Rust, Steel, and a Lineup Worth Losing a Weekend Over

The setting alone makes the Melt Festival worth thinking about. Ferropolis is a decommissioned open-pit mining site in eastern Germany—a field of enormous rusting excavators frozen in place like industrial dinosaurs—and every July it fills up with people dancing underneath them. Someone looked at that landscape and thought: music festival. That instinct was correct.

The 2018 lineup ran July 13 to 15, and it was genuinely stacked. The xx headlining felt both overdue and perfectly timed—a band that somehow gets better at being the soundtrack to 3 a.m. the longer they exist. Florence + The Machine on the same bill, which is never a bad idea. Fever Ray returning after years away, which alone would’ve been enough. Tyler, the Creator, who by that point had completed one of the more interesting image reinventions in recent pop. Nina Kraviz, Jon Hopkins, Ben Klock for the techno faithful. Cigarettes After Sex for whoever needed to feel something slow and aching. Little Dragon. The Internet. Princess Nokia. BadBadNotGood. Modeselektor. Apparat. The Blaze, who were in the middle of making everyone feel things they couldn’t quite explain.

That’s not a lineup so much as an argument—a festival making a point about what a weekend can be if you stop defaulting to the obvious names and actually pay attention to the moment you’re in.

Germany has no shortage of summer festivals. But if you’re not a rock crowd—if your idea of a good weekend sits somewhere between hip-hop and techno with enough pop eclecticism to keep things strange—Melt has been the right answer for a long time. The excavators help.