The Reeperbahn Festival is manic, busy, and packed with music. And if there is one thing we’re gunna do, it is find new music we love and share it with you guys.
These are in no particular order, and far from everyone we saw.
A Mess
After a long morning, we’re seeking refuge in the Festival Village. Maybe grab an apple, some water, and a seat. As we stroll through the arch, we’re greeted with screaming guitars - music to our ears. We grab the apple and head to where a sizable crowd has formed.
A Mess on the Fritz-Kola stage, in a pink babydoll dress, pink guitar, a riot grrrl if we've ever seen one. Her chords rip, and we mean riiiiiip. The size of the sound coming from the speakers is something you'd expect from a full band… but no need in this case. Some drum smashing and that beautiful guitar are doing the work just fine.
Vocally? That good grunge 90s that we adore. They drawl, they drag, and A Mess moves between light, sugar-sweet notes. It’s too easy to reach for Hole or The Distillers as a comparison, but that was the instinct.
Potentially, the best thing is that it is in the sweetest notes that the cutting lyrics get delivered. Personal favorite track right now is BLAME IS A DYE - live it was perfection, and ahead of the performance, A Mess spoke about the rates of sexual assault on women, to which the crowd cheered. She also tells her own story.
A Mess isn't new to this, she is true to this. Since 2021 she's played 150+ shows across Europe, signed to German indie label Rookie Records, and picked up real critical weight along the way: five stars from GAFFA ("a remarkable release"), heavy rotation on P6 Beat, and write-ups from Der Spiegel, OXFANZINE, and Loud Women. Her debut album WOMAN – NO MAN, compiling the two EPs, landed her on IMPALA's "100 Artists to Watch" in 2024.
Follow A Mess: Instagram
JOSY
JOSY wasn’t marked on the list for us; it was a case of right place, right time. Making our way out of the Festival Village toward Spielbudenplatz, we made it for the very start.
If we had to sum up JOSY in a very short sentence, it would be tiny but mighty. Her vocals are unique. On TOO LATE TO MY PARTY, the warbled notes are exacting, total control and somehow total abandon at the same time. It’s a slow start, but worth the almost 2-minute wait until that stretched, light scream starts appearing. You only need to take a couple of minutes and click through her discography on Spotify to see she’s more than happy to experiment, and that over time her own style has matured. In the future, we expect nothing but more boundary-pushing.
Turns out tiny but mighty has history behind it. JOSY is really Josefin Vogler, Munich-born, Augsburg-based, and back in 2019 she and her sister Mimi won The Voice Kids Germany as a duo - you might remember them, or their coach-branded single with The BossHoss, or the project that came after, HAVET - or not, ’cause we didn’t know anything at all before catching her on stage. In 2023, JOSY stepped out on her own. Gone is the talent-show polish, in its place: dark alt-rock and dreamy, experimental composition, built out of a studio she works from in Augsburg. Reeperbahn's own program notes call her "a phenomenon nobody was prepared for" (translated from the German), which we back 100%.
What stands out in JOSY’s work, after some browsing online, is that there is a healthy dose of creativity in the artwork. Interactive and sneak-peek all in one, JOSY’s Room. Open the VHS and put in one of the tapes.
Experimental, great vocal range - cruising through airy and light, to scathing screams, rap, and everything in between, and while she sure does have a full band on stage, you’re looking at her, and pretty much her only. She struts across a stage as if she lives there. We hope she keeps living there, ’cause PARADE, her 2025 album, is a marvel.
And by the way, we reached out to find the setlist, and it turns out a lot of them are unreleased - which means we know they’re coming and we’re so ready for it.
Follow JOSY: Instagram
Maia and the Squires
LEVI’S Music @ Millerntor Stadion, we lined up just as it started to rain. The thing is, with a lot of the smaller venues, you do need to be there early because they just don’t have the capacity. Presented by Marshall and LEVI’S, a small room, but a big sound. The room itself is compact, but the light streams in from the side - and when you look out, in our case it was an empty - but impressive - stadium. The lineup changed as the event went on, but the ones we wanted to see were there. Maia and the Squires ended up on first and were fabulous.
The vocals bounced around the room beautifully - as you’d expect from a high-quality studio setup. Each of the musicians was brilliant, but we couldn’t stop watching Phan Anh Bui on guitar and Paula Fot on bass - all of them individually cool af. Worth a small note: some sources list a different bassist than the one we saw, so we can't say for certain if Paula was standing in for the night or is a permanent member - either way, she was excellent. Maia herself floats around what little space she has on the stage with ease. Something about the bouncing curls and glittered eyelids, hands reaching up to the spotlights in the ceiling, and the vocals following the line of her arm upward made it very intimate.
Being unfamiliar with the songs is a benefit when listening to bands live for the first time, you can’t try to sing along, you have no idea where the hook or the chorus, or anything is. You’re right in it. Somewhere in the fingertips heading skyward, FKA Twigs came to mind.
SPAGHETTI FOR BREAKFAST stuck out the most because of the name.
There was one song on stage we still can’t find anywhere. We asked the band for the setlist, and they haven’t gotten back to us. If it turns up, you’ll hear it here first… well, second, ’cause we get it first.
Maia and the Squires formed in 2024, after Maia Luker met guitarist Phan Anh Bui playing Radiohead in a quiet corner of their Berlin music college. Ulysse Zimmer and Merlin Ricco Laudien joined soon after, and the lineup's stayed international ever since - Argentina, Vietnam, France, and Germany. They've been playing Berlin monthly since forming, venues like Urban Spree, Cassiopeia, and Monarch, and dropped their debut EP, SINKING INTO THE OCEAN, back in May. Cinematic dream rock is the closest label, though Smashing Pumpkins, Wolf Alice, and PJ Harvey are the names they reach for themselves.
Mia Gjakonovski
We’re not going to brag here, but we have been backing Mia since we first heard WHEN DID YOU KNOW and shared her on our RADAR channel. And, because we wanted to see Mia so much, we also got to see Maia and the Squires. Sometimes everything works out perfectly.
The room is empty, and people flit in and out to pick up drinks from the fridge. They’re setting up, sound checking, and Mia takes a seat on the drum riser, decked in double denim with a Levi's t-shirt on. It could be awkward, the silence in the room, the hum and flutter of conversation outside. The start time is shifting, and we believe the lineup of the evening was changed, too. A bigger band wouldn’t be able to do this; they would be swarmed. It isn’t awkward, though. It’s peaceful.
One of the most important things that we notice about Mia is that she is easy with the room. And she has zero issues making sure the sound tech gets the sound she and her band need. Her team makes it very clear who they are. One is taking care of the screen showing the wrong band, another is keeping the time, and another is in the front row happily declaring they are the biggest fan. The support is palpable.
WHEN DID YOU KNOW has a slightly sped-up YOU’RE SOMEBODY ELSE - Flora Cash feel to its opening, and in all honesty, that is what made Mia interesting without hearing the rest of her discography.
While we didn’t capture it, it was captivating to watch in real time - the space between the instruments, the moments where it is just Mia and maybe one of the band, while the rest stare at her with soft, awe-filled eyes. The bass, the keys, the guitar, the drums - the nothing in between the chords is filled with focus. A talent that not every artist has is the ability to switch between the saddest of songs and a bright, lighthearted joke with the crowd. The live rendition of FOCUS ON ME was beautiful; the studio version is rich, but live, Mia throws her vocals higher, lower, thinner, and wispier as she goes.
It’s interactive; the musicians watch for Mia to signal and heed it every time. She knows what she needs beat for beat.
Mia Gjakonovski is Berlin-based, and her exceptional training shows. Two years in BuJazzO, the German National Jazz Orchestra, a JIB scholarship from the Karl Hofer Society, and she's currently finishing up jazz vocals at the Jazz Institut Berlin. A debut album is due early 2027, which, based on what we saw, is worth clearing your calendar for.
That’s four. We saw a lot more, and a few of them will probably still be rattling around in November. That’s Reeperbahn. You walk in with a list and walk out with a different one.
So go follow them. Artists this size feel every follow, every save, every “you need to hear this” sent to a friend. It costs you nothing, and it’s how acts like these end up on bigger stages next year.
Full playlist:
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