Music festival Hit The City: 5x must-sees

Effenaar is celebrating its 50th anniversary and treats the city to a new festival! At Hit The City, it's all about discovering new music. Whether you’re an indie fan or a lover of hip-hop, pop, garage, or singer-songwriters, you can indulge yourself in this three-day music festival. Where to start? We’ve selected five must-sees for you!

PLASMA

Inclusive platform PLASMA is back! With a dazzling program of talks, pop-up performances, and DJ sets centered around one theme: the urgency of collective intimacy. A talk about club culture is interspersed with pop-up performances and sets by DJs from PLASMA's own collective. Dance (and discuss) the night away in the industrial but intimate setting of Subbar.

Friday 15 October | Subbar

Sophie Straat

What happens when ‘smartlap’ (sentimental song in Dutch) meets activism? What started with a cargo bike and homesickness for Amsterdam, ended with an album full of songs about gentrification and sexism in the soccer world. Sophie Straat is a voice of our time and perhaps the new queen of smartlappen.

Friday 15 October | Stroomhuis

Hang Youth

They deliberately keep the middle between a funny art project, an angry tweet and a deadly serious punk band. Hang Youth is socially engaged and extremely anarchistic. With lyrics like "First your neighborhood gets demolished, then your rent goes up, that's how we live" (this text is much better in Dutch: “Eerst wordt je buurt gesloopt, daarna gaat je huur omhoog, dat is (ge)woonbeleid”), you can taste the sour inspiration that the band draws from the capitalist system. Spotify tip: BELASTINGDIENST.

Saturday 16 October | Dynamo

DADA

On Sunday, DADA will release its debut album 'Bijna Alles’ at Effenaar. The musician-writer from Eindhoven produced an album with personal stories about love, sorrow, pain and hope. Taboo-breaking songs that might help others struggling with the same shit. Want to know more? A documentary has just been released about DADA and the major themes in his life. He talks about his out-of-home placement, experiences with youth welfare organizations, drug and alcohol abuse, imprisonment, borderline, and of course the music.

Sunday October 17 | Effenaar

Homegrown

As an interdisciplinary platform, Homegrown produces music videos in collaboration with local organizations. Last year, they already made several productions for the online DDW edition, now you can finally see them in real life. Homegrown presents Reinel Bakole, Illnowledge and Gita Buhari in an intimate, offline setting at Fifth.

Sunday October 17 | Fifth

Festival Hit The City | October 15 - 17, 2021 | eight locations in the city | free entrance