Cultural highlights 2025: Sŵn Festival, Cardiff

Aled Singleton, with photos by Helena Lopes

Cardiff’s weekend-long music festival in mid-October complements a UK scene often typified by expensive tickets that sell out in a nano second.

Sŵn is affordable and the model is based on shows in multiple venues across the city. You buy a wristband for one, two or three days which allows festival goers to drop in and out.

This review is based on seeing 15 acts over Friday and Saturday. There is less critique of the music itself and more attention paid to the overall experience and what it offers for the cultural scene in Wales.

Sŵn has existed for nearly two decades. There are always bigger acts somewhere on the bills, but its strength is having a good range.

This year I went with first-time-Sŵn-er Helena, who planned some choices after listening to the Sŵn playlist. The festival app was kept updated to find times and venues and to find more about all the acts.

On Friday afternoon we collected our wrist bands from Canopi on Tudor Street and headed towards the downstairs venue at Clwb Ifor Bach. Clwb is perhaps the heart of the festival as there are two stages, two bars and many of the acts will end up playing here at some point in their careers.

After the sun had gone down we went to the absolutely packed downstairs Boho on St Mary Street, which hosted Scustin from Bray in Ireland. The singer came out from the stage and invited the audience to sing along, providing Matt Damon masks. All great fun.

A bit further away from the centre, Jacob’s Market has a fairly cool cellar space for live music with other rooms next door to sit, get a drink and take in a DJ set.

Here we saw Adjua, who led a multi-instrumental supporting band and mixed R&B with some jazz and other influences.

I liked the way that she was excited to play this gig in her home town. Helena had seen her playing bass guitar with a different act in Cardiff only a few days before.

Generously spaced

The programme offers a fair bit of time between acts and therefore encourages movement. Before Friday ended we visited Clwb Ifor Bach and St John The Baptist Church in the centre of Cardiff, before with a post-midnight show back at Jacob’s Market with some sweaty moshing to Welsh language rockers Breichiau Hir. It was the last chance to burn off any remaining energy.

Though Saturday morning started in a comfortable bed rather than a tent, the second day felt like being at a proper festival rather than a series of gigs. At the fresh and loud end of the scale, were MORN.

In all honestly I cannot quite describe what they played, but these guys loved being there and the sound seemed to bounce off the back walls and back into the audience.

A space for acts to connect and grow

The festival format provided bands at different stages in their careers. Helena and I agreed that Deadletter, who played at the Tramshed, the best act.

They had all the right components: a lead singer with charisma, a tight sound and saxophone which added something to every song.

Deadletter are not a huge band, but they have carved out a decent career. I felt like any of the smaller bands would take inspiration from them.

In this way Sŵn festival feels like it is a bit of a school for new acts and a pipeline for the future.

Serving a wider cultural ecosystem

We took time out from Tramshed to visit Canopi. On stage Cardiff R&B band Source inspired some serious dancing and crowd appreciation, but this space demonstrated another strength of Sŵn: to make longer-term connections.

There was local beer on sale and we could see how the former Cardiff Bus Social Club was being managed by the Sustainable Studio.

On a similar vein, Sŵn led to Cardiff Market being open on Friday evening for shoppers and food.

To end this review I reflect how Sŵn fits with the music scene in Wales.

At earlier iterations in 2011 and 2012, I remember going to Dempseys, Gwdihŵ, and Cardiff Arts Institute. These venues don’t exist anymore.

The scene has changed and Cardiff has a programme of summer one-day festivals dominated by bigger (and often older) acts playing in spaces such as the Castle, Principality Stadium and now Blackweir.

Personally, I enjoyed seeing Pet Shop Boys, Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins and so on, but I’m grateful that Sŵn exists to offers us venues and acts which we wouldn’t otherwise choose.

We get to sense a big range of indie-oriented live music plus acts who write and sing in Welsh.

Beyond Cardiff it is positive that Newport hosts Le Public Space and is about to have the second iteration of the Music Trail – happening on 27 and 28 March 2026.