Radar Festival Announces First Wave Of Bands For New Dates In 2025

Festival co-founder Catherine Jackson-Smith comments:

"We’re hitting the ground running with Carpenter Brut’s only UK performance in 2025 as our first headliner announcement. They’re a band that we’ve admired for a long time and their production combined with the mammoth effort that they put into making a special, one-off event is something that aligns exactly with what we want for our statement sets! Our first announcement is a solid mix of fresh new music that we know our RADAR community will love plus some familiar faces, rising up the ranks and showing everyone why they’ve become such firm favourites.

"This is only the beginning and we can’t wait to share more of our plans with the RADAR community as RADAR 5.0 starts to take shape properly."

Alongside the acts announced, RADAR's commitment to a musical and gaming paradise continues: their music & gaming market will return. Expected to be wowed by a retro arcade, the best new instruments and music tech, and many more besides.

Also demonstrating their commitment to new bands, RADAR will continue to donate a portion of ticket sales proceeds to Music Venue Trust, in order to support grassroots music venues.

RADAR - the UK's most exciting new progressive music festival - moved to Manchester for its 2023 edition, the third iteration of the festival.

RADAR pride themselves on providing a first home for the best international artists - previous years have seen Dirty Loops' (2022) and The Callous Daoboys' (2023) first UK shows.

Joining the list were RADAR 2024's Friday headliners - synth royalty The Midnight, making their UK festival debut. Accompanying them were Saturday headliners TesseracT, as the UK prog metal titans delivered a special War Of Being album set. Finally, closing the festival on Sunday modern progressive titans Leprous performed a world-first live, by request fan set.

RADAR 2023 saw Friday headliners Sleep Token joining Periphery (Sunday) and Igorrr (Saturday) among a host of the best from the UK progressive underground and globally.

RADAR capped their intensely impressive 2022 by winning the Best New Festival Award at the UK Festival Awards on 6th December in Manchester, and were shortlisted for Best Small Festival and Best Metropolitan Festival at 2023's UK Festival Awards.

RADAR are again shortlisted for Best Small Festival and Best Metropolitan Festival at this year's UK Festival Awards.

With their mixture of international talent and confirmed homegrown success, RADAR Festival has already positioned themselves as a champion of forward-thinking guitar-led progressive music. No genre boundaries, welcome to all, RADAR Festival was launched in 2019 to acclaim, with performances from Animals As Leaders, Agent Fresco, Rolo Tomassi, among others. Following the COVID hiatus, RADAR Festival 2022 expanded to three days with triumphant appearances from Leprous, Haken, Dirty Loops, Plini, Conjurer, Soen and more.

RADAR Festival is all about pushing boundaries - this year introducing fresh genres to the lineup and stages - and this is just the beginning.