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Photo by Sophia Barkalakis
Whenever the announcement of the lineup to a major national festival that everyone is looking forward to is on the horizon, it always brings with it a gauntlet of predictions about who will be playing the festival, the chances of which always range from being sensible and perceptive to absolutely batty nuggets. This is especially true of the forthcoming Sasquatch! 2016 lineup rumor mill, where everyone is throwing around every musician under the sun’s name, from Joanna Newsom to Adele to Muse.
The lineup of a trendy, big-name festival like Sasquatch! is always pretty easy to predict compared to a festival like Bumbershoot, which seems to assemble its big headliners by putting the names of a bunch of bands that were popular at one point in history on a dart board and booking whichever names they happen to hit with darts regardless of their status and relevance in today’s popular music landscape. Sasquatch!’s lineups tend to be geared towards the contemporary taste of the younger alternative/indie crowd, with the occasional nod to the more middle-aged rock demographic, and a respectable emphasis on local bands as well. Today I’m gonna add to the meaningless, ephemeral discussion of who may play Sasquatch! 2016, with NorthWest Music Scene’s Totally Not Arbitrary and Spectulative Sasquatch! 2016 Predictions, curated by me and a handful of other contributors to the site.
We’ll get the obvious one out of the way first. Yes, it is very likely that LCD Soundsystem will shut up and play Sasquatch! when you consider that the band is reuniting for a big festival tour, and was officially confirmed for headlining this year’s Coachella very recently. If they’re announced, then they’ll probably a first-row headliner, which wouldn’t be a terrible pass-seller for the festival. This would be a pretty freakin’ sweet one for them to announce.
One name we’re very surprised no other publications are predicting to also be a first-row headliner for the festival is The Cure. When Robert Smith and co. announced their North American tour throughout 2016, a Washington date was suspiciously missing from the lineup, but there was a Vancouver, B.C. date announced, happening after a six-day break in the tour, and incidentally the day after the last day of Sasquatch! While we could be dead wrong on this, it seems like it’d be a pretty big coincidence if they didn’t play the festival, along with their tour opener The Twilight Sad.
Every year Sasquatch! does a pretty good job of peppering their lineup with nationally-renowned Pacific Northwest favorites, especially 2015, which had almost too many to count – Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists – and for this year, we’re gonna throw our hat in the ring and say Pearl Jam will be a first-row header in 2016. We don’t have any evidence to back this prediction up, but Pearl Jam would be a great fit for the massive main stage, and Sasquatch! already blew their load with Soundgarden headlining their cancelled second weekend of 2014, so it only makes sense. Also, considering how popular they still are, and how their forthcoming LP is probably going to kill it on Top 40 radio, we’re also gonna say Macklemore & Ryan Lewis will probably be there too; their new album will likely be out by late May of this year. Other contemporary names like Fleet Foxes, Robert DeLong or The Head and the Heart wouldn’t be too surprising, and would work nicely on the bill.
A lot of booked acts for festivals like this are acts whose material recently received mass praise from the popular indie/underground music press, which is why it wouldn’t be too surprising to see names like Vince Staples, Baroness, Grimes, Pusha T (whose new album is projected for a Spring release date), Jamie xx, Hop Along, or even Neon Indian occupy a good amount of this lineup. More polarized names with nice marquee value, like Big Grams or Travis Scott, should also be expected to show up here too. Given indie media’s undying, codependent love for them, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Young Thug and/or Future somewhere near the top of this lineup too.
As for the smaller, more locally-known Washington acts, you can usually guess all the bands they’ll pad out the bottom of the lineup with from a mile away – Cataldo, Sisters, Smokey Brights, etc. – but I’d personally love to see local love for Manatee Commune, One Above Below None, The Flavr Blue, Lemolo, The Fame Riot, Youryoungbody, Mutiny Mutiny, and Chastity Belt.
A band that is likely to be on the festival circuit this year, that would really sell a fuck-load of festival passes for Sasquatch! is Vampire Weekend, a name I’d like to see on the first or second row not just because they’re my favorite indie rock band of this generation, but because it’s been a goddamn long time since they’ve done anything noteworthy that’s music-related. And since Ezra Koenig promises Vampire Weekend-related things in 2016, could this mean a new Vampire Weekend album released in the first half of this year, followed by a festival tour? I can feel it comin’…
And finally, it’s become a Sasquatch! tradition at this point to really hit hard with a big name that’s been around for a long time, a name that even the most average of average Joe’s will read and have watering mouths over, whether it’s Robert Plant, Beck, or the Foo Fighters. They’re usually unpredictable and really hard to call, but this year I’ve narrowed it down to two names, aside from The Cure, who would probably fit this role really well on their own. I think it’ll either be Kate Bush, to really strike while the iron’s hot after she announced her first shows in several decades last year, or David Bowie, who would be a pretty amazing name to have as a main headliner, and an artist who isn’t that hard to see doing a festival tour considering how his hotly-anticipated album Blackstar comes out in three days.
But at the end of the day, this is all just speculation and presumption, and regardless of how many of these predictions we get right or horribly wrong, we’re sure the Sasquatch! 2016 lineup is going to turn out to be just as solid and appealing as it always is. At least you can always count on Sasquatch! to not book Calvin Harris as a large-text main headliner.
Let us know who your predictions are for this year’s Sasquatch! festival. You can read our review of Sasquatch! 2015 here, and read our interviews with Milky Chance and Of Monsters of Men.
