Slide Away Festival 2025 and Whirr’s Return

The annual shoegaze music festival “Slide Away,” hosted and headlined by Philadelphia band Nothing, had its first of two dates in Brooklyn on Saturday, April 26. The tickets for this year’s festival sold out extremely fast and accumulated a lot of hype for the lineup and trending popularity of the genre, but those weren’t the only reasons.

The excitement for this year’s festival came thanks to the surprise headlining band Whirr, performing for the very first time in over a decade. Friends and collaborators with Nothing since the early 2010s, Whirr was once a household name, and the two bands were largely credited with the shoegaze genre’s continued success in an era of diminished popularity.

While Whirr’s return has been widely praised and anticipated, their long hiatus was not without reason. Following what would be their last performances in 2015, Tweets were found on Whirr’s account slandering transgender punk band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Lving Outside Society’s Shit) whom they played with while on tour.

The band was quickly pushed out of the public eye, canceled, and disbanded despite various interviews, apologies, and public statements explaining that the account and tweets were the fault of their merchandise manager and not indicative of the band’s actual views.

The band’s apologists and genre fanatics defended them and wished for their return in the years following, leading them to briefly reunite to record two critically acclaimed albums in 2019 and 2024. With this year’s Slide Away Festival, Whirr has almost completely regained public trust and come back to performing for the foreseeable future, with plans to continue recording and touring.

Some critics, former fans, and news sources will never forgive the band’s actions in 2015, but the success of Slide Away proved that excitement from their many fans clearly outweighed all mistrust.

Whirr’s set in Brooklyn was met with raving enthusiasm as their set sounded cleaner and tighter than ever, performing hits from their 2019 and 2024 albums for the very first time. Tickets are sold out for their next show on the second leg of Slide Away in LA on May 24, but dates for a summer tour with Nothing were just announced.