After years of simply attending Shaky Knees Music Festival, this year marked our first chance to cover it for the blog. As one of our favorite places to still hear good old-fashioned rock music, we came into the weekend excited to share our experience with you!
As expected, the lineup gave us plenty to work with. Friday alone brought back several bands we had seen before, along with a few sets that were completely different from anything we’ve seen this year.
We started the weekend with Geese, who continue to grow into one of those bands we make a point to see whenever we can. There is something almost effortlessly cool about the way they play live, and being part of their crowd is what makes their live sets special. Each experience is unique.
Instead of the intense mosh pits and crowd surges that have accompanied some of their other sets, much of Friday’s crowd seemed content to sway along for most of the show. However, by the closing stretch, the intensity had noticeably grown, with a field of voices joining in for “Au Pays du Cocaine,” “Taxes,” and “Trinidad.”
On the Peachtree stage, Turnstile was a very different story.
Before the band played a note, a video montage featured people talking about the hardcore scene and what it meant to them. The final voice summed it up simply: “hardcore is pure love.” Then, with a thunderous roar, Turnstile set the crowd in motion.
We have seen the band several times now, but Friday felt noticeably more intense. And that’s saying something. The sound was huge, clean, and physical in exactly the way a Turnstile set should be. And the crowd responded accordingly. There was no easing into this one.
Even by Turnstile standards, this one hit harder than expected.
We slipped away long enough to catch part of Alice Phoebe Lou’s set on the Criminal Records Stage, and the contrast with Turnstile could not have been sharper. Her newer material leans into stripped-back arrangements and a more dreamlike, intimate feel, with the focus staying squarely on her voice and songwriting.
That translated well live. Even catching only a few songs, the set felt warm, unhurried, and completely comfortable being smaller in scale than what surrounded it. The restraint was part of the appeal, giving the songs space to breathe without losing the crowd.
Then came Danny Elfman, easily one of the most intriguing bookings on the entire Shaky Knees lineup.
Calling it a concert does not quite cover what happened. Elfman bounced between his solo work, Oingo Boingo songs, and decades of film and television music, backed by a band and a small orchestra that became particularly important when the set moved into his scores.
The result felt less like watching an artist work through a catalog. It was more like watching several different versions of his career collide on the same stage.
The range was almost absurd, but somehow it came together as a complete idea. Oingo Boingo material sat alongside themes from Spider-Man, Wednesday, Beetlejuice, The Simpsons, and Batman, with “This Is Halloween” landing somewhere in the middle of all of it. The orchestra gave the score material the size it needed. Meanwhile, the rest of the set still felt like a dramatic rock show.
It was theatrical without feeling like a novelty. Ambitious without collapsing under its weight. By the time it ended, Elfman had made a compelling argument that festivals like Shaky Knees are so cool because of their variety.
The Strokes closed Friday with one of the most focused sets we have seen from them.
Part of the fun, and sometimes the frustration, of seeing The Strokes live is never quite knowing how much Julian Casablancas is going to wander. Friday still had a few of those moments, including filling time during a technical delay, but they never took over the set.
Instead, what stood out was how good the band sounded and how well the setlist balanced the songs people came to hear with deeper cuts and material from across their catalog. The strength of the set was less about any one song than how consistently it moved.
By the time they reached “Last Nite” and “Reptilia” near the end, the whole thing felt unusually locked in.
And then, right at 11 p.m., the day was sadly over thanks to a city curfew.
That hard stop makes Friday at Shaky Knees feel compressed, but it did not feel slight. We walked out of Piedmont Park having seen familiar bands exceed previous performances, one of the most unusual festival sets we will see all year, and a headliner that sounded exactly like a headliner should.
For anyone not ready to call it a night, Shaky Knees also partners with several local venues for separately ticketed late-night shows. We never made it to one this year, but after seeing how much the festival still had going once the park closed, that is something we fully plan on exploring next time.
Most importantly, we could comfortably say we had not seen a bad set all day. That sentiment would indeed hold true for the entire festival!
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