There is something quietly thrilling about queueing for a festival and already feeling the pull of the stage before you've even got through the gates. Standing in the line at Ashton Court on Sunday afternoon, the energy was unmistakable — a low hum of anticipation, the sun already committed and not a single cloud prepared to argue with it. The gates were already open, but the queue barely moved. Everyone around me had the same name on their lips: Rizzle Kicks.
It says something about the growing pull of LSTD's bookings that a single act could hold an entire crowd at the entrance, unwilling to miss a second. When I first started coming to LSTD, arriving felt like drifting in, floating between stages, stumbling across something unexpected, letting the weekend find you. That version still exists, somewhere. But it took a little more searching this year.
Rizzle Kicks met the crowd's longing head on and matched it with energy that made the whole field feel alive. It was a piece of a particular era, bright and ridiculous and full of joy, and the crowd felt every second of it. Near the water point, I got chatting to a nineteen-year-old who had never heard of them. They were baffled by the size of the crowd. I was baffled by them. For anyone who grew up in the early 2010s, if your early teens had a soundtrack, there is a good chance Rizzle Kicks were on it. Old songs, new songs — the crowd didn't care. They were just glad to have them back. When they finished, there was a mass exodus from the stage that I have never quite witnessed at LSTD before: a tide going out all at once. For a non-headliner, the footprint they left on the day was enormous.
Rizzle Kicks performing on stage [Photo taken by Jessie Myers and provided by Plaster]
The act that gave me the most pause for reflection was 4AM KRU. I first encountered them three years ago at LSTD, on a smaller stage, in front of a crowd that could be counted in the tens, maybe hundreds at most. This year they had moved up considerably, a step that reflects how far they've come. Their visual world remains one of the most distinctive things in the current Bristol scene: bold cartoon aesthetics that pull you into a story and keep you there, something between a rave and an animated film. But where the experience once felt intimate and discoverable, the sheer scale of the crowd this time around changed something. What was once perhaps hundreds has become thousands, and with that came the inevitable funnel of bodies pushing for the front, the sense of being on the outskirts rather than inside the moment. It is not a loss exactly, it is a progression, but there is something worth naming about the change. The charm of watching an act grow is inseparable from the smallness in which you first found them.
A genuinely exciting development was the introduction of Peequals — female urinals dotted around the site. It sounds like a small thing. It is not. For anyone who has spent years of festival-going navigating long queues, inadequate facilities and the particular anxiety that attaches itself to that part of the day, the announcement alone felt quietly revolutionary. I never actually managed to find them on the day, which I'm still annoyed about. The FOMO is real. I hope they stay, I hope they spread, and next year I fully intend to seek them out. Gender-equal infrastructure at festivals is long overdue, and LSTD deserves credit for getting there.
Photo taken by Jessie Myers and provided by Plaster
If there is a tension running through this year's festival, it lives in the gap between what LSTD was built to be and what it is becoming. The crowds are larger. The queues are longer. Tents felt noticeably fuller, populated by a demographic that seemed to arrive with content in mind rather than music. At one point I caught a snippet of conversation nearby, someone cheerfully announcing they were really just here to drink, the music almost incidental. It is hard not to feel a flicker of frustration when you hear that at a festival so rooted in genuine musical culture. But it would be unfair to let that colour the whole picture. For every person there for the wrong reasons, there were hundreds clearly lost in the music, present in the way LSTD has always inspired. The audience skewed younger, teens and early twenties, which brings its own energy, and the festival remains one of the most welcoming and vibrant weekends Bristol has to offer. The spirit is still very much alive. It just occasionally has to share space with people who haven't quite found it yet.
Perhaps the answer, at least for me, is to go back to wandering. The acts I have loved most at LSTD — 4AM KRU among them — I found by accident, on a quiet afternoon, in front of a handful of people. I followed them as they grew, and I'm glad I did. But a big crowd is not where I feel the magic anymore. Maybe that's the natural cycle of it: you discover something small, you watch it become something big, and then you let it go and start again. There are always new names on a bill like this, playing to tens of people on a side stage somewhere, waiting to be stumbled upon. This year I didn't wander enough.
Love Saves The Day remains one of the most important weekends in Bristol's cultural calendar. The bones are brilliant and the ambition is real. But the festival's founding spirit — that sense of being let in on something, of the music choosing you rather than the other way around — is worth protecting as the crowds continue to grow. The smaller stages are where that spirit lives. This year, more than any before it, that is where I would point you.
Photo taken by Giulia Spadafora and provided by Plaster
One final note, and it is a practical one. Getting there from Bath is straightforward enough — a train to Temple Meads and then the Love Bus out to the site. But getting home is a different story. With so many students and festivalgoers travelling from the neighbouring city, the return journey requires a kind of tactical thinking that sits awkwardly alongside a day spent surrendering to music in the sun. The Love Bus queues swell so dramatically as the festival winds down that by the time you've made it on board and across to Temple Meads, the last train is gone. Leave the festival early to beat the queue and you've cut your evening short. Stay until the end and you risk missing it entirely. We opted for the penultimate train, exhausted and sun-baked, and felt quietly relieved we did — the last service was cancelled, and I can only imagine the scenes that followed for the likely thousands left scrambling for alternative routes home on a Bank Holiday Sunday evening. If you were one of them, and I suspect some of you reading this were, I'm genuinely sorry. That is not the note any festival should end on. We were lucky, and we knew it. First Bus already runs a service between Bath and Bristol, and it feels like there is a conversation worth having between them and LSTD ahead of 2027. A dedicated late-night return service for Bath would be a small logistical ask with an enormous impact. The festival deserves a homecoming that doesn't end in a stranded platform.