“This is a song about looking at this beautiful sea,” said Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring before the band launched into “A Dream of You and Me,” Friday night at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival. Strictly speaking, that wasn’t really true, but with the Mediterranean just a stone’s throw away, could you blame him for wanting to adapt his catalog to fit the occasion?
Primavera Sound, now in its 14th year, tends to inspire that kind of reverie from performers and attendees alike. With as many as a dozen stages running simultaneously and an attendance of some 50,000 people a day, by all rights it should feel far more hectic. Chalk it up to the curation, the crowd, or simply the location, but Primavera is one of the most welcoming, easy-to-navigate mega-fests you’re likely to find. And with three nights of dusk-to-dawn programming that ran from the Pixies to Kendrick Lamar to Jamie xx to Caetano Veloso to Demdike Stare to Dev Hynes, it’s certainly one of the most diverse. Here are SPIN’s best photographs from the event. (For a detailed recap, don’t miss The 10 Best Things We Saw at Primavera Sound 2014.)
