After an incredibly triumphant inaugural year, Live At Leeds: In The Park is set to return on Saturday 27th May. Set against the unique backdrop of Temple Newsam, this is a festival worth making room for in your summer schedule.

In 2022 Live At Leeds: In The Park’s successful launch saw Bombay Bicycle Club, The Vaccines, Arlo Parks, Easy Life and Sea Girls amongst many more perform across 5 stages for the ultimate introduction to the indie all dayer brimming with live music from all four corners of the globe. We still fondly look back on the moment from last year when the sun went down, Bombay Bicycle Club took the main stage and the crowd errupted.

This year’s lineup is packed with even more festival-highlights-in-waiting and headliners Two Door Cinema Club will close the show with their technicolour world of soaring anthems. They are joined by indie royalty the DMA’s, Maximo Park, The Hives, The Lathums and Everything Everything. The lineup is packed with rising stars like Black Honey, Tom Walker, CMAT, The Beths, Prima Queen, Lime Cordiale, AfflecksPalace, Brooke Combe and Gengahr. For those of you looking to discover your next favourite band be sure to check out Bully, Pillow Queens, Lapsley, Rose Gray, Panic Shack, Opus Kink, Low Hummer, Dolores Forever, Priestgate and Deadletter.

With so many incredible acts to choose from, we’ve made a list of our must-watch artists from this year’s event, so you don’t have to!

Two Door Cinema Club

Mixing guitar-driven, post-punk hooks with dancey, electronic polish, Northern Ireland’s Two Door Cinema Club first gained attention with 2010’s Tourist History and singles like ‘Something Good Can Work’ and ‘Undercover Martyn.’ The record hit number one on the Irish independent albums chart, and landed on the BBC Sound of 2010 Poll. Along the way, the band earned favorable comparisons to and . They continued to evolve, landing in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 with 2012’s Beacon, and experimenting with -esque disco and synth pop on 2016’s Gameshow. That album also hit the U.K. Top Ten and paved the way for 2019’s new wave-inspired False Alarm and 2022’s Keep On Smiling.

‘Talk’, the first single from the band’s fourth album, False Alarm, appeared in early 2019. It was followed by ‘Satellite’ a month later, and the LP was released in June. A fifth full-length, Keep On Smiling, arrived in September 2022, having been recorded while Two Door Cinema Club were both in and coming out of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Produced by the trio, along with longtime associate and Dan Grech-Marguerat, the album featured the singles ‘Wonderful Life’ and ‘Lucky’.

With the band’s UK tour dates selling out quickly this is your perfect opportunity to catch this genre defining trio in the flesh.

The Big Moon

The Big Moon’s 2022 record Here Is Everything was conceived during the weight and worry of lockdown in a pandemic. Lives became seismically different, whilst every day a carbon copy of the last. So, whilst Covid pulled the duvet tightly up over our heads, it was also the unlikely backdrop to welcoming new life. Vocalist Juliette Jackson might have started lockdown teaching fans how to play guitar on Zoom to help pay the rent, but she ended it as mother to a super little human being.

Here is Everything documents the arrival of that baby in real time, and the simultaneous arrival of a new mother, full of excitement and fear. Meanwhile, the rest of the band doubled-down in the studio, taking Jules’ embryonic song frameworks and stepping forward as one, reveling in an innate, giddy togetherness and with a clutch of genuinely fantastic tunes.

With a set at Glastonbury and their biggest headline to date at London’s Roundhouse in the pipeline, expect even bigger things to come from this band in 2023.

DMA’S

Reading and Leeds main stage sets, touring with Kasabian, 65,000+ tickets in the UK alone, and a massive sold-out Australian tour. DMA’s world is one of acceptance, freedom of expression, collective high, and each twist and turn in their journey to led to the landmark release of their 2023 album How Many Dreams?.

Across twelve tracks, How Many Dreams? weaves electronic dance elements seamlessly through the beloved foundations of guitar rock, punk, and lyricism of their highest charting album THE GLOW (2020), which peaked at #2 on the ARIA charts, #4 on the UK Official Albums Chart, and #1 in Scotland.

THE GLOW (2020) was recorded and mixed by multi-Grammy Award winning producer Stuart Price (, , ) at the historic Westlake Recording Studios in LA, and secured 4x ARIA Nominations and multiple Platinum and Gold (ARIA) singles.

The band will be stopping off at Live at Leeds as part of their UK and Ireland tour.

Everything Everything

Everything Everything’s latest album RAW DATA FEEL, features singles ‘Bad Friday’, ‘Teletype’, ‘I Want A Love Like This’, ‘Pizza Boy and Jennifer’.

On their sixth album, the band set about to revolutionise modern pop music, with frontman Jonathan Higgs abandoning his own brain and letting technology do at least some of the thinking: creating an A.I. programme and feeding it selected information – the entire LinkedIn Ts&Cs, the epic poem Beowulf, 400,000 4Chan posts and Confucius’s teachings – into A.I. automation processes and using its responses as a basis for the record’s lyrics, song titles and artwork creation.

Produced by guitarist Alex Robertshaw and production partner Tom Fuller, Raw Data Feel reflects an attempt to make it “straight from the heart, rather than the ego,” as drummer Michael Spearman says. “The humans are getting information back, deciding what has feeling and what doesn’t,” adds Alex. Trying it again, trying it another way, Everything Everything are back out there again, remodeling the old worlds, finding new ones to explore.

Let Everything Everything take you to a new world, make sure to add their set to your schedule.

Lime Cordiale

Lime Cordiale’s infectious performances and genuine interactions with their fans has made them one of Australia’s buzziest bands. In 2020, Lime Cordiale’s hit singles ‘Robbery’ and ‘Temper Temper’ gained Platinum accreditation, and over the past eighteen months, the band has accrued an additional 7x Gold singles. Their newest mini album Cordi Elba is a pure art collision between Australian chart-topping duo Lime Cordiale and actor/musician/DJ and record label boss Idris Elba. Recorded in Sydney this year while Idris was in town shooting a movie, what started as a one-off experiment spawned a mini album, “Apple Crumble” being the first released single. The partnership began when Lime Cordiale asked if Idris wanted to guest on a new version of Lime Cordiale’s Unnecessary Things – a song that first surfaced on the ‘relapse’ reissue of their 2020 No.1 album 14 Steps To A Better You. Idris did his research and was instantly sold. “I listened to them on Spotify, fell in love with them very quickly,” he says.

Take this year’s Live at Leeds in the Park as your opportunity to fall in love with Lime Cordiale, drink in hand, under the Yorkshire sunshine.

Panic Shack

Romi, Sarah, Emily, and Meg were fed up of music being a ‘members-only club’ at its best and a phallocracy at its worst so, they decided to do something about it.

Cue, Panic Shack.

Armed with brash, witty lyrics and killer hooks, they crashed through the UK music scene with a tidal wave of ear-crunching noise. Immediately building up a reputation for their raw, unapologetic live shows and off-kilter songs, Panic Shack prove that DIY does it better.

Since their inception it’s been non-stop for this Welsh punk quintet. With support from BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6 Music, Huw Stephens, Jack Saunders, Radio X, Bob Vylan, and PRS, it’s clear that this band have started something special.

Having already played prestigious stages at Green Man Festival, Liverpool Sound City, Cardiff Castle, and 2000 Trees Festival, and joined bands like The Wytches, Grandma’s House, and Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard on stages across the UK, Panic Shack are only going to continue to create unhinged, earth-shattering music.

Make sure to catch their set to witness the band’s incredible on stage energy.

Black Honey

Fantasy and escapism are all well and good, but what happens when you strap in, buckle up and set a course straight to the core of your own cold, hard reality?

For two albums, Brighton quartet Black Honey – firebrand frontwoman Izzy Bee Phillips, guitarist Chris Ostler, bassist Tommy Taylor and drummer Alex Woodward – have been living in a glitter-specked, sepia-tinged magic kingdom of their own making. It’s undeniably served them well. Rising from cult underground favourites on their self-titled 2018 debut through to a genuine breakthrough success story on 2021’s Top 10-charting follow up ‘Written & Directed’, the band have amassed a legion of fans to their constantly shifting canon of fizzing, visceral indie and nostalgia-soaked pop.

Since the end of the Written & Directed campaign the band played a sold out UK Tour including a night at Heaven, immediately followed by shows supporting IDLES, tours with Nothing But Thieves and The Vaccines across the UK and Europe. The band’s latest release A Fist Full of Peaches is full of attitude and raw emotion, deserving of its number 6 place in the UK album charts.

Izzy, meanwhile, has become something of a Pied Piper for life’s outliers, for the people that resonate hard with her own memories of struggling through youth and desperately attempting to find connection and understanding in an often impossible world. You can see the results in the front row of any Black Honey show; dedicated fans presenting in all forms that embrace the band’s message of acceptance. But it’s not until now that the singer has fully, 100% bared her soul herself.

We had the pleasure of watching the band on their latest tour and we can’t wait to catch them again this weekend!

Afflecks Palace

Formed in Manchester in summer 2019, Afflecks Palace are a 4-piece psyche guitar band described as “The birth of Nu-Madchester” by online Jicuration platform Manchester Lemon. The group take influence from The Stone Roses, Kurt Vile, The Smiths, The Las and The Durutti Column.

Their debut album “What Do You Mean Its Not Raining” hit no.20 in the UK album chart after playlist support from BBC 6 Music & Radio X playlists.

Their sophomore EP “Everything Is An Attempt To Be Human” was released by Spirit Of Spike Island in September 2020 and peaked no.3 in the UK vinyl chart, selling out all 500 ltd-edition copies on preorder.

The band’s 2023 release The Only Light in this Tunnel is the Oncoming Train takes Afflecks Palace into a new era, and Live at Leeds in the Park is the perfect opportunity to experience this new record before the band set out on their October UK tour.

Prima Queen

Prima Queen’s love story is one which cinema could only aspire to. An instant connection that was nearly missed. A divide of 4,000 miles and an Atlantic Ocean. An almost-marriage. A tour supporting The Big Moon, Dream Wife and Wet Leg, and six-figure streams. The magic of their ethereal, guitar-driven sound is built not on romantic love, but something immeasurably stronger: female friendship. Louise Macphail and Kristin McFadden almost didn’t meet at all. Kristin travelled from her native Chicago to join the same course as Louise last minute in London, and as soon as she saw her perform in front of the class, Louise as good as musically proposed to her right there and then: “Will you be in my band?” After sparking a friendship with Juliette “Jules” Jackson and Fern Ford of Mercury Prize shortlisters, The Big Moon on tour, the pair volunteered to assist Prima Queen on the production of singles “Chew My Cheeks” and “Invisible Hand”, encouraging them to elevate their sound to new emotional and musical heights through experimentation. For Prima Queen, it’s these moments of shared intimacy in their music, entrusting closely guarded feelings, that creates a togetherness they love to feel with their audience: “Our songs mean so much to us, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world to see someone really belting out our lyrics at a show.” Resonance, above all else, is what Kristin and Louise are striving for.

Prima Queen’s set at last year’s sister festival Live at Leeds in the City reached capacity in minutes, so make sure to head over to the Dork Stage early to secure your spot!