Goldenvoice has long been the architect behind music culture’s biggest proving ground. Coachella remains the flagship: part spectacle, part ritual, pop’s closest thing to a world’s fair. And even when it occasionally stumbles (or lets Travis Scott headline), the infrastructure remains unmatched: global headliners, deep cuts for crate-diggers, and just enough spontaneity to keep the skeptics guessing.
But as the music landscape has atomized, Goldenvoice has recalibrated. In a post-monoculture world, where no one channel tells us what matters and the “canon” feels more like an outdated folder in your mental Dropbox, the company has leaned into precision. Their newer festivals – Just Like Heaven, No Values, and (pertinent to this review) Cruel World – aren’t trying to hit every demographic. They’re built to serve specific generations and subcultures, hyper-targeted experiences for people who still care deeply about something.
It’s a strategy that makes sense in the era of algorithmic sprawl. MTV no longer funnels your attention toward an ordained few. There’s no Matt Pinfield solemnly telling you which post-punk deep cut or Britpop B-side is going to save your life. Instead, your TikTok FYP morphs every hour – jumping from gothic cabaret to skate punk nostalgia to hyperpop breakdowns. Taste is tribal now, and in this landscape, Goldenvoice’s niche festivals feel like anchors.
If Just Like Heaven is Coachella for the MySpace class (Rilo Kiley reunions, Vampire Weekend beach-fit vibes, and an unspoken agreement that the first time you heard “Helicopter” by Bloc Party was definitely not in your college dorm while playing Guitar Hero), then Cruel World is something else entirely. It trades the deep Vs and disco sweat of indie sleaze for the slow, deliberate pulse of a Bauhaus bassline – vinyl corsets, smeared kohl, and the scent of hairspray and regret.
Pasadena’s Brookside, nestled in the shadow of the Rose Bowl and typically home to golf carts and film execs from South Pasadena’s quiet elite, has taken on a strange new holiness. It’s sacred ground now: part gathering, part algorithmic fever dream. One weekend it’s millennials in sensible fits, rolling in with boutique finds and camping wagons — eager to introduce their toddlers to the song that once opened Mommy’s first CD-R mix. The next, it’s goths in fishnets, vinyl corsets, and faded Siouxsie shirts, chain-smoking American Spirits and mouthing along to lyrics like scripture.
Just Like Heaven and Cruel World aren’t opposites. They’re companion pieces. A diptych of curated longing. And Pasadena’s Brookside is where those memories get to stretch out, side by side, on the same grass. Cruel World isn’t just a festival. It’s the algorithm’s most poetic glitch – where niche meets need, and nostalgia becomes present – just for one day.
“ You want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.”
It’d be easy to assume Cruel World is just a goth convention with better lighting – a weekend of eyeliner and ennui, soundtracked by Disintegration on repeat. But the ‘80s weren’t just black lipstick and existential dread – they were also neon synths, romantic ambition, and melodies built to last decades. That contrast is best embodied by two acts that helped define its sound. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) and Alison Moyet showcased how they were architects of pop hooks so indelible they still sneak into films, playlists, and dance floors without needing an introduction.
There’s a specific kind of confidence that only comes from surviving decades of trend cycles: OMD opened with “Tesla Girls” and dropped “If You Leave” fourth. The prom anthem that defined a generation, casually tossed into the early set like a flex. Then came “Enola Gay,” a pop banger delivered alongside mushroom clouds and historical dread. Andy McCluskey – part frontman, part agitator – commanded the crowd with sly charm. Perfectly timed and delivered with the ease of someone who’s been winning over crowds for decades.
Alison Moyet had an opposite posture. Her power was quieter, but no less commanding. Before the solo acclaim, she was one half of Yaz — the duo Vince Clarke formed after leaving Depeche Mode in search of something more intimate. Yaz didn’t just ride the early synth-pop wave, they helped script it. They made machines feel real. And for anyone who’s tried to lace a dance floor with melancholy ever since, that’s the blueprint.
Her voice hit like memory and muscle – still bracing, still cut with character. “Only You” and “Don’t Go” weren’t treated like museum pieces. They were alive, charged, gently devastating. Her solo work held its ground too, reminding the audience that Moyet isn’t just an icon from a beloved duo. She’s an entire arc of synth-pop history; rooted in it, shaping it, and still singing above it.
New Blood, Same Pulse
If OMD and Alison Moyet embodied legacy, Nation of Language and Chelsea Wolfe carried the torch forward. Younger than most of the crowd and the bands, yet completely in tune with the festival’s wavelength. They clarified what Cruel World actually is: not a nostalgia trip, but a tonal commitment with aesthetic fidelity.
Nation of Language came out with the kind of clean, cool confidence you only get when you know you’re playing a festival with people who actually get it. “This is easily the coolest festival we’ve ever been a part of,” frontman Ian Devaney said, and it felt honest, like a band more used to opening for contemporaries at Knockdown Center than sharing a stage with synth-pop demigods. They’ve become the unofficial narrators of New Brooklyn, where immigrants from Dime Square drift south to Red Hook Tavern – trying to remember how to care about music again. Their set shimmered with earnest poise, as if they’d studied Low-Life and Sound of Silver not to mimic, but to understand.
Then there was Chelsea Wolfe, who didn’t so much take the stage as summon it into a darker timeline – like the Black Dahlia reborn and back for bloodlust. Her set played like a séance disguised as a performance – light as a feather, stiff as a board, delivered through drone, distortion, and total command. If Lana Del Rey took acid, wandered into her older sister’s record collection (Siouxsie, Swans, Cocteau Twins, maybe a little Dead Can Dance) and came back speaking in riddles, you’d get something close.
Wolfe’s set was pure atmosphere – distilled intensity, equal parts ritual and reckoning. She blurred the line between performance and possession, turning aesthetic into conviction. Nation of Language moved with studied clarity; Wolfe unraveled with force. Together, they made a case for something rare: that the new class doesn’t need to mimic the past. They’re already speaking its language – just in a voice all their own.
The Sophie’s Choice of Set Times Conflicts
At 7 PM, the most painful set conflict of the day hit: Garbage or DEVO? You couldn’t be in both places. You had to choose between the noir elegance of Shirley Manson’s defiance and the art-damaged chaos of Akron’s finest agitators.
Garbage took the main stage not with bombast, but with reverence. “We honestly weren’t sure anyone would come,” Shirley Manson said early on. “Because, well, DEVO!” With that said, the crowd didn’t budge. Because for many, Shirley is the headliner – someone who helped define not just the rough edge of the late ’90s, but the very politics that came baked into it.
Yes, it was nostalgic, but no less powerful for it. “Stupid Girl,” “Only Happy When It Rains,” “Push It,” and “I Think I’m Paranoid” landed with urgency – not as relics, but as reminders from an era when rebellion came shrink-wrapped in pop hooks and pop still had bite. Garbage never quite fit the mold, and that outsider charge still hangs off them – grizzled, defiant, and allergic to assimilation.
On the opposite end of the park, the Ohio legends were unraveling a different kind of gospel – less heart, more circuitry. They walked onstage in black quiet luxury and opaque sunglasses, standing stiff like tech CEOs fresh off a panel titled “The Future of Disruption.” A lack of movement, and just the eerie calm of men who might try to sell you crypto during an economic collapse. But instead of announcing a pivot from generative AI to brain chips, they slowly began peeling off their layers to deliver a strange display of sonic absurdity.
Hazmat suits were pulled on. Red energy domes were mounted. Movements turned robotic, then spastic. And just like that, DEVO became DEVO again.
Their set wasn’t nostalgic. It was diagnostic. “Don’t Shoot (I’m a Man),” “That’s Good,” “Whip It” – each song a jolt of surrealist critique, delivered with the same deadpan intensity they’ve been weaponizing for over 40 years. But what once felt like satire now lands more like inevitability. Their sound is tight, their timing brutal, their entire aesthetic a collapse rendered in cartoon shorthand.
Nick Cave’s Prophetization
Nick Cave has been an enigma for four-plus decades, not by resisting categorization, but by dissolving it entirely. He’s penned brutal screenplays, scored films with aching intensity, and written novels that spiral between the sacred and profane. He’s a philosopher, a poet, an angelic muse, and a blasphemous shit-stirrer (when asked to pitch a sequel to Gladiator, Cave suggested that, instead of Paul Mescal lowering his voice an octave. Russell Crowe should return from purgatory to, I shit you not, assassinate Jesus Christ).
Cave moves through mediums and mythologies with equal weight. But perhaps his most profound offering is how he meets strangers in the dark. Through The Red Hand Files, his public letter project, he responds to questions about loss, faith, and meaning with a precision shaped by personal devastation – having endured the deaths of two of his sons. When a father wrote in, afraid his growing cynicism would poison his child’s worldview, Cave didn’t deflect. He responded:
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned… it can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism… Each redemptive or loving act… keeps the devil down in the hole.”
That’s the Nick Cave who stepped onto the stage at Cruel World – not just the singer, not just the myth, but the witness. Cave prowled a small ramp built into the crowd’s orbit, like a preacher at a makeshift altar — kneeling, reaching, gripping hands as if he needed their pulse to finish the lyric.
He opened with “Frogs,” shadowy and slow. Then “Tupelo,” all thunder and flood. “Jubilee Street” arrived like a confession, unraveling into something holy. But it was during “Wild God” that the night fractured open. When Cave screamed “BRING YOUR SPIRIT DOWN!”, he was demanding release. The call bypassed reason and went straight to the marrow, a raw burst of anguish. The music became a votive, lit for something larger and aching.
Then came “Hollywood.” “We’ve never played this before,” Cave said. “It’s extremely long … and it’s written for Hollywood.” What followed was 14 minutes of quiet devastation — the closing track from Ghosteen, delivered not as an encore but as an elegy. When he sang “Malibu is on fire,” no one reached for metaphor. The line felt immediate and unfiltered, like a memory brushing up against the present.
In Pasadena, still carrying the memory of smoke from January’s apocalyptic wildfires, the lyric cut deeper. This was a crowd that knew the color of burning skies and the weight of waiting for the wind to shift. There was a quiet understanding. When Cave says “Hollywood,” he’s not talking about the industry – he’s invoking a myth, built on dreams and rot in equal measure. In the timbre of his voice, he sang like someone who knows that while some wounds never close, some voices can still keep the devil down the hole.
New Order’s Rapturous Closing
If Cave held grief like a sacrament, New Order turned it into light. There’s a quiet symmetry between them. One built his mythology on the raw edges of personal loss; the other emerged from one of the most public tragedies in modern music. Cave lost children. New Order lost a frontman. Both took unspeakable grief and reshaped it into art that endures. And while their sounds couldn’t be more different, the impulse is the same: take pain, give it shape, hand it back to the world as something tangible.
Few bands have molded modern music like New Order. Born from the black hole left by Joy Division, New Order didn’t just survive tragedy; they rebuilt from it. Their sound was a contradiction from the start: danceable yet melancholic, angular yet lush, distant yet human.
The influence is immeasurable. “Blue Monday,” still the best-selling 12-inch single of all time, is the blueprint for electronic crossover. Without it, the distance between post-punk and club music might never have collapsed. No Pet Shop Boys. No LCD Soundsystem. No Chemical Brothers. No Skrillex. No Carl Cox. Entire genres owe New Order their floorplans. “Bizarre Love Triangle,” strangely but beautifully, has become a karaoke staple across East Asia — a soundtrack to heartbreaks and late-night confessions in cities a few kids from Salford could never have dreamed of setting foot in.
By sundown, the rail in front of the main stage was lined with people who’d been camped there all day. A group of Gen-Z goth girls told each other with total sincerity that nothing else today was going to sound as good as the drumkick in “Blue Monday.” Two rows over, a trio of dudes who looked like they’d driven in from an ASU frat party nodded in agreement. The algorithm might scatter us, but New Order still brings us back together.
They opened with Joy Division – “Transmission” and “Isolation” – not as gestures of nostalgia, but as foundation. No distancing, no reinvention; just songs played like instinct. “Age of Consent” shifted the energy, “Regret” kept it buoyant, and “True Faith” soared, loose but undeniable. Even “Plastic,” one of the newer tracks, pulsed with precision – a reminder that their grip on rhythm and atmosphere remains intact.
Then came “Blue Monday,” less a song than a detonation. The drum machine thudded, the bassline lurched, and the crowd erupted. People danced, screamed, even sobbed. Phones shot up to capture it, like proof. A woman near me gasped, “Oh my god,” as if she’d seen a former jilted lover. The euphoria was overwhelming – a collective release, decades in the making.
“Temptation” followed, glowing with nostalgia, its chorus drifting through the night like a half-remembered dream. And then, the final hymn: “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” No fanfare, no pyrotechnics, just the stark image of Ian Curtis on screen. What started with joy ended in elegy. A reminder of what put them on the map. An offering to the ghost that still lingers.
In the end, Cruel World wasn’t a goth gathering, a new wave revival, or a synth-pop séance. It was proof that nostalgia, done right, doesn’t trap you in the past. It threads you through it. Each set, whether drenched in fog or lit by LED fervor, felt like a message in a bottle sent from another era, arriving precisely when it meant to. The festival didn’t ask you to pretend it’s still 1985. It asked you to remember what made 1985 feel worth holding on to. And in a time when memory fades fast and culture fractures faster, maybe that’s the real miracle: a weekend built not just on what we used to love, but on the enduring belief that we’re still capable of loving something together, in the same place, under the same gray sky.
Words and photos by Eric Han
