The Great Escape announce new Billboard UK Live stage plus 100+ further acts

Tuesday 4th March – ‘The Great Escape‘, the festival for new music, is delighted to announce a brand new partnership with leading music, charts and news outlet Billboard UK, featuring the launch of the inaugural Billboard UK Live stage at the 2025 edition of the Brighton festival. Headlining the showcase is Mercury Prize winning indie-rock four-piece English Teacher, with further exciting artists to be announced.

English Teacher (pic Sara-Louise Bowrey)

The festival has also revealed 100+ new additions to the 2025 line-up, including some of the most promising emerging acts from across the globe. Welcoming talent across a wide breadth of genres including indie, pop, electronic, rock, rap, R&B, folk, dance, and soul, the announcement features artists including Welly, The Bug Club, She’s In Parties, Nxdia, Tough Cookie, Home Counties, Greg Freeman, Adult DVD, and many more.

Today The Great Escape has also released individual day tickets and two-day (Friday and Saturday) tickets for purchase. For music fans unable to attend the full four-day weekend, these tickets give the perfect opportunity to sample some of the exciting acts on offer at this year’s festival whilst visiting the Brighton seaside for the day. Tickets are available to purchase now from HERE.

Synonymous with new music discovery and acting as a springboard for rising artists, The Great Escape is the festival for new music. Playing host to over 450 up-and-coming artists and hotly tipped talent across 35+ walkable venues, alongside the music industry-led TGE conference, the festival will kick off the 2025 season from 14th – 17th May in Brighton. Tickets for The Great Escape festival start from £81.24 and are on sale HERE.

Welly (pic Max Tollworthy), Baby’s Berserk (pic Sara-Louise Bowrey), Currls (pic Cherie Elody), Ideal Living (pic Sara-Louise Bowrey), Polite Bureaux (pic Petra Eujane) & She’s In Parties (pic Sara-Louise Bowrey)

ALTERNATIVE & INDIE

Flying the flag for alternative and indie music throughout the weekend, English Teacher will be joined by an abundance of emerging talents including Brighton-based energetic Britpop namesake band Welly, hazy shoegaze four-piece She’s In Parties, grunge-inspired Tough Cookie, indie-rock duo The Bug Club, dance-punk six-piece Home Counties, rambunctious indie four-piece Jagged Baptist Club, gritty Brooklyn storytellers TVOD, visual artist and experimental alt-pop composer Mazy Day, outlandish audio-visual act vgtbl.pl (Franek Warzywa & Mlody Budda), surf-tinged Korean indie-rockers Say Sue Me, Coventry alt-indie misfits FEET, alternative hip-hop-inspired indie duo Good Health Good Wealth, and Beijing alt-indie outfit Dabo Lang.

Further performances across the weekend will come from acoustic indie-rock singer-songwriter Greg Freeman, Gardens, an Austrian four-piece fusing indie-folk and garage-rock, wonky art-punk group Water Machine, Chinese alt-indie band Radio Mars, synth-pop six-piece Adult DVD, singer songwriter woody, Belgian singer-songwriter and producer J.Bernardt, classically trained songwriter Vraell, late-night dance-sleaze trio Baby’s Berserk, bolshy and brash garage-punk rabble-rousers The Velvet Hands,Viennese alt-indie dreamweaver KÄSSY, seven-piece Dutch indie-pop group Son Mieux, alluring shoegaze soloist Graywave and ethereal Japanese indie-rock two piece The fin..

Also confirmed to perform at the 2025 festival are The Rosadocs, 88 Miles, Paige Kennedy, Ray Silvers, big long sun, Ideal Living, Last Apollo, Louis Gardner, My First Time, The Rolling People, Fiona-Lee, Preoccupations, Scrounge, Bad Buddy, Holiday Ghosts, DoFlame, Alice Costelloe, Benjami Amaru and O’Phantom.

ELECTRONIC & DANCE

Fans of innovative electronica and floor-filling dance, fans can look forward to catching some of the genre’s most trailblazing new talents throughout the festival, with performances from Nigerian-Canadian electronic musician Debby Friday, broken beat-maker Polite Bureaux, Nairobi-based pop, hip-hop and electronic fusion KABEAUSHÉ, Mercury Prize-winning producer Mike Lindsay, Electro party-punk purveyor Jodie Langford and Iranian electronic dance act Ava Rasti.

Today’s line-up additions also include Korean electronic boundary-pusher Cifika, dance duo Nighticket, electronic innovator afromerm, eclectic pioneer Maria Uzor, Korean electro hip-hop fusion Hypnosis Therapy and London-India electronic act Priyaji.

GRIME, RAP & HIP-HOP

An array of vital new voices from the worlds of grime, rap and hip-hop will be showcased throughout the festival, with sets from Tay Jordan, a London-based lo-fi artist combining hip-hop with West Coast rap, award-winning poet, songwriter and visual artist Nadeem Din-Gabisi, esteemed spoken-word artist Joshua Idehen and Persian-meets-Western rapper CHAII.

JAZZ, R&B & SOUL

Fans of more soulful sounds will also be treated to sets from the very best emerging acts in jazz and R&B, as rising lyricist Laiconista, Nigerian alternative soul singer Tomi Owó, North London’s psychedelic jazz funk fusion trio Koteri,and Korean groove-maker Jacqui take to stages across the city throughout the festival.

POP

Fans looking for a dose of infectious pop melodies and sunny seaside rhythms will be able to catch a diverse range of rising singer-songwriters performing throughout the festival, with pop offerings from the likes of London-based singer, rapper and producer Miso Extra, sci-fi pop duo Lucy Dreams, melodic singer-songwriter Lily Lyons, heartfelt folk-pop artist Benjamin Steer, Northern Irish singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Lee Brady, grunge-pop songwriter Lonne Gunn, Australian pop storyteller Gordi, mandopop-rock band Chinese American Bear and Tokyo pop singer-songwriter Rikuto Fujimoto.

They will be joined by bilingual alt-pop artist Nxdia, magnetic singer-songwriter JON POPPII, The Voice Kids winner Sam WIlkinson, Canadian alt-pop musician Rich Aucoin, Dutch artist and composer Robin Kester, spellbinding singer songwriter Daisy Dooks, infectious Swiss pop artist Joya Marlenn, powerful Brighton songwriter Frances Mistry, Glasgow producer and multi-instrumentalist Rubie and Maleigh Zan, a rising pop act inspired by the underground house scene..

PUNK, ROCK & METAL

A selection of the finest new acts from the worlds of punk and metal will be flying the flag for rock music at this year’s festival, with heavier offerings from cutting-edge high-energy punk pioneer BEX, genre-bending post-hardcore band Post Profit, rising Brazilian punk-rock artist KAREN DIO, Shanghai punk-rock rebels Oh! Dirty Fingers, Finnish punk-metal powerhouse LUNA KILLS, sonic powerhouse duo CURRLS,Leeds-based queer alt-rockers Artio, otherworldly synth-rock duo Zetra and psychedelic street-punk trio Bones Ate Arfa. Further showcases will come from queer punk girl band COMIC SANS, progressive Middle Eastern metal band Lowen, pop-punk trio MOUTH CULTURE, Canadian rock band zouz, melodic French rockers Last Train and Brighton-based alternative supergroup VOWER.