The loud, the strange and the local all share a stage at G! Festival

G! Festival is the kind of music event that feels like it was dreamt into existence and for three days each year transforms Syðrugøta – known simply as Gøta to locals – into something that feels like you wandered into a village fête on the outskirts of Glastonbury and found a low, hidden door in a wall leading to a utopia where the music is nothing less than fantastic, and everything is connected by solidarity and togetherness.

Despite Faroese society and politics leaning relatively conservative – with roots in traditional Christian values – strong bonds and tight-knit local circles mean music tastes here easily cross the genres – from experimental electronic performances, punk, and hip hop to choir traditions. Without rigid scene boundaries, the environment for creative expression is wide. The Hoyma concert series – another Gøta-based event from the same team as G! – even sees entirely unplugged sets taking place in the homes of locals, with the town opening their private living rooms to strangers and visitors.

We’ve written about G! a lot in this magazine: it’s a little festival that stands out as one of the best, and, as booker Høgni Lisberg tells me, is in debt to its audience who come back year after year: “We have earned people's trust. They expect to experience something different and unexpected. We do not take that trust lightly, and we are very dedicated to bringing in truly great live acts to maintain it. We have often shaken things up with unusual bookings, but when you keep doing it for many years, it becomes part of what people expect and part of the festival's identity.”

The festival aims for an even balance between foreign and Faroese acts but given the diverse audience - across age, taste and background – I wonder about the challenges Høgni and his team face each year in curating a lineup that ticks all the boxes. It’s a relatively simple approach, he replied: “With the Faroese acts, we want to give space to artists who are working on new music or have tours coming up. We also keep a close eye on what's new and make sure promising artists play G! as soon as they're ready. At the same time, we'll usually have one or two established Faroese acts who can pull in a big crowd, but we're careful not to let nostalgia take over. Most of the programme is about what's happening now.”

There’s a constant dialogue between the festival with Faroe Music Export, and TUTL, the local record label which has been a linchpin of the Faroese music scene for more than half a century. Its founder Kristian Blak first gave a home to musicians wanting to play jazz and experimental music back in the late 1970s and the now 79-year-old musician was also responsible for creating one of the Faroe Islands' own microgenres. Back in the mid-80s, ‘Grotto music’ emerged as a site-specific genre where artists play inside remote, inaccessible sea caves to harness the natural acoustics, which cause notes to overlap and hang, allowing them to build layers to their performance.

Four-piece Tunghoyrt are among those taking their first steps with G!. After being featured in the Sement music showcase and competition last year, they were invited to open the 2025 edition and are back to close out the festival’s second day. Just like its Icelandic equivalent Músiktilraunir – Sement represents the polar opposite of what you’d expect from a battle of the bands, or a Pop Idol-type event. A snapshot of the Faroese music scene that welcomes experimentation, it’s been responsible for helping launch some of its more boundary-pushing artists – among them Marius DC, gówa, Joe & the Shitboys, and AGGRASOPPAR; all won the competition this decade and feature this year at G! in some form. Sement’s role in the careers of Faroese musicians is undeniable: several of its finalists have found their way to showcases in the US, UK, Iceland and Denmark after winning.

Tunghoyrt’s set this year is a massive leap in their sound and songcraft from 12 months ago. While it’s flush with the harder edges of 90s grunge-metal, they’re a tight unit reinforced with a hardcore sensibility and the combination feels remarkably fresh right now – they’d fit easily on a lineup with the likes of Lip Critic, YHWH Nailgun and Truck Violence. Less than 12 hours after coming offstage following a 1.30am set, they’re back playing a pop-up show on an industrial boat in the Gøta bay, so tired they’re struggling to address the mostly international crowd in English but still turning in show with the same energy they had hours before.

Musicians Eivør Pálsdóttir and her sister Elinborg were both born in Syðrugøta, and both are back here again to play G!, with the elder sister – arguably the Islands' greatest music export – reuniting with Clickhaze, the legendary band who last performed here over 23 years ago and whose members have become central figures in the archipelago's cultural development across the 21st century.

Clickhaze is to Eivør what Sugarcubes and KUKL are to Bjork, someone helpfully informs me. Drummer Høgni Lisberg – who we have met already – books G!, while guitarist Jón Tyril is one of its founders and whose home I reside in during my time in Gøta. I see him roll home at 6am, following the Clickhaze set, as I head to the airport. Bassist Jens Thomsen found fame internationally as a composer and sound artist, with installations using mountains as instruments, collaborations with Yann Tiersen and Travis, and a permanent audio piece transmitted 24/7 via FM radio in the seven-mile subsea tunnel we pass through on our way to Gøta.

To understand the importance of Clickhaze, one only needs to glance at the audience during their set: joyful tears and audible goosebumps reach a crescendo when original member Petur Pólson joins the band onstage to perform a few verses of “Wall of Silence”. Two strokes that initially paralyzed his speech and entire left side have meant the poet and musician now uses a wheelchair and is accompanied by his daughter onstage to the most applause I hear during the three days in Gøta. The beach stage's tiny capacity is so full, there are even islanders standing in the sea to catch the set. "These people once changed the way I thought about music and lit a fire within my heart that still burns,” Eivør will later write of the show.

What Clickhaze has become represents in many ways the interconnectivity of the music scene here. Wander between sets at G! and you’ll easily spot the same faces popping up during sets. Channelling Big Thief and First Aid Kit, Guðrið Hansdóttir's perky take on folk rock comes with a backing band seemingly made up of some of the Islands’ best musicians (there’s Marianna Winter beside her onstage!), while at rapper Marius DC’s set I lose track of the bodies on stage (among them Dania O Tausen and RSP).

Born Marius Dam Christophersen, Marius DC began rapping aged 14 and now, at 22, is a voice of wisdom way beyond his years when we talk about the music he’s become a key voice in defining here in the Faroes. The son of Niels Uni Dam - aka Spark Buzz N, the frontman and rapper of hip-hop group MC-Hár – Marius originally wanted to direct films or be a pro-wrestler until hearing Chance the Rapper’s 2013 Acid Rap mixtape changed his life. “You need to understand that there’s not a rock scene here,” he tells me, “and there's no punk scene. There's not an emo scene, or a rap scene. You have people who work within those genres that intermingle with each other, but there's just not enough people for you to have major living, breathing environments and ecosystems within all these specific genres. We're just all together in the same fucking tiny backstage area!"

Tórshavn duo Swangah were the ones who really kicked things off for hip-hop on the Faroes, around the start of the last decade, Marius tells me – "They were the godfathers of Faroese hip hop in the truest sense” – but the local take on rap runs wide: from the avant garde experimental Silvurdrongur, whose debut Silvurplata dropped just as Marius was kicking off his career, to the playful collective RSP, repping a new wave of Faroese rappers Marius has linked up with; rising stars Nettup also get a shoutout.

His own music isn’t really bound by the genre either, argues Marius, and this is something reflected in his live show too. “I did an R&B song with Dania yesterday, you know –“Sig mær” – and “Babyrockari” got full on rock with a mosh pit and everything. Obviously I have some things that are just straight rap but I'm not only a person who listens to rap and I'm not only a person who feels like rap. Music is all about emotion, and you don't always feel like a Kendrick Lamar song. Sometimes you feel like a Joni Mitchell song or a Bob Dylan song. Sometimes you feel like a Joe & The Shitboys song….”

At a secret set from Marianna Winter the night before G! kicks off, I clock Marius completely hypnotised by the performance, and delivering the biggest cheers in the room after every single song. It’s something akin to Yung Lean mouthing every word at a Taylor Swift show and captures quite beautifully the musical mycelium of the Faroese. “Humans are so much more than one thing,” Marius gleefully tells me, “and that also goes for genre. I think it also allows you to sort of take from the best of all of these different things. I've been so inspired by pop artists in the way I put on my show - it’s like a party on stage. But I've also been so inspired by punk shows and the distinct energy you have there too.”

Trygvi Danielsen stands out as one of the Faroes’ most fascinating artists. He's a writer, filmmaker, poet, musician and a member of experimental "flower punk" collective AGGRASOPPAR, along with Eyðfinn Lamhauge and Dania Tausen. But it's his solo musical project Silvurdrongur – the "silver kid" – that's become the other big talking point at G! this weekend. What was birthed in a rap and spoken-word space has rapidly moved into something way more ambitious, and indefinable.

Trygvi's approach to his music refreshingly eschews almost every rule that musicians are meant to follow. "I don't want an algorithm-driven life on social media which just uses you and me to gather data, sell advertising and create as much social division as possible," he told Faroese newspaper Dimmaletting back in April this year, and he sure as hell followed through. His latest record Bønir (meaning both "prayers" and "beans") was pressed to few handfuls of CDs that sold out quickly – and that's the only way to hear it. It's not on streaming, you can't find it on Bandcamp, and there's not even a second of it on any social account. Want to get in touch? Hit him up on email and he'll add you to his mailing list, hosted on German email service, Tuta, which is – of course – completely encrypted and collects no data.

"I'm doing the opposite of what you should do, you know," Trygvi tells me when we talk the day after his show. "I'm going totally offline, like non-non-line, as I call it. Because I'm only releasing physical CDs, and only 100, it means there's only so many people that can hear the music. It creates this effect that means people are curious and are interested, and even desperate to hear it because they can't. Art is so fucking easily accessible everywhere. You can just click whatever [and it's] so fucking boring. It shouldn't be so fucking easy, you know? Art should be brutal and trying and difficult and exhausting and challenging!"

I offer this information to add context around how special it feels to be among those at his set. My first experience of Silvurdrongur - two years ago at Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík - saw him emerge onstage dressed like a Russian grandmother and delivered a set that left me impotently grasping for adjectives. Somehow it felt spiritually – but perhaps partially musically – connected to Tom Waits, King Krule, Frank Ocean, Aphex Twin and even Kate Bush. This time his sonic universe is even wider and more defined, and his staging beyond anything I've seen at a festival this size. There are around 15 bodies onstage, robed like we're witnessing an Ásatrú ceremony. It's a choir, the harmonies catching on the breeze, with Trygvi coming on after several minutes, damsel-dressed in an amethyst purple gown. Is he the leader or the sacrifice? I'm not sure. There's a glorious duet channelling drag with a guest vocalist that Joe & The Shitboys' Fríði (more on him later) tells me is his cousin... and then the guitars hit a level of heavy that would appease Trent Reznor. It's a show that revels in its relationship to volume, taking us on a real journey from start to finish, with the ever-present hills of Eysturoy a key part of the scene setting.

"I'm a late bloomer," Trygvi tells me when I ask about the show. "I'm mid-30s, and I feel like I'm in my prime right now in some some ways, and releasing new music that's abrasive in a way that speaks to our current world situation and a particular Faroese situation. These new songs combined with the old songs – and even the older songs – in a new arrangement was really effective yesterday, it really worked. People knew a lot of the songs."

A fact that's repeated quite often during my time in the Faroes is that there's only two punk bands here and Joe & The Shitboys is one of them. They’ve built fanbases far beyond the Faroe Islands, with tourmate Iggy Pop notably declaring them "the greatest band in the world,” as Høgni Lisberg reminds me. G!’s been pivotal to their story, giving them their first major stages and they’re one of the few Faroese bands that are connecting with a younger and more politicised generation of music fans overseas.

Much of this success has to do with abrasively charismatic “Joe”, aka Fríði Djurhuus. "I've always loved heavy music," Fríði tells me on the festival’s closing day. Growing up in a village of around 300 people, just the other side of the hills that frame the bay in Gøta, Fríði was raised by a Sunday school teacher mother. "There was fuck all to do growing up," he explains, "and I got pulled into a metal band who needed a singer – I'd never sang before and the show was in two days."

That performance was, he tells me, terrible - but the otherness of singing heavy music was very appealing to someone who grew up bored and with undiagnosed ADHD and bipolar disorders, Fríði explains. "If you're playing heavy music, people are gonna think you're strange in some way. You don't really fit in. You're always gonna be that guy when you come to the birthday party or something... either you come to peace with that, or you stay a poser. And I'm gonna be the weird one, and I do have some things on my mind that I want to talk about. Joe & The Shitboys is what I do onstage and it's an expression of so many different things – yeah, it's political, but it's also funny. It's very high energy, and these are things that I have inside me."

Being in only one of two punk bands in the Faroes has created a sort of celebrity, Fríði explains – "and you need to be brave because you're gonna get shit. Usually it's people approaching me for discussion on a night out, and they try to provoke me. I always need to be very calm, no matter how pissed off I am, because otherwise people are going to think I'm so fucking arrogant and I can't handle anybody having a different opinion." Fríði's even had partners break up with him because they couldn't hack the negative attention he gets: "It's tough sometimes. Most people are nice though, I genuinely believe that most people are nice... but when you stick out, then you get the attention of the not-so-nice people."

Fríði's relationship with the Faroes is one that most neurodivergent kids stuck in small towns across the world will recognise – albeit with a heightened level of isolation. "You get depressed while you're bored, and then boredom just ends up always connecting with depression, and I just need something to shake that. I love being in the Faroes but I don't want to be stuck in the Faroes and that's what it felt like for most of my life until I realised how easy it is to leave for a bit and then come back." Moving to Copenhagen for a year aged 23 was a life-changing moment for Fríði: "There's shows happening all the time – I paid 140 Kronas to see Napalm Death, and when Shitboys play in the Faroes we'd take at least 200 for our shows so Napalm Death was cheaper!"

Why make heavy music here, I ask Fríði? "We have a lot of musicians per capita, but it is a small population and that means if you want to do something, you just have to do it yourself, and you don't really have anybody to mirror yourself with. It comes about from what you personally listen to and get inspired by."

For the young punk, that inspiration came from Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra, Black Flag's Keith Morris, and - surprisingly - the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin. "His mentality – the wrestling mentality – is always: 'this is the room, this is what's going on. Confront it. You're putting on a show.' Wrestlers are always improvising and we don't plan anything out either. I make the set list an hour before, I don't know what I'm gonna say or anything like that."

Audiences at G! are very open to the music Joe & The Shitboys make and they embrace the angry, ebullient provocateur who strides on stage wearing a dress, in the early hours, to close the festival’s opening day. “The music of these islands for most of history, it's just been vocal based,” says Fríði. “I've gotten some blowback for singing in English, but it's easier for me to write in English and I want my music to reach more people.”

He recalls when G! booked Swedish melodic death metal band Arch Enemy in 2010. “There's so many old people who don't really like the sound of a distorted guitar and they’re still saying that’s the greatest show they've ever been to. That was 16 years ago! But it moves you, and that’s perfect for us. It's a great way to open people up to new music, and G! has always had that.”

Høgni Lisberg also remembers Arch Enemy as one of the festival’s prouder moments, and a gamble that paid off: “Bands like Arch Enemy and Meshuggah are huge names internationally within metal, but we might only have 50–100 true metalheads in the Faroe Islands who really know what they're about. When you completely blow up the scale and proportions like that, I think those are some of the bravest moments in G! Festival's booking history.”

The experience of playing across the world has made Fríði appreciate the unique musical eco-system back home too, and echoes Marius DC’s words from our earlier conversation: "It's a music scene," he tells me. "It's not a punk scene or a hip hop scene. It's a music scene. We all play together, and we are guests at each other's shows. We come to all the shows: we want to see our friends, we want to make them happy and we want to make new friends. Everybody here is just fighting for Faroese music culture!"