The beginning of every year brings the excitement of new music. Who’s dropping a new album? Who’s reuniting? Who’s making a return to the studio after several years of silence? The announcements come rolling out, and with them come the rumors. We keep track with our Festival Outlook, and things tend to run as expected. Some artists, however, never seem to move from “logical” to “confirmed.”
2015 has certainly been playing by a different rule book. Many of this year’s lineups see repeated acts from 2014. Big names working on new albums (Radiohead, anyone?) aren’t yet listed as making appearances. Then come the surprises. Sleater-Kinney said they wouldn’t play any festivals, but Primavera Sound snagged them for this year’s fest. Portishead and Kraftwerk have yet to agree to any US festivals. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, Tool, and Chromatics are nowhere to be seen.
So we’ve scoured the facts and compiled the 10 most surprising names still absent from 2015 U.S. festival lineups. Narrowing it down is hard when there are a lot of missing shoe-ins. Then again, maybe this is our reminder that festivals are growing harder to predict — or that the undercard acts are ready to steal the spotlight once and for all.
–Nina Corcoran
Staff Writer
