Notes from the field as the idyllic Brecon Beacons festival returns for its rapturous 2025 edition.

It’s hard not to spend a weekend at Green Man without leaving profoundly inspired, with a heart achingly full. Set in the gorgeous surroundings of the Brecon Beacons in South Wales, the festival offers a lovingly curated celebration of music, comedy, film, science and arts, bringing together people of all ages in a joyous haven of creativity and silliness. Above all, of course, it is the festival’s typically on-the-pulse line-up that gets us at Hard of Hearing. Here is what we saw and heard over the weekend…

Following a traffic-hampered journey packed with a fair few ‘Are we there yet’s?’, the golden hour of the mountains embraced us on our arrival on Thursday afternoon. The stony earth embraces our frustrations too as we struggle to push flimsy tent pegs into the ground, while the distant hum of W.H. Lung’s ‘Inspiration’ provides, erm… inspiration. For the blessing of no rain hitting us across the weekend, the trade-off is an air lightly flecked with an ever-gathering dust kicked up by mosh-pits and the general festival throng.

Settled in at last, first beer firmly in hand, Welsh trio Triswch y Fenywod (which translates as ‘The Sadness of Women’) provided a sombre greeting. Mingling classic 80s 4AD aesthetics with Nico-esque discordant folk drones, If Green Man was a religious cult, these would be our purifying hymns.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, band of the moment Kneecap are this weekend’s de facto curtain raiser. Drawing a huge crowd to the Far Out end, chants of ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Get your Brits out’ rise above stomping breakbeats, pounding techno, and calls to open up the moshpit.  Invited on stage is Welsh Cafe owner Helen Wilson, who infamously live-streamed the band’s Glastonbury set which, as the band don’t hesitate to tell us, the BBC refused to show. All in all, it’s rousing, rebellious, and fiendishly hedonistic.

Closing the Thursday are Factory Floor. With this year signalling a welcome return to the musical world after an extended hiatus, their gorgeous electronic abstractions, and cornucopia of on-stage drums and percussion keep the party rolling.

Dusting ourselves down for Friday, the only place to begin was at the Mountain Stage, opened by Green Man Rising 2025 winners wing!. Hitherto only realised in small venues, the setting of the mountain stage, baked in weekend’s fiercest sun, turns their shadowy trip-hop/post-rock excursions into genuine skyscrapers – instrumental monoliths rising up to the heavens, statuesque, poetic and proud.

The rest of the afternoon has us hopping from stage to stage: a glimpse of Robin Kester’s groove-rich psych-rock set closer here, a gander at Silver Gore rocking their new banger ‘All the Good Men’ there; thick-voiced rapper MIKE’s soft, dub-laced, disco-rich hip-hop here; Sex Week’s swishing moss-green hair and glistening, grunging dream-pop there. We are cooking, literally and spiritually, as we get into our rhythm.

One of the main takeaways from this year’s festival is the proliferation of mesmerising new folk artists, the lineup adorned by adherents of various shades and colours. The first of these, Naima Bock, performing to the tune of our chomping on pesto-pocked pizzas, offers up gorgeous fiddling folk-rock beauty. The second, stateside duo @, are truly spectacular. With the sparsity of two voices, two guitars, and the flex of their flutes, clarinets and a trumpet sound made by lips alone, their songs hold extraordinary power and ring in our ears long after the set’s conclusion.

Amping things up, Panda Bear, aka the solo project of Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox, deliver what many confidently confirm as one of the weekend’s highest moments. Totally backlit, eccentric visuals – among them cantering pink dogs and masses of middle figure emojis – define a set that’s slow and measured, yet so thwomping and mind-fucking too. His voice is a gift, and the second tune ‘Defence’ has us melting at its blushes.

Headliners Wet Leg heroically flex their muscles and stomp through hit after hit after hit after hit, getting the whole arena literally screaming – with more than a few realising they can recall more lyrics than they thought. Then Detroit ghetto-tech prankers HiTech crown the evening. Heaving their hulking frames into the fray of chaotic mosh-pits and haphazard crowd surfs, there’s more lyrics about ‘booty’ and ‘ass’ per square inch of music than can scarcely be believed. The cognac flows on stage and the whole place is rocking.

Waking up to Saturday, Sarah Meth lays down the law with her swaggering and cutthroat love-bitten ballads. Flitting from grunge-y workouts to the charmed ‘Sister You Said’, it’s music that leaves in it’s a wake a pile of broken hearts and roses. There’s more of that aforementioned resurgent folk too. Nodding to the genre’s past, Broadside Hacks take over the main stage to present a Bob Dylan tribute. Spitzer Space Telescope and Clara Mann deliver sumptuous duets, before a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, featuring members of The New Eves, Skydaddy, The Cindys and Daisy Rickman’s band, arrive to playful shouts of ‘Judas’ before rattling through some of Dylan’s shambling 60s rock classics. Nodding to folk’s future on the other hand, Manchester’s Truthpaste deliver an uplifting set of jigging bops, their ticking drum machines, saxophones, violins, and whimsical melodies received by rapturous applause.

As the first energies of the day start to dwindle, it turns out all we need to set ourselves right is an onion bhaji salad, a diet coke, and a shot of RIP Magic to jolt us back into wakefulness. The magic buzzsaw synth of opener ‘Loot’ is explosive and unforgettable. Vocalist Marco Pini is up for this, kick jumping and skirmishing across the stage with freaked purpose. YHWH Nailgun are up for this too. The band ambles onto the stage, and singer Zack Borzone warms up with hardcore yoga moves, the crowd looking on in heated anticipation. And then they let it rip. All it takes is the most abstract guitar screech for the crowd to cheer the forthcoming song and brace themselves for more to come. To screams of “Fountain of Pain” and rollicking roto-toms, the twitching, moshing throng sends puffs of dust spiralling into the air. The visage of Zacj standing sweaty, triumphant and panting, gazing over the crowd, the scene of his conquest, is an icon for the weird achievement and catharsis that only the gruel of a musical festival can bring.

Next, it’s no surprise that the crowd is backing up over the hill for Westside Cowboy. With a huge future undoubtedly in store, the quartet swagger on stage soundtracked by ‘Tumblin’ Dice’ by The Rolling Stones and surge through seriously joyful and belted tunes, melding blistering pop-punk with deeply affectionate indie charm.

For a change of pace, we catch Daisy Rickman and her band back at the Walled Garden droning through an enchanting version of The Velvet Underground’s classic ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, before she’s switches to drums and rattles out a krauty, cosmic jam, complete with sweeping cellos and synthetic swells. It’s folk and psychedelic rock dancing together in heavenly force.

While CMAT can be heard delivering her charismatic charms on the main stage in the distance. We’re here at the Walled Garden to see what caroline are up to. Churning through cuts from one of this year’s stand-out albums, ‘caroline 2’, it’s a set of elliptical experimentalism and colossal post-rock. A delicate, highly sensitive operation, vulnerable to any minute shift in the sonic climate, it’s hard not to be a little stressed-out watching them, as they’re constantly looking to tweak and calibrate the balance and admit they can hardly hear themselves on stage. Their artistic ambitions are sky high, but when it works, it’s unbelievable and there’s hardly anything that can match it.

With Saturday night ending in a blast of Black Fondu’s maddening and athletic electro-glitch abrasions, and Underworld’s ginormous set of raving brilliance, so astonishingly transcendent that this writer was left basically non-verbal for 30 minutes swilling in psychic filth, it’s succour indeed, when Sunday comes, to have Natalie Wildgoose serenade the Rising Stage with her piano-led folk ballads. Unreleased cut ‘In The North’ is a moving reflection of grief, that falls as serenely as a solitary falling leaf and is special to be a witness to.

Heading to the Far Out tent, grinning Texan trio Being Dead keep morale flying high – their matching bright red attire bringing a vibrancy and colour commensurate with their joyous jangle-pop and smiling harmonies. More moody and mysterious, but no less captivating, Good Sad Happy Bad say this is the last show of their tour, and how glad we are to be able to catch their hypnotic rendition of cuts from last year’s wonderful album ‘All Kinds of Days’.

It’s not often that the Walled Garden stage reaches capacity and has to be shut down, but Australian quartet Folk Bitch Trio do just that. Coming on stage waving a bottle of suncream to the crowd – “we didn’t expect our hottest gig to be in Wales”, they joke – their 45-minute set flies by in a rush of vocal power and songwriting brilliance. It’s magic. Beth Gibbons sundown set is equally so. Stateliness personified, bowed bass guitars and swooping violins define a haunting set of baroque-rock brilliance. It’s a special moment when she nods her Portishead days and drops their classic ‘Glory Box’.

Closing off the weekend, we head to the Popperz takeover at Round The Twist – Tatyana strokes a golden harp and delivers sumptuous 00s-pop-referencing melodies over chuntering deep-house. Then, Pearl2’s 90s-style trip-hop gnarliness elicits a few final ‘stank faces’ before the Green Man himself is burnt, and all our dreams and hopes spark up into the night sky, for another year.