AVA Festival have announced the first fave of acts and speakers for their 2025 edition. Check out more information below.
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The three-day event is returning for its eighth year and is set to take place in venues across London, including The British Library and The Standard, between March 20-22.
During the daytime, there will be a series of lectures, talks and networking events, with appearances from FKA Twigs, Jarvis Cocker, Munroe Bergdorf, Marcel Dettman, Annie Mac, Jayda G, Tony Andrews, Nonotak and No Tags Podcast, with more to be announced.
Then, the night programme will feature club shows at HERE @ Outernet and EARTH Hackney, with performances from Erika de Casier, Kojaque and Mechatok.
You can see the full line-up below, and sign up to access tickets here.
FKA Twigs will feature in a live recording of the Resident Advisor Exchange podcast at the British Library, while Jarvis Cocker is set to deliver a special climate-themed lecture titled “Biophobia” in association with EarthPercent.
AVA first ran in 2017 and has previously hosted the likes of Brian Eno, Charli xcx, Laurent Garnier, Bicep, Orbital, Joy Orbison and Irvine Welsh.
In other news, FKA Twigs is set to release ‘Eusexua’, the long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s ‘Magdalene’ on January 24 2025 via Young (available for pre-order here).
So far, she’s shared three tastes of the record. In September she dropped the album’s title track, which came alongside a Jordan Hemingway-directed music video, shortly followed by ‘Perfect Strangers’, which featured cameos from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Yves Tumor.
Most recently, she released the avant-garde single ‘Drums Of Death’ featuring Koreless.
‘Eusexua’ came in at 21 in NME‘s 50 Best Songs of 2024 list, with the song heralded as “an astonishing, delicate take on techno.”
Elsewhere, Cocker has been fuelling rumours about new material from Pulp in recent months, after he was recently spotted in Walthamstow by a fan, and reportedly told them that the band were heading “back in the studio”.
That took place just days after Pulp performed at Flow Festival 2024 and used their set to debut a new song titled ‘A Sunset’, which was co-written by Richard Hawley.
Before then, the vocalist spoke to NME and suggested the song could be officially released at some point, as well as confirming Pulp’s touring plans for 2025. The band will perform their first dates of the year in January at Japan’s Rockin’ On Sonic festival alongside Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, The Lemon Twigs and Wednesday, among others.
Pulp’s last full-length release was 2001’s ‘We Love Life‘. In a three-star review of the LP, NME described the record as “a grandiose, symphonic affair buoyed by succinct orchestration and white-light choral interludes”. It added: “At times, the music really sparkles as it soars above Cocker’s bleakly-intoned spoken-word meditations.”
