Joy Formidable - Hop Farm Festival
“Ritz-tastic” someone shouted from the crowd in honour of The Joy Formidable’s lead singer and guitarist Ritzy Bryan as the three piece walked on to the stage and this was before the crowd were blown away by yet another amazing performance by the rocking trio. Playing the majority of their awesome debut album, 'A Balloon Called Moaning', they raised the already high roof with a mix of soft, hard, melodic, epic, killer tunes.
It did not take long for the packed Third Stage crowd to come alive, possibly for the first time of the festival. The set did not go without its hitches, with Matt Thomas’s snare drum breaking and having to run off stage for a replacement at the start of a song. However, Ritzy and bassist Rhydian Dafydd kept the crowd alive extending the next songs intro.
The Joy Formidable are not a band to just do the easy tunes that seem to have saturated the mainstream market, they love to play with effects including having a plethora of pedals for both guitar and bass, which are used to good effect, none more so during the finale of the last song, which saw Ritzy’s guitar being cruelly abused against the amp and dragged along the floor for the crowds pleasure.
The new songs that got aired on their recent UK tour show that there is going to be just as superb a second album in the offing, in particular The Ever Changing 'Spectrum Of A Lie', which is a classic in the making. All in all this was, despite some very stiff competition, mostly from this stage, the best set of the festival, could even hear the start of 'Austere' being sung long into the night on the campsite. It won’t be long till The Joy Formidable have global domination based on this showing.