Saturday at Shaky Knees Music Festival brought us not only an exciting lineup, but some legitimately hot weather. Not just festival hot. Not “remember to hydrate” hot. It was the kind of heat that made standing in direct sun physically uncomfortable.
And considering the amount of time we have spent baking at Bonnaroo over the years, that’s saying something.
Every patch of shade around Piedmont Park immediately filled, with people lining the trees and squeezing into whatever relief they could find. Ironically, by the end of the day, heat would become the least of our weather challenges.
For the moment, though, we had a full Saturday lineup to dig into.
We started with Elio Mei, who ended up being one of our favorite finds of the festival. It was the kind of set that leaves you wanting to get home and start digging through a catalog, especially the lyrics. On the surface, there was something light and almost whimsical about the performance, but it felt like something much heavier was sitting underneath it all.
That makes sense once you spend a little time with Mei’s music. His songs often pull from fantasy imagery and ethereal storytelling while circling much more introspective ideas about yearning, identity, and self-discovery. That push and pull was part of what made the set so intriguing. We came in curious and left wanting to hear a lot more.
From there, we made our way to Geordie Greep on the Criminal Records Stage. The former black midi frontman came out of London’s Windmill scene, and his solo work is every bit as hard to describe in writing as that history suggests. Unfortunately, this was where we first noticed some sound issues on the stage, with his vocals difficult to make out at times.
That was frustrating in a set built around so much personality and detail, but even with the mix working against him, we left completely intrigued. This was the first place we went on Spotify after we returned to the hotel.
Then came Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, whose big riffs and wild energy felt just as at home on a festival stage as in a gritty rock club. The band explored all corners of their catalogue, but songs like “Found God in a Tomato,” “Mundungus,” and “Hymn for a Droid” brought familiarity for the more casual fan.
Even in the kind of heat that made standing still feel like work, the crowd was ready to move. This was one set where the temperature was no match for people’s willingness to rock.
Peach Pit followed with a complete change of pace. After the frenzy of Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, their wistful grooves and glassy guitars gave us a chance to find some shade and bask in the music instead of the heat.
Familiar favorites like “Alrighty Aphrodite” and “Tommy’s Party” settled easily into the afternoon, and for a little while, Shaky Knees felt collectively relaxed.
Blood Orange was yet another abrupt change in musical style. This time it was a turn towards something much more exploratory. Within the first four songs, the set had already moved through multiple instrument changes and a Björk cover, giving the whole thing an artsier, less predictable feel.
We were actually talking about how intrigued we were by where the set might go next when the weather changed everything.
A delay hit. And then came the rain. And the lightning. Before long, Shaky Knees moved into a full evacuation, one of several weather evacuations affecting festivals across the country that day.
And then came even more rain. At some point, we joked that “you can only get so wet.” Somehow, at least three times we thought we had reached that point of being soaked, only to find out our shirts, shoes, and even our shorts pockets could hold more water.
The evacuation was unquestionably necessary. However, our one piece of feedback for this year’s Shaky Knees survey will be on the communication around the evacuation. Just one person giving directions as we left the gates and at least one social media update during the hour-long pause would have gone a long way toward putting people more at ease.
By the time the festival reopened, much of the remaining schedule was gone. Twenty One Pilots was ultimately the only set left at the end of the night, with a shortened performance ahead. At that point, we were soaked to the point we were dumping water out of our shoes, cold due to the sudden temp drop, and still a long way from a hotel room. We made the difficult call to head out before their set, looking back over our shoulders several times wondering if we were making the right choice.
For our group, the biggest disappointment was missing Pavement, one of the sets we had been looking forward to most all day.
Saturday had started with some of the most punishing heat we have ever dealt with at a festival and ended with us cold, soaked, and heading for shelter. Somewhere in between, though, we found another run of sets that kept reinforcing the same thing Friday had already suggested: this was one heck of a weekend of music. And with the festival still able to close Saturday with its headliner despite the weather, we left looking ahead to Sunday, the festival day we had been most excited about before arriving in Atlanta.
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