, rap and electronic tomfoolery floating across the site – has been promising a weekend headlined by indie giants Pixies and Bright Eyes since 2020. Covid scuppered that event, and post-pandemic travel issues forced the 2021 bill to become more UK-based. But this year, EOTR puts its music where its mouth is at last, with plenty more curveballs thrown in to keep this crowd of discerning alternative music fans pleasingly off-balance.
The opening Thursday night bill is a brain-rattling case in point. On the main Woods Stage, LA’s Sudan Archives sets out to invent jig-hop, interspersing psychosexual ambient raps (she ends “NBPQ”, for instance, rolling on her back screaming “I just wanna have my titties out!”) with ruined snippets of Irish folk played on the fiddle she brandishes throughout. Even when slapping the butts of imaginary sexual partners.
