For the past 20 years, Reeperbahn Festival has taken over Hamburg’s prominent music venues and clubs, including Molotow, Grosse Freiheit 36, and Mojo. As the 2025 edition, running from 17-20 September, draws nearer, it’s time to share top picks among the hundreds of acts. As always, the aim of the festival is to promote organic music discovery.
25 must-see bands (in no particular order) include MØ, Dry Cleaning, Max Baby, Gardens, Gizmo Varillas, Annie-Claude Deschênes, Léonie Pernet, Pierre Kwenders, Rasha Nahas, MICH, Slate, Ebbb, Soft Loft, Nell Mescal, The Haunted Youth, Jude York, Night Tapes, Brodie Milner, Meduulla, Ash Molloy, Lézard, Melike Şahin, PORIJ, Honeyglaze, and Everything Everything.
Theme: Imagine Togetherness
In response to the current political landscape, Reeperbahn Festival chose the theme “Imagine Togetherness” for 2025. It aims to focus on solidarity and unity through the music represented. With this, while there’s no explicit mention of support, Palestinian musicians are featured in the lineup. More on the theme will be addressed at the opening show on 17 September.
One thing Reeperbahn Festival does make a statement about is its diversity, inclusion, and active effort to ensure a 50/50 gender split for both musicians and conference presenters booked. This is backed up by the festival being a Keychange lead partner since 2019. Keychange is a Europe-wide gender equality initiative launched at Reeperbahn in 2017.
Topics addressed at Reeperbahn Festival
With the theme, the conference aims to tackle topics such as DEI, streaming, rising costs of venue operations, and facilitating safe spaces. The festival recognises challenges the industry currently face with consolidating powers. It explores what such changes mean for new talent. Throughout the conference, representation from both major players including Universal Music and Amazon Music and independent labels like Partisan, and Mayway Records discuss how the music business is evolving.
