If Mad Cool’s name could be distilled to a single gesture, it would be the shaka: that thumb-and-pinkie surfer salute, deployed here without a hint of irony. But move past that and you’ll be rewarded with a lineup this year that is second to none.
The festival opens with Wolf Alice, prize-laden leading lights of a generation whose decade-long mastery of genre-fluid rock is unimpeachable. Fusing pristine melodies to snarling guitar work, the London quartet never disappoint.
