The 14th annual Hopscotch festival is returning to fill the streets of downtown Raleigh with music lovers and bands from all over the country. The festival will take place Sept. 5-7 with stages at Moore Square and City Plaza, along with club shows at eight local venues.
It’s that time of year again. Families line up on Cates Ave. giving tearful goodbyes with mattress pads in hand. There’s a U-Haul or old couch in every other yard on Clark Ave. Students are getting back to their school routines, and everyone is scheming for a Hopscotch pass.
The festival took a break during the COVID-19 pandemic and returned to its full capacity last year. The 2023 lineup was rather historic, featuring American Football’s first performance in the state and Pavement, who hadn’t held a show in North Carolina since 1999.
Zane Acord, a band member of The Thing, is playing Hopscotch on Sept. 5. He offered his insight on the attitude the audience should bring to the festival.
“I think everyone should move,” Acord said. “I think everyone should just dance and feed off the energy. Our mentality is, we’re playing to people for the first time, but we pride ourselves in making dance music. And it doesn’t have to be pinned down to EDM or what we think dance music is in current culture and society, but we like to think it should make you move, you know?”
Acord reflected on the experience of playing crowds of wildly different sizes, from small dives to massive festivals and everything in between.
“This has been an awesome year of eye-opening experiences, and it is a complete honor to be on stage with so many of those musicians that we either grew up loving or love right now. Yeah, it’s an honor,” Acord said.
Maddy Moore, a fifth-year studying textile engineering and a DJ with NC State’s own WKNC, attended Hopscotch in 2023. It was the first music festival she had ever attended, and she felt that her experience was worth the price.
Music festivals at the scale of Coachella or Lollapalooza are a thousand dollar, multiple day excursion. Hopscotch, however, provides a unique opportunity due to its location in the Triangle, which is home to eight colleges and universities.
“I know that music festivals can be stressful,” Moore said. “But, since I am local to Raleigh, it wasn’t super expensive, and the parking situation was pretty good, so I wasn’t stressed about any of that kind of stuff.”
Hopscotch tickets start at $159 for General Admission three-day passes and increase as the festival date approaches. Compared to current concert prices for large pop musicians, this is a high-value offer for consumers, especially student consumers.
This isn’t even to mention the rich alternative music history of the Triangle’s college scene. 80s bands such as Let’s Active and the Db’s hailed from Chapel Hill. Iconic hip-hop acts Lords of the Underground, met while attending Shaw University, and Little Brother formed at North Carolina Central University.
The tradition of alternative music has stayed alive in the state since then, and this year’s Hopscotch lineup showcases the up-and-coming sound from the mountains. Headliners include North Carolina’s own MJ Lenderman, a talented singer-songwriter in his own right. Lenderman also plays with the band Wednesday and has now lent his drumming skills to Indigo de Souza.
Moore said she has seen Raleigh-based band My Sister Maura about four or five times at local shows, and she’s looking forward to seeing them open for an artist she’s been listening to since high school.
“I think for Hopscotch, to be able to get Faye Webster is kind of cool because you can see the change,” Moore said.”I feel like in 2014, like ten years ago, she wouldn’t come to Raleigh, just because, I guess it wasn’t on the map like that.”
Artists like Ty Segall, Pylon Reenactment Society and Tim Heidecker are all exciting additions to this year’s lineup, and might show a future relevance of North Carolina to the music industry.
“I’ve seen some other festivals popping up,” Moore said. “They’re kind of smaller, but I feel in the next ten years I could see Hopscotch being kind of at the same level as, maybe, Lollapalooza. Because, if they keep going in this direction, [they will] definitely gain more attention from bigger artists who would be more likely to headline.”
Hopscotch Festival takes place from Sept. 5-7 in downtown Raleigh.
