Para leer en español: Cinco grandes momentos del Pitchfork Music Festival CDMX 2024
Over the course of six days, punks, e-girls, and club kids gathered at five venues across the Mexican capital for Pitchfork’s first festival in Latin America. Volcanic ash and hot temperatures enveloped the metropolis, but that didn’t hamper fans from getting their fill of post-rock, avant rap, and Detroit techno. Here are a few of the best performances we caught:
Rubio – Thursday, March 7, Foro Indie Rocks!
Songwriter and producer Rubio commanded the Indie Rocks! stage with a spectral versatility: One minute, her voice shivered in a horror-movie whisper; the next, she screeched like a banshee, her eyes rolling into the back of her head. Her talent as a multi-instrumentalist sparkled as she hopped between drum machines, electric guitars, and samplers, blasting the audience with twitchy garage breaks, dream-pop fuzz, and dirty dembow riddims. But the most remarkable part of her set was a moment of hushed intensity. During “La Especie,” a song from Rubio’s 2020 album, Mango Negro, the sound man passed her a lit sage stick, maraca, and feathers; she walked across the stage and shook the bundled items rhythmically, allowing the fragrant smoke to curl through the air. The purifying energy she brought to the room came as much from the pungent herb as it did from her own hypnotic stage presence.
Yeule - Friday, March 8, Frontón Bucareli
Yeule arrived for their performance in theatrical fashion, emerging with cartoonish eyebrows and Betty Boop hair. The 26-year-old noise pop musician’s set had all the wistful brokenness and emotional devastation that defined their triumphant 2023 album, Softscars. They switched between three guitars, emitting waves of corroded reverb, gently fingerpicking, and even using a cello bow to draw out distorted drones. The grungy excess of Yeule’s songs can be euphoric as well as doleful, and the crowd wasn’t shy about chanting and jumping along. Halfway through the set, Yeule demanded everyone in the room scream “I FUCKING LOVE MUSIC!”—a directive they dutifully followed.
Sky Ferreira - Friday, March 8, Frontón Bucareli
Sky Ferreira is notorious for showing up late, so everyone was prepared when a message appeared onscreen 45 minutes after her set time to announce that the elusive indie-sleaze siren had a sore throat and needed support from the audience to move forward with the show. In spite of her vocal issues, the frizzy-haired Ferreira landed her massive choruses with almost no strain at all. Between apologies, she stretched her vocals to execute beloved anthems like “You’re Not the One” and “24 Hours,” and even performed a new unnamed track. When the infamous perfectionist introduced her classic “Everything Is Embarrassing,” she quipped: “Very fitting.” Through it all, she exuded effortless rock-star cool, dressed in dark sunglasses and a shiny patent leather trench coat. It was on-brand, beguiling, and punk as fuck.
MNTY B2B Meilgaarden and DJ Holographic - Saturday, March 9, Fünk
A weekend in Mexico City wouldn’t be complete without a wild night at el antro. On Saturday evening, a parade of international clubgoers and locals shuffled into the glitzy basement club Fünk, located in the city’s Condesa neighborhood. Local stalwart MNTY and New York–based Meilgaarden won over the crowd with a B2B set even though it was still too early for real rave hours; assorted queer kids and American tourists milled about the bottle service area and bopped across the dancefloor as the pair spun Madonna and Björk remixes alongside a squelchy blend of acid techno and breakbeats. When Detroit’s DJ Holographic entered the neon-lit DJ booth around 1:30am, she brought the spirit of her hometown to the venue’s black marble floors, synthesizing thumping soulful house and icy disco with beatific results. The color-shifting lights and lasers that adorned the booth and the club walls—which reacted to changing drops and basslines—added a futurist edge to all the bliss.
Mabe Fratti - Sunday, March 11, Casa del Lago UNAM
The Guatemalan experimentalist Mabe Fratti can burrow into the darkest parts of human consciousness, but her music also possesses a luminous tranquility. On the last day of the festival, she brought that gift to the Casa del Lago UNAM in Mexico City’s famed Bosque de Chapultepec park, fronting a trio in an ornate gazebo a few feet away from the park’s lake. Fans sat on the grass and listened attentively as the cellist alternated between bowed dissonance and divinely plucked melodies. The songs bled into each other, conjuring a kind of dream state; people drifted through the lakewater on paddle boats and golden sun rays shone through the leaves of the tree canopy above the crowd. The scene put a bow on the whole festival, blessing the audience with a moment of much-needed serenity after a long week of raging.
