"There aren’t a lot of new rock acts to choose from." Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis says she'd like to book more rock bands for the festival, shares her hope that the genre "will emerge again" one day

Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, June 29, 2024 — (Image credit: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)

With the final day of Glastonbury 2024 upon us, festival organiser/booker Emily Eavis says that she would have liked to have seen more rock bands on her family's farm over the past weekend, but that this wasn't an option this year as “there aren’t a lot of new rock acts to choose from.”

In a new [paywalled] interview with The Telegraph, Eavis admits that, no matter who is booked for the iconic English festival, inevitably she will receive criticisms from some quarters that the line-up is “too rock, too grime, too hip hop, too pop”, but argues that the bill each year “reflects what’s happening in the music world at the moment.”

“There aren’t a lot of new rock acts to choose from if I’m honest,” Eavis tells the British newspaper. “Hopefully that will emerge again, my heyday was 1995 with Pulp and Oasis and Radiohead... and that was great but music changes all the time and right now this is where we’re at.”

The Pyramid Stage headline acts for this year's festival are Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA, with the genre-straddling PJ Harvey arguably the only artist on the site's main stage who could be classified as a “rock” act, for those who insist on labels.

However, the Louder-endorsed likes of IDLES, Fontaines D.C., Voice of Baceprot, High Vis, Yard Act, NewDad, The Last Dinner Party, Problem Patterns, Kim Gordon and Psychedelic Porn Crumpets either played, or are due to play, across the site from June 28-30.

Back in May 2019, Metal Hammer's Merlin Alderslade saluted the Glastonbury team for finally "embracing" metal, as the organisers had made space in the iconic Shangri-La fields, two years previously, for the Earache Records-curated Scum stage, which saw performances from Napalm Death, Ho99o9, Hacktivist, Wormrot and more.

Last year's event, meanwhile, featured a main stage headline set from Guns N' Roses on June 24, Queens Of The Stone Age topping the Other Stage bill on June 25, a 'secret' set from Foo Fighters, and appearances from Nova Twins, Manic Street Preachers, The Hives, The Hu, Maneskin, Viagra Boys and more.

How to rewatch Glastonbury 2024: No matter where you are

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.