After everything Saturday threw at us, Sunday began somewhere much safer: Atlanta Breakfast Club.
A little peach cobbler felt like a pretty solid recovery plan after a day that was full of great music, but filled with all manner of summer weather challenges. With a solid base layer for the day, we headed back to Piedmont Park for the final day of Shaky Knees.
Sunday was the day we had been looking forward to most before arriving in Atlanta. The headlining Gorillaz set was the focus of our anticipation, but the schedule gave us little time to ease our way up to it.
Coheed and Cambria
Coheed and Cambria gave us our first taste of music for the day. We only caught a few songs before we let a scheduling conflict win, but even a short stop was enough to take in the band’s enormous prog-rock sound and Claudio Sanchez’s instantly recognizable voice.
More than two decades into their career, Coheed remains one of rock’s stranger success stories, building much of their catalog around the sprawling sci-fi universe of The Amory Wars. Their latest album, The Father of Make Believe, still lives partly inside that world while bringing more of Sanchez’s own life into the story.
Even in a short visit, it was easy to see why the band has built such a devoted following around a sound and story that are completely their own.
BIG SPECIAL
BIG SPECIAL were next, a Birmingham duo made up of Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney whose music pulls together working-class frustration, dark wit, tenderness, and plenty of fury.
Their set pulled from both 2024’s POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES and 2025’s NATIONAL AVERAGE, including “SHITHOUSE,” “TREES,” “SHOP MUSIC.,” and “PROFESSIONALS.” The mix gave a pretty good introduction to what BIG SPECIAL do well, moving between working-class frustration, dry wit, vulnerability, and plenty of noise.
The duo have already moved on again with the recent O’JOY! EP, a collection they describe as “the fallen parts” of their first two records, giving us even more to dig into after the festival.
Jet
Then came one of Sunday’s more painful schedule decisions. Jet directly opposite OK Go…
Jet won out, and once we made that choice, we stayed for the full set.
The Australian rock band exploded onto the scene with 2003’s Get Born, an album that gave the world “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” “Rollover D.J.,” “Look What You’ve Done,” and “Cold Hard Bitch.” More than 20 years later, those songs still carry a huge amount of recognition.
What made the Shaky Knees set work was that Jet did not play like a band simply going through those familiar motions.
The heat was back, though thankfully not quite at Saturday’s level, and the band matched it with a loud, loose set that was simply a lot of fun. “Look What You’ve Done,” “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” “Rollover D.J.,” and “Cold Hard Bitch” all showed up, along with an AC/DC cover of “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll).”
There was obviously plenty of nostalgia involved, but Jet attacked the whole thing hard enough that it felt celebratory instead of stale.
Santigold
Santigold was up next, and the set was just fun to watch. Between the dancing, the movement, and songs like “L.E.S. Artistes,” “Disparate Youth,” “Creator,” and “Big Mouth,” there was always something happening onstage.
After the straight-ahead rock of Jet, it was another reminder of just how far Sunday’s lineup was willing to jump between sounds.
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
The nostalgia continued with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and this time Shaky Knees took us straight into a collection of songs that have been part of hip-hop culture for decades.
“Thuggish Ruggish Bone,” “East 1999,” “1st of tha Month,” “Tha Crossroads,” and “Foe tha Love of $” all made appearances, along with nods to Eazy-E and 2Pac.
More than anything, though, it was just fun hearing those harmonies and rapid-fire verses carried across a festival field by a crowd that had known many of the songs for years.
Wu-Tang Clan
From Bone Thugs, we headed into another full set from Wu-Tang Clan.
At that point, Sunday had developed a pretty serious nostalgic streak, but it never felt like we were simply checking off names from the past. Wu-Tang still brought the kind of presence you expect when that many unmistakable voices and personalities share a stage.
For a day that had already moved through prog rock, British post-punk, garage rock, art-pop, and melodic hip-hop, standing in a field watching Wu-Tang Clan somehow made perfect sense.
And then Sunday changed directions again.
LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem might have been the easiest set of the day to simply fall into.
Songs like “Someone Great,” “North American Scum,” “Dance Yrself Clean,” and “All My Friends” gave the crowd plenty of familiar moments, but the performance never felt like a collection of songs being checked off a list. It felt more like one long excuse for everyone to keep moving.
By that point in the evening, the nostalgia that had run through so much of Sunday had turned into something looser. The band sounded great, the crowd was completely into it, and the whole field seemed ready to dance through the final hours of Shaky Knees.
It was simply one of the most fun sets of the weekend.
Gorillaz
But Gorillaz were the band we had come all this way to see.
Thankfully, they delivered.
The band sounded fantastic, the stage production was enormous, and the crowd seemed almost perfectly divided between people who wanted to rock and people who wanted to dance. Somehow, both groups got exactly what they wanted.
The set reached across Gorillaz’s catalog, moving through “Tomorrow Comes Today,” “19-2000,” “Rhinestone Eyes,” and “On Melancholy Hill” before loading the later stretch with “Stylo,” “Kids With Guns,” “Feel Good Inc.,” “Dirty Harry,” and “Clint Eastwood.”
A steady run of guests made the show feel even bigger. Kara Jackson, 6LACK, DRAM, EarthGang, Bootie Brown, and Del the Funky Homosapien all smoothly joined at different points without turning the set into a parade of interruptions.
Instead, the whole thing felt built for exactly this setting.
After spending much of the weekend waiting for Gorillaz, getting a closing set that sounded this good and looked this big was about all we could have asked for.
And with that, our first year covering Shaky Knees for East of 8th was done.
We came into Atlanta expecting a good weekend of music. Somehow, Shaky Knees still managed to exceed those expectations.
The Strokes and Gorillaz made for superb bookends. Several bands we already knew gave us some of the best sets we have seen from them. A few artists we knew very little about sent us home ready to dig much deeper into their catalogs.
We also survived some of the hottest festival weather we can remember, a full evacuation, a dramatic temperature drop, and enough rain to learn that apparently you can always get a little wetter.
Through all of it, the music never let us down.
After five trips to Shaky Knees and our first one covering it for the blog, that feels like a pretty good way to leave Atlanta.
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