With summer temperatures soaring and the anticipation building ahead of our Festival, the next wave of line-up confirmations has hit our desks. On the bill alongside well-known and popular names from within the established Reeperbahn family we have some artists debuting at the festival plus certain other big surprise performers. We’ve got sunny country notes from Canada (Skinny Dyck), psychedelic nostalgic rock with a hint of the hippie era (Les Hôtesses d'Hilaire), slick future pop from South Korea (CHE) and experimental rap combos whose members read like a Who’s Who of bands not normally known for mixing it with the hip-hop crowd (XL The Band). This is the place where previously opposing camps come together and hit it off. We also look forward to being able to finally tell you the show days. So you can start planning your festival slowly.

Starting things off are Betterov and Friends, who this year are staging a very special show for the Reeperbahn Festival. This reformer of punk and everything that came after it in this genre is full of ideas that are as fitting as they are absurd, and delivering the soundtrack of existentialists, cultural pessimists and non-conformists fit for our New Twenties. What will the whole thing sound like? Anyone wanting to know should dress cool and come along.

It'll get a touch hotter when Hundreds, accompanied by string quartet and percussion, fill the room in St. Michael's Church. The new musical concept from the brother and sister duo Eva and Philipp Milner sees them take a step further out of their comfort zone. This has not only opened up new paths for future studio albums but also expanded their own stage repertoire, allowing their coolly precise electro pop to shine more vividly than ever in a festive concert setting.

Lighting up the place is also top of Tom Walker’s agenda. The trained singer and multi-instrumentalist, a stranger to neither strings nor keys, gained a reputation throughout Europe in the late 2010s as a big connoisseur of folk, pop and rock and how to mix them right to produce the perfect cocktail. His creations always throw up some surprises, as shown with his singles, but he saves the best for his live shows.

And live performances are also where Stella Sommer turns up the dial too. The ever busy and much travelled songwriter, whose band Die Heiterkeit has been reviving, burying and then reincarnating German-language indie pop for the past decade, knows how to make her audience laugh and cry. Especially in the times we're living in, this is no mean achievement, and she'll be bringing it to the stage in September with her trademark understatement.

Also sidling in subtly will be Philine Sonny, to perform her dreamy indie-pop live at the Reeperbahn and show that the DIY sound of a new generation is anything but boring or banal. And, with this being the self-taught artist’s first time with us, we’re all set for a performance big on emotion and excitement.

The same can likely be said of GIRLI, who’s already earned her stripes as an independent artist in the UK having had to beat a path through the stuffy labels and patriarchal structures. This hard route in has done her snotty mix of grunge, electroclash, pop and punk no harm at all: now more than ever, she knows that representing her queer-feminist community is no obstacle, but actually pure inspiration.

Tommy Lefroy find very similar sources of artistic expression in contact with the audience, which they have had to leave out for long enough during the last two years. Now the time has finally come to present their fans with the style mix of indie spirit, soft rock and contemporary pop earworms for which they are already being wholeheartedly celebrated in London.

Further confirmations:

HATCHIE | Blanks | November Ultra| Blue Hawaii | Softcult | Ewan Mainwood | rauchen | Wunderhorse | Naima Bock | HAZLETT | Josh Cashman | Honeyglaze | Joe & The Shitboys | The Goa Express | PRISMA | Brenda Blitz | Temmis | Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys | Marlon Hammer | Alysha Brilla | Brimheim | Ultraflex | Skinny Dyck | PLANET | nothhingspecial | CHE| Choses Sauvages| Al-Qasar | DOT | Good Wilson | Greatest Hits  | Nuela Charles | Freekind. | Zoon | Xay | Bec Sandridge | Strandhase | Lawn Chair | Deer Anna | Jordan Klassen | Les Hay Babies | Little Destroyer | Nerd Connection | Gus Englehorn | XL the Band | MOON MATES | Mauvey | JayWood | The Garrys | LOKI | Neon Neet | Motherhood | Les Hotesses d’Hilaire | das bisschen Totschlag | Berglind | 250 | Terra Spencer | Dajung | Gunner + Smith | Ellen Froese | Declan O’Donovan | Braden Lam | Andrew Waite

Here is the programme

Cancellations to date:

Oliver Francis

Hurray for the Riff Raff