LIVE REVIEW: Sunny Side Up Fest 2025

Manchester is overflowing with music; shops seem to use gig announcements for wallpaper, adverts for bass players are scattered around every vintage store, all pubs have a little backroom which whirs into action after 8pm. The Sunny Side Up Festival is simply a manifestation of this, hosted in two of Manchester’s most prestigious music venues, Gullivers and The Castle Hotel, which are nestled opposite each other in the Northern Quarter. By 3pm there are huddles of people outside these venues, scoffing meal deals in the knowledge that they won’t be leaving these venues until far into the night.

Photo Credit: Grace Walkden

Jangly Americana band Wyatt kicked off the day at Gullivers with smokey, whisky coloured tunes. They, self-confessed, haven’t named many of their songs, and so their set feels a little like flicking through a diary, jittery, scrawley writing, mentions of old tunes and new memories, completely void of context or narrative. There is something wonderfully worn about their songs; you get the feeling that lyrics were written on the back of dirtied envelopes in the middle of fields and riffs came to them round camp fires. Their set swings along like an old train, slowly letting the world unfurl before us, a perfect start to a day that could become your whole world.

Magnum Opus II are the first to grace the stage of The Castle Hotel. They feel like a collection that should be found in an antiques shop; a lead singer with raw, imposing vocals adorned in dramatic golden jewelry, a Post-Punk violin player, a swirly keyboard. Each song feels monumental, building chords on chords, crescendoing towards some unknown pleasure. Ther sound has hints of man/woman/chainsaw and Black Country, New Road, and with each tune you feel certain that the more chords they layer on top of their songs, the closer they are to musical greatness.

The wonderful thing about Sunny Side Up is that it spans the entire length of the Alternative music scene, like a playlist made for a first crush. Q.U.A.L.M.S are different from the rest of the lineup, and have a distinctively riot grrrl feel with Kathleen Hannah inspired cries of “girls to the front” and short, blunt songs about “nice guys”. The guitars are swirly, unpolished, but that’s the entire point; this band was built for impact, to take space and hold it. The vocals are a protest, they drag across the mic in frustration before flaring into loud, furious chants. By the end of the set, you feel as if they’ve ripped a little corner out of The Castle Hotel, given a space in the festival for anger, for power, a safe space for any who need it.

Photo Credit: Grace Walkden

The night then spirals into a series of ever-stranger bands, like a kaleidoscope that keeps being twisted to reveal ever more bizarre patterns. Bedroom Vacation are the first of these bands, a wall of sound through which is weaved experimental snippets, contorting their songs into wild, untamable creations. They layer instrument upon instrument, giving their sound the heaviness of DIVV, or Swervedriver, and yet they can’t be tied to one specific sound. Buried underneath the distortion is a scattering of experimental minds; a jittery bass player, a Geordie Greep guitarist, a synth player who spends the end of the set mushing guitars into the wall. The band is less of a band and more of a Jackson Pollock canvas, things are thrown at it until they stick, and it is a wonderful creation.

The penultimate band to grace the Sunny Side Up festival are Umarells, who flicker into view as if lit by candlelight. They play with the space in the room, finding the fuzzy, in-between spaces to lay their shimmery guitar and and skipping drum beats. There are elements of nostalgia, harking back to The Stone Roses with tunes like 'One More Day', and yet they lean into the modern dream pop revival with tunes like 'Closer' having the tragic yearning of Ethel Cain or Beach House. Their woozy, repetitive guitar and tumbling rhythms lulls the audience into such a trance that when they leave the stage, they feel more like an ancient, familiar folk tale than a real memory.

Formal Sppeedwear end the night in a dizzy dance party. Their jumpy vocals hop around syncopated rhythms, creating a wired, wonky, Talking Heads sound. Their set dances through genre after genre, dragging the audience through an exhilarating wash of sound. Burton has a distinctively post punk feel, tightly wound and swerving across the stage in an act of beautifully controlled chaos. The gothic swirls of 'A Dismount' shake in an Ian Curtis style, juxtaposed wonderfully with The Line which bounces through the room in a Get Down Services style. Little about the band is ever still, their music veers from side to side until the very end, throwing each note into space before waiting for it to drop. The set ends abruptly, all of these notes coming tumbling down onto a giddy audience, exhausted from dancing, buzzing with the feel of the festival.

The people spill out of Gullivers at 11 and, just for a moment, Manchester feels like the center of the universe. This is what Sunny Side Up does, it makes its little corner of the Northern Quatrer your whole world; the vintage shops and the bass players and the back rooms of pubs. The people are overflowing with music, and with more gigs on the horizon, this can only get more intense.