Mutations Festival 2025

I’ve been going to The Great Escape for the last decade. I have a number of bugbears such as the distance between venues and how often you walk across town to find the venue is full, meaning you miss many of the artists you wanted to see. The upstart, Mutstions festival, say they minimise queues as they don’t oversell tickets. I have never been before, but friends have always been positive about the festival. This year, the lineup was too good to miss.

So are their queues? Well I didn’t experience any.  Although I did hear there were occasional queues at the Prince Albert and Hope and Ruin. But that’s pretty good going. This is nowhere near The Great Escape levels of queuing. All good? Well kind of. So let’s get the negatives out of the way before I talk about the positives. 

When you look at the lineup poster, the bands at the top that have been highlighted in bold, basically play at the same time. You have to choose who you want to see. That’s how they achieve the queuing sleight of hand. If you are choosing this festival over all the other options around, be aware of this. This may seriously change how interesting you might perceive the festival. What made me attend was that lots of my favourite bands were listed – but they all played at the same time. On Friday, DITZ up against Dry Cleaning, IST IST and University. Saturday, Lambrini Girls, Big Special, Benefits and Courting up against each other. It meant some difficult decisions.

Despite these difficult choices, I managed to finally catch IST IST, who were everything I hoped they would be. Benefits and Lambrini Girls brought their own takes on the state of society. I discovered a few excellent bands. For some reason, I had never seen Aint. Their set was enough to convince me that they are to be added to my must see list. Sadly, the other band who stood out, Golomb are from Ohio, so it might be difficult to catch them again.

Overall, it was an enjoyable festival. With a late afternoon start on the Friday and with most venues finishing relatively early on Saturday, it felt short compared to the Great Escape. TGE is much better value for money. However, it was nice to not have to queue. And with the festival taking place in November, hotel prices were much cheaper. Approaching the weekend, as a short weekend break in Brighton with some music, it worked. I suspect I will be back. However, I will wait until the lineup is announced.