Where do you start with a fest whose schedule runs four days with 70, 80, who knows how many acts? How about starting at the start and ending at the end? Nice, A Fest runs four days, from Thursday, July 25 to Sunday, July 28.

Get your tickets here.

Music fests are a place to discover new music. So go in completely blind and see some bands you’ve never heard before. Or disregard that advice entirely and preview below some acts we’re excited about at Hump Day News.

Life is about choices.

Thursday

Dutch Tulips / Haasan Barclay

Pink Navel / Rusty Mullet / Sweet Petunia

The festival kicks off Thursday night with a show that probably approximates most closely the contours of a one-off show. Five bands, sure, but doors don’t open until the evening and all the action is in one spot: Crystal Ballroom.

If there’s one thing that screams ‘festival’ about the lineup, it’s the diversity of acts, everything from alt folk, hip hop, to rock. Eclectic. These local bands have been watching each other come & go for long enough, though, that they’ll ‘jig’ into each other’s ‘saw’ just fine.

Alt folkers Sweet Petunia are pros at opening fests. The guitar-and-banjo duo filled a similar slot at last year’s In Between Days (RIP, or will it rise again? No 2024 edition…). Watch for the whistling fills – good whistlers are increasingly rare.

Pink Navel is no stranger to the local festival circuit either. Hump Day News caught the solo hip hop act at last year’s Fuzzstival and Hope Fest (which, by the way, rebranded to Moon Over Salem – happening this year on 9/14).

Lately Devin Bailey, the artist behind the moniker, has been giving their folk sound a whirl, either as a solo acoustic act or teaming up with a partner as First Passionate Frisbee Club. Who knows what to expect, but last year’s full-length LP How To Capture Playful ripped. Shout out to Beedle.

Every music act is in a state of constant evolution, but Haasan Barclay has been one to especially watch.

The electro-inflected guitar slinger formed a band to turn a solo gig into a group effort. Sure, he still plays out on his own, like at this year’s We Black Folk Fest at Club Passim. It’s the full band outings, though, that showcases the biggest steps forward. Consider the journey traveled from the laptop jockeying of DUAL SHOCK to the live rhythms of the quartet we caught at The Rockwell last year. Giant steps.

Shout out to Rusty Mullet, who we caught at The 4th Wall, and Dutch Tulips, another In Between Days veteran. Seriously though, when’s In Between Days coming back? There was talk of it expanding from a two-day to three-day fest, and then it just disappeared entirely.