CMAT, Yard Act, Divorce and more cement Green Man 2025 as a festival of core memory-making moments 

Testament to the festival’s commitment to properly platforming new artists from the off, it’s wing! - the winner of this year’s Green Man Rising competition - who opens the pastorally-perfect main Mountain Stage on Friday, his hypnotic alt hip-hop offerings making for a heady start to a schedule overflowing with similarly experimental fare. Whether it’s dreamy, harmonica-flecked dub-folk (Mark William Lewis), hauntingly beautiful dream-pop (Sarah Meth), or harmony-laden slacker-rock (Westside Cowboy), both the scenic Rising Stage - complete with cut-out backdrop emphasising the glorious Bannau Brycheiniog beyond - and the suntrap Walled Garden play host to an impressively on-the-pulse programme throughout the weekend. 

Two such artists who pull some of the Garden’s biggest crowds are Jacob Alon and jasmine.4.t - a pair of vital songwriters whose respective unflinching, moving explorations of gender identity and love through a queer lens are translated live into rousing, powerful calls for solidarity. Here, Green Man’s assembled masses answer these calls in earnest: Jasmine leads the crowd in decrying Streeting, Starmer, and the recent Supreme Court ruling on trans rights before her heart-wrenching album closer ‘Woman’; Jacob, meanwhile, is offered some sertraline post-show by a sympathetic audience member (their supply has run out), and their angelic rendition of debut single ‘Fairy In A Bottle’ - performed a cappella due to guitar tuning issues - is met with pin-drop reverence.

Part of the charm of watching such sets is the knowledge that, as their trajectories ascend ever-higher, Green Man will respond in kind: just look at Friday night headliners Wet Leg, whose bill-topping turn comes just four years after opening the Far Out tent in 2021. And the size of the crowd isn’t all that’s changed; having swapped cottagecore frocks for bodybuilding power, the Isle of Wight outfit prove themselves to be just as strong as their new aesthetic suggests, seamlessly integrating new cuts from ‘moisturizer’ into their established repertoire of bratty, crowd-pleasing bangers. Also back for round two is breakout cult star MJ Lenderman, the Wednesday guitarist who last year played this very same slot - a sun-drenched turn on the Mountain Stage - alongside the band. With an extended 90-minute set time, he’s well and truly taking centre stage this time around; and, although swirling rumours about a guest appearance from Waxahatchee ultimately don’t materialise, his solo catalogue of understated alt-country anthems are all that’s needed to captivate a whole hillside full of onlookers. 

Each day, it seems, brings a fresh crop of ‘you had to be there’ highlights. Getdown Services shutting down their secret set at a packed-out Round The Twist tent? Triumphant. Funk legends Cymande turning Far Out into one big dancefloor? Infectious. Underworld blasting the iconic opening bars of ‘Born Slippy’ in the Welsh mountains? Goosebump-inducing. A drag queen-led tribute to Fleetwood Mac at the hidden Wishbone stage? The stuff of pure joy. In a (quite literally) packed field, though, this year’s Green Man yields a trio of standout sets that will surely go down in the history books as some of the festival’s most special. 

When Nottingham quartet Divorce take to the Far Out stage on Sunday afternoon, shock at the size of the crowd they’re met with is writ large across their faces. Clearly, endearingly delighted to be here, their energy proves infectious as frontperson Tiger Cohen-Towell bounces across stage, leading the crowd in singing happy birthday to drummer Kasper Sandstrom in between high kicks and gleeful asides. But little comes close (across the whole weekend, even) to closer ‘Hangman’, for which the band invite Leo - apparently the child of one festival crew member, and something of a Green Man icon - to dance onstage alongside them. Evidently having the time of his little life up there, he moves with unselfconscious, euphoric abandon, perfectly epitomising the childlike joy a good festival fosters in punters of any age. It’s the kind of thing you can’t predict, can’t plan, and is all the more precious for it - the numerous people wiping away tears as the song ends is proof enough of that. 

Similarly, as Yard Act squint out across the Mountain Stage slopes at golden hour on Sunday evening, there’s a real sense of occasion. Arresting and witty as ever, they cut biting post-punk (‘Payday’) and groove-laden hooks (‘Dream Job’) with unreleased offering ‘You’re Gonna Need A Little Music’ - a percussion-led, LCD-adjacent number which already fits seamlessly into this high-octane set. Few others balance the tightrope between tongue-in-cheek antics and earnest emotion as well as these Leeds lads, and nowhere is this better exemplified than the double header of ‘The Overload’ - for which James somehow persuades a whole hilltop to crouch, chanting “Green Man” in unison - and ‘100% Endurance’, which, three years after its release, is just as life-affirming as ever. If the question at the centre of the band’s second album was ‘Where’s My Utopia?’, there may be no closer answer than right here. 

Come the end of the weekend, there’s one name on everyone’s lips. Pulling one of the biggest crowds in Green Man history, CMAT makes her debut not just at the festival, but somehow the whole of Wales, in truly spectacular style. Peppering her set with shout outs to national treasures including Charlotte Church, Cate Le Bon, and Cerys Matthews (“we loves you we do!”), as well as a cover of Catatonia’s ‘Road Rage’ (“the Welsh national anthem”) and a brief ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ interlude, she plays to this particular crowd with such humour, heart, and sheer star quality that it’s impossible not to be swept up in the musical rodeo. And, while the whole audience doing the Dunboyne County Two Step to ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!’ is certainly a site to behold, it’s the superfans - namely, a young girl called Ivy on her dad’s shoulders, and another clutching a CMAT Barbie in the front row - who cement the fact that this is well and truly CMAT’s summer. A pop star, performer, and role model bar none; next year, surely, the headline slots will come calling. 

In community spirit, lineup diversity, musical quality, and genuine pinch-me moments, Green Man is perhaps only rivalled by Glastonbury - a cultural titan whose world-famous magic is emulated here in an even more incredible setting, on a much more intimate scale. Without a doubt, it's one of the UK's best fests. 

Tags: CMAT, Divorce, Jacob Alon, jasmine.4.t, Underworld, Wet Leg, Yard Act, Green Man, Festivals, Reviews, Live Reviews