End of the party almost ready, Paul Kalkbrenner and Vince Staples warming up in the band to begin to lower the Sónar blinds and, like Primavera Sound a few days ago, balance practically identical to last year’s. That is: 120,000 attendees … adding Sónar by Day (54,000 people) and Sónar by Night (66,000) and a slight increase in national visitors, with 70 percent of local audiences compared to 30 percent of international attendees coming from 90 different countries.
Sweet year, then, for a festival that adds for the first time the parallel activities and performances of OFFSónar, thus growing to 154,000 attendees. «It is a change in what we count as Sónar. “We have been talking about Sónar week for a couple of years now,” justified Ventura Barba, CEO of Advanced Music and co-director of the Barcelona festival.
This is, added another of the co-directors, Ricard Robles, to underline the role of the festival as a key piece in the international projection of Barcelona beyond the three days of feverish activity at Fira Montjuïc and Fira Gran Via. «If last year, with the 30th anniversary, the word was celebration, this year we want to talk about capital status. The content and the offer are demanding, and we managed to give Barcelona the image of the capital of electronic music and digital culture,” he explained.
With Laurent Garnier’s session and Jessie Ware’s concert still in the memory, co-director Enric Palau wanted to emphasize that the festival continues to grow strong in the balance between new experimental formats and synthetic hedonism. “Sónar is a celebration, and dance is the protagonist,” he recalled. A look at the lineup on Saturday night, with Charlotte de Witte, Floating Points or Kalkbrenner himself handling the strings and the dishes, only proved him right.
On the horizon, a next edition of which the inaugural concert has already been announced, a special evening at the Palau de la Música with music by Steve Reich and Raquel García-Tomas and performances by Lluïsa Espigolé, Helena Otero Correa and Frames Percussion; and a 2026 edition marked by the difficult concentration of the entire offer, daytime and nighttime, at Fira Gran Via.
And, with the renovation works on the Fira Montjuïc pavilions, Sónar by Day will be ‘exiled’ in the Sónar by Night venue for at least three years. “It’s time for reinvention,” said Robles, who recalled that this is not the first change of location that the festival has had to face. «We spent 19 years at the CCCB and it seemed impossible that it could be done better. Just because we go to the same venue for the day and the night does not mean that the festival will lose its essence. Every time we have changed headquarters it has been to improve,” he said.
