Let me paint you a picture: Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek, August 16th, 2024. The night was muggy, like the sweat on the back of your neck after you’ve been bouncing around in the pit for an hour straight. Kevin Abstract, the wild card from Corpus Christi, Texas, set the tone with his genre-bending hip-hop. Known for his role in Brockhampton, Abstract’s solo set was anything but low-key. Halfway through, he vaulted off the stage like a man possessed, diving into the crowd as if to merge with the very pulse of his music. Fans were electrified, a sea of hands grasping at him as he surfed the tide of bodies. If you didn’t know Kevin Abstract’s name before, you sure did after that—his latest solo album Blanket dropped last year, a raw, unfiltered diary in musical form. Check him out at kevinabstract.com, but don’t expect him to stay still for long.

Enter Glass Animals, the Oxford-bred psychedelic pop maestros who’ve been turning heads with their eclectic, genre-melting sound. Led by Dave Bayley, with Drew MacFarlane on guitar, Edmund Irwin-Singer on bass, and Joe Seaward behind the kit, they’re like a technicolor dream in a world of grayscale. The crowd was already amped from Kevin Abstract’s high-octane opener, and when an inflatable cow bounced around the hands of fans, you knew things were about to get weird in the best possible way. Bayley’s falsetto slid through the humid air like butter on a hot skillet, the band working through tracks from their latest release, Dreamland, a hallucinatory trip of an album that feels like a long-lost summer soaked in neon. If you weren’t there, you missed something special, but there’s still a chance to catch them at glassanimals.com before they disappear back into the ether.

Kevin Abstract

Glass Animals