For nearly 20 years, Brighton’s The Great Escape has been a proving ground for emerging talent, new acts from around the world gathering by the sea for what is often dubbed the British equivalent of SXSW. The multi-venue festival has helped launch the careers of many now-big names in the past, from HAIM to Aitch, Sigrid to Sunflower Bean, always offering up an unmissable, sprawling line-up full of discoveries waiting to be made.
The 2025 edition was no different. Make it through the usual chaos of queues and clashes, and you are rewarded with performances from nearly every spot on the genre spectrum, unassuming newcomers becoming surprise highlights, and a notes app full of artists to dive deeper into once the madness is over. Here are the nine best acts NME saw at The Great Escape 2025 to add to your list now.
The nine best new acts from The Great Escape 2025
Chloe Qisha
Recent NME Cover artist Chloe Qisha is a star. You don’t need to witness her Great Escape set to know that, but her impeccable performance to a packed out Patterns drives that fact home, and then some. If you’re lucky enough to cram into one of the busiest, buzziest gigs of the whole festival, then inside you’ll witness pure pop magic delivered by an artist in complete control.
READ MORE: Meet Chloe Qisha, your next main pop girl: “I’ve never envisioned a glass ceiling”
Between songs, Qisha holds court in the smoky, sticky basement venue, nonchalantly acknowledging that writing about sex is “very on brand” before a funky ‘Sex, Drugs & Existential Dread’ or celebrating the release of her second EP ‘Modern Romance’ the same day with the quiet confidence of a far more seasoned pro. What matters most, though, are the performances themselves, and pop’s coolest new star excels, strutting through the shimmering ‘A-Game’ and the perfectly addictive ‘I Lied, I’m Sorry’ with transfixing precision.
DellaXOZ
Thanks to our phones, you can’t even avoid the pitfalls of modern dating when you’re in the sanctuary of a music festival anymore. Luckily, though, DellaXOZ’s set at Dalton’s offers something of a salve via fizzing indie songs that are as bruising as they are dreamy. She dedicates a couple of those tracks to people dealing with specific romantic situations, like the crushing ‘UnHinged’ and the dating app hellscape it half takes its name from. The Bolton musician has already earned a co-sign from SZA, and her winningly sweet performance makes it clear why. DellaXOZ is giving relatable, relishable takes on modern life for all of us in the trenches.
Florence Road
The chatter around Florence Road is swelling at a rapid rate right now, and for good reason. The handful of singles the Irish four-piece have put out so far this year are some of the most fully formed indie-rock tracks to come from a new act in recent memory – overflowing with confidence and an innate knack for big songwriting.
Now, though, they have to prove themselves on the live stage. Prior to their Great Escape performance, the Wicklow band had only a handful of gigs under their belt, but that doesn’t stop them from making an early bid for one of the festival’s highlights. Singer and guitarist Lily Aron has undeniable star power as she and her bandmates meld the atmospheric indie of Wolf Alice and the rumbling rock riffs of Queens Of The Stone Age on ‘Figure It Out’, while ‘Heavy’’s anthemic chorus is destined to be yelled back at them at festivals to come.
Max Baby
In the dark confines of Dust on Friday night, Max Baby’s noirish new wave serves as the perfect pre-game for a big night ahead. ‘Trouble’ creeps with an illicit, lust-filled sexiness, the Parisian artist commanding his voice from purred lines to raspy bellows, while ‘Nothing Ever Changes’ teeters and totters beneath him like it’s already several pints deep. The spectre of Julian Casablancas’ influence looms from time to time, particularly in Baby’s on-stage mannerisms, but this is a thrilling introduction to an artist stepping into the spotlight after time spent working with the likes of Drugdealer and Weyes Blood.
Nadia Kadek
It’s rare for an act to stun a room into silence at a festival like The Great Escape, but British-Indonesian singer-songwriter Nadia Kadek manages to do just that. She’s on slightly friendlier turf than most, playing a showcase for her new label home of Transgressive, but you get the sense her poignant storytelling would be up to the challenge elsewhere, too. ‘Fathers’ is the emotional highlight of a moving and exciting set, the 22-year-old sharing a sharp, sensitive insight into her experience growing up mixed-race in sleepy Norfolk. Although yet to officially release music, there’s plenty of promise in this captivating newcomer.
Sex Mask
Wry Gray, frontman of Melbourne punks Sex Mask, prowls the Patterns stage like a caged animal, shirtless, chest glistening with sweat, threatening to burst out of his confines every time he half climbs the barrier in front of him. Behind him and to his right, drummer Vicente Moncada and guitarist Kaya Martin form a tight, forceful foundation for him to spin out from. Sometimes, that base is pulverising and punishing, at others melodic and lighter or, as on ‘Birds’, a combination of the two. Gray’s wide-boy, half-rapped drawl sometimes recalls Jamie T, while echoes of Interpol, The Strokes and Suicide cushion him. The results are intoxicating, cementing Sex Mask as a band to get behind now.
Silver Gore
We’re calling it now. ‘A Scar’s Length’ is going to be one of the year’s biggest earworms in the alternative world. It’s one of the brightest moments of London duo Silver Gore’s Thursday night set, Ava Gore’s cheery falsetto as she sings “I haven’t listened to a song since 2021”, sprinkling magic dust over its twee folk leanings and glitchy electronics. The rest of the set is just as fun, whether in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs-go-electronica of ‘All The Good Men’ or the explosive, metamorphic ‘Forever’.
The Itch
Seeing The Itch at any other time than in the middle of the night would likely feel like a missed opportunity. Core duo Simon Tyrie and Georgia Hardy’s (plus an additional two live members) take on indie-electro – all new wave bass grooves, rave-y synth drones and enough cowbell to summon the ghost of Does It Offend You, Yeah? – demands you work up a sweat and is so potent that even a crowd largely made up of members of the music industry fall under its command.
The likes of recent singles ‘The Influencer’ and ‘Co-Conspirator’ wear their inspirations on their sleeves – a hark back to ‘Blue Monday’ here, an unmistakably James Murphy vocal tone there. Instead of riding the coattails of established heroes, though, they build on those blocks to create new worlds; ones that wrap you up in swirling, angular electronics and a hedonistic spirit that collides with darker, more political undertones.
Westside Cowboy
Two weeks before their trip to the seaside, Manchester’s Westside Cowboy won one of the most coveted slots of the British Summer – the Emerging Talent slot at Glastonbury 2025. If there wasn’t already a lot of curiosity around the four-piece before, that victory made it skyrocket, with their name constantly coming up in conversations across The Great Escape. Any doubters, though, will have been silenced by what they saw – a ferociously feel-good performance that toyed with twanging Americana and plaid-hued slacker rock, all delivered by a group that seemed like they were having more fun than anyone else at the festival combined.