The Six Best Sets From Splendour In The Grass, Ranked
From Childish Gambino to Broods to SZA, these are the sets we're still thinking about.
Splendour in the Grass has wrapped up for another year, leaving behind memories of sets from Childish Gambino, SZA, Foals, and so, so many more.
It was a weekend crammed with plenty of surprises — from the great (Tina Arena appearing for ‘Chains’ anyone?) to the not-so-great, like when Chance the Rapper unexpectedly cancelled, leaving his headlining slot to the Hilltop Hoods.
But for the most part, Splendour went down in the way it has always gone down: with a shit tonne of shit hot sets from some of the best acts going. Music Junkee was on the ground the entire weekend, and witnessed as many of them as we could — here are the performances that we’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.
#6. Hayden James
“This is definitely the biggest show I’ve played in my life,” an awed Hayden James told the crowd on Friday night at the Amphitheatre. Which was fair enough: the Sydney producer drew one of the biggest crowds of the entire weekend, the punters stretching from way up the hill to the sardine-tin crammed pit at the front of the stage.
With a newly released debut album tucked under his belt — not to mention six years of singles — James had a wealth of material to choose from. He could have slapped together a greatest hits set easily enough, but what he delivered was much more considered, more cohesive, a rounded distillation of his sound. Framed inside giant LED squares (a stage set up premiered at Curve Ball last month) he peppered remixes of Duke Dumont and Daft Punk between crowd favourites like ‘Better Together’ (featuring an explosive Running Touch) and ‘Just Friends’.
A roll call of guests including Panama and GRAACE appeared throughout, with the best guest spot reserved for the Brisbane City Choir, who elevated ‘Nowhere To Go’ to a ghostly hymn.
— Jules LeFevre
#5. Set Mo
“The first time we played Splendour it was to a tiny crowd in Tiny Dancer, so to be doing this now is just… wow.” It was an understandable response from the Set Mo boys as they looked out to the mid-afternoon crowd spilling out of the Mix Up tent on Sunday.
It’s no easy feat to fill up that space so early on in the day and keep a crowd fully invested for 45 minutes, but Set Mo eased their way through it, with a slew of guest vocalists appearing over the set. They closed their set with ‘I Belong Here’, inviting KLP, Woodes, and Thandi Phoenix on stage to help lead the crowd.
Having just released their debut album Surrender earlier this year, you get the feeling that Set Mo’s stock is only to rise from here.
— Patrick Campbell
#4. Wolf Alice
“You just gave us our first festival moment right then! Wolf Alice’s Theo Ellis told the packed Ampitheatre crowd on Saturday night. The moment in question was thousands of people singing along to ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’, the band’s runaway single from their album Visions Of A Life. The set marked their third visit to Australia in less than two years, but it didn’t stop them from drawing in a huge crowd early on in the evening.
For an entire hour, the UK group exhaustively burned through their expansive back catalogue, bringing the crowd to tears with heartbreak anthems, before igniting a frenzied crowd chant of “You bore me to death! I don’t give a shit!” with the track ‘Yuk Foo’ — barely 10 minutes between the two moods.
By the time they tore through set highlight and final track ‘Giant Peach’, they had the Amphitheatre eating out of their hand.
— Patrick Campbell
#3. Childish Gambino
No other Splendour set was as highly anticipated as Donald Glover’s. After cancelling his Spilt Milk appearance and tour late last year, and announcing to the world that he’ll soon be hanging up his microphone as Childish Gambino forever, Australia audiences were champing at the bit for their last chance to see the ‘Redbone’ hitmaker live.
All we can say is it was worth the wait. In front of one of the biggest crowds we’ve ever seen at Splendour (really, ever), Gambino’s reputation as one of the world’s great live performers was solidified. “I got two rules,” he told the crowd at the start. “First, love me and love yourself. Rule two is put your phones down. You don’t need to share this with anybody out there. This is for us, treat it like church.”
He swayed and slinked through R&B jams like ‘Summertime Magic’ and ‘Feels Like Summer’, before diving into a recreation of his incendiary ‘This Is America‘ video. From then it was a slide down a trio of big hits: ‘3005’, ‘Sober’, and ‘Redbone’ hit one after the other. He even threw in a newbie — a track called ‘Human Sacrifice’, which he performed while being lifted over the crowd’s heads on a scissor lift.
“This is the part of the show where I rate the crowd out of 10,” he told us at the end. “You guys are like a 16.”
Right back at ya Donald.
— Jules LeFevre
#2. Broods
It would’ve been fair to expect the crowd for Broods to be on the lighter side, considering they clashed against Meg Mac and international heavyweights Foals. But the Mix Up tent proved expectations wrong — by the end of the New Zealand duo’s opener, it was filled to the brim.
The set was heavy on tracks from their latest album Don’t Feed The Pop Monster, including crowd favourite ‘Peach’ and set highlight ‘Everytime We Go — which was painstakingly built to a thundering crescendo.
When they finally closed their set with the inarguably perfect pop song ‘Couldn’t Believe’, all the crowd was left wondering was why there weren’t more pop acts on the Splendour bill.
— Patrick Campbell
#1. SZA
A little over 18 months ago, SZA arrived on our shores a relative newcomer, with a debut album under her belt and a slow-growing hit called ‘Drew Barrymore’. In the time since, she stormed the stage at Coachella, and scooped up a stack Grammy nominations for said album, CTRL (the fact she didn’t win one remains perhaps the biggest upset of the awards).
So her Splendour set was always going to be her Australian victory lap — as she acknowledged a few songs in to a packed Amphitheatre crowd. “The first time I was here I was opening for Post Malone, and I thought nobody fucked with me. SO RANDOM!” She laughed, giving the audience a big ol’ wink, to rapturous applause.
Her performance was a masterclass in confidence, in effortlessness; as she straddled and lounged on her circular cage, swinging her leg through openers ‘Supermodel’ and ‘Broken Clocks’, it felt like no one had inhabited the Splendour stage quite as comfortably as her. She played with the audience, winking and smiling and talking shit about astrology and about how her song ‘Go Gina’ was penned about the ’90s sitcom character of the same name, from the show Martin.
‘Drew Barrymore’ and ‘Love Galore’ prompted mass singalongs, while the biggest reaction was given to her surprising (and excellent) cover of Wheatus’ ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. By the time ‘All The Stars’ and ’20 Something’ rolled around as the closer, SZA’s victory lap was complete. We could have stayed for a few more.
— Jules LeFevre
All photos by Mikki Gomez for Music Junkee