Wild Paths Norwich: sacred spaces, sweat, and shoegaze unite on Days 2 and 3 of 2025 festival - live review
Three days of sound, chaos and communion; with Norwich itself as the main act ⚡
In my write-up of Wild Paths’ first full opening day, I talked about the rituals of the gig – the half-hour purgatory before the first chord, the shuffle towards the stage, the nods between strangers who will never meet again but know they’ve seen something.
Festivals like this thrive on those details, the repetition and rhythm of moving between venues and crowds until the city itself begins to pulse with sound.
Day 1 gave us a taste of Wild Paths’ trademark weirdness: the polite dissonance of watching distortion pedals stomped inside a hotel function room more accustomed to retirement luncheons, and a church echoing with Getdown Services’ gleefully sacrilegious twit-hop.
Day 2
But Day 2 brought something else entirely, that strange déjà vu you get on the second day of a festival, when you return to the same rooms and bars but they already feel rewritten by the night before.
Being a Norwich local, I’m one of the lucky ones: home turf advantage. At 5pm, I downed tools, power-walked to the nearest shop for provisions, and joined the city’s slow migration towards music.
First stop: Voodoo Daddy’s for Palm, a band already sweating before the first chorus. One member had gone “taps aff” before sundown (a bold move in this climate) for a set of wiry riffs and unhinged grins, the only real peril being that their pogoing bassist might smash his skull on the newly installed, rather sinister AC unit looming above the stage.
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Eades followed, rolling out a sound that felt like Pavement if they’d grown up on cheap bourbon instead of irony; slacker-rock threaded through Americana.
Surely it was only a coincidence then that at one point I found myself staring at the guitarist, wondering if he’d accidentally wandered out of a Mark Ibold lookalike competition...
Next stop: St Peter Parmentergate a skate-park-church-gig-venue hybrid just a few steps from my front door.
(Truly, Norwich living at its finest; a few paces from the pews and I’m back in my flat between bands with a cold beer and ringing ears before the next act.)
First up were Piss, a throwaway name that undersells how raw and gut-level affecting they were. Frontwoman Cara Macdonald stalked the stage like Lydia Lunch trapped inside a séance, screaming her way through trauma and transcendence alike.
One slower song left me blinking back tears while stood on a quarter-pipe. Brutal and beautiful and utterly unforgettable.
Then came Oi Nah, the kind of local chaos agents every city deserves. Their set tested the church’s acoustics, a recurring theme across the weekend as the loudest bands got funnelled into Norwich’s most echo-prone venue. You could practically hear the stained glass begging for mercy.
Over at Voodoo Daddy’s Cucamaras arrived looking like the weekend’s designated buzz band, all shiny guitars and perfectly practiced scowls.
They’ve clearly got industry eyes on them (vocalist Oliver Bowley even joked about the “break for crowd banter” markers in their setlist), but many songs landed, hinting at a band with something to say rather than something to sell.
Day 3
Saturday felt like the festival’s proper marathon, with bands on all day, and I dragged myself up Space Studios’ tiled stairs, nursing a hangover like a wound, to find Dog at The Opera already in full dream-reverb bloom.
Their Slowdive-by-way-of-Sub-Pop drone shook the dust off the morning and, mercifully, my head. At Voodoo Daddy’s, Amourette channelled Elastica into giddy, grinning pop-punk, then it was back to St Peter’s for a full day of glorious racket.
Birdwitch churned out riffs like tectonic plates colliding, while 2nd Location took hardcore’s feral energy and threw it into breakdowns so heavy I forgot my doctor’s recent warning about “avoiding impact activities.”
Then came Kulk, a two-piece who make enough noise to frighten the clergy two parishes over. Their doom-laden drone threatened to shake the stained glass right out of its frame.
At that point, I needed a palette cleanser, which arrived in the form of ‘Scustin, Ireland’s premier funk-pop oddballs. Within minutes, I was onstage, wearing a Matt Damon mask and dancing to a song about hanging out with the actor in a field.
Set closer, ‘Don’t Put Blackcurrant in That Pint of Guinness’, might be the greatest public service announcement ever committed to melody...
Adult DVD pulled the festival’s first true sell-out crowd, with synths, sweat, and mass movement in a room that could barely contain either.
Then finally, Norwich heroes Other Half closed out the weekend back at St Peter’s, delivering a communal, cathartic wall of sound that felt like a homecoming.
Wild Paths 2025 might not have had the biggest names, but it didn’t need them. It had the city itself, its pubs, churches, and basement dives humming with noise and laughter. Here’s hoping it returns next year.