Yasiin Bey Returns: The Forensics and Tirzah at Lido Fest 2025

Yasiin Bey & Alchemist return as 'The Forensics' debuting Bey's first music in almost two decades at Lido Fest 2025 in a profound and profoundly undanceable day of stunning, infrasonic tunes. Tirzah, Air, and Massive Attack also play.

Tirzah's sound (and her sleek yet funereal style: long, black hair; long, black dress) makes of the metronome a long blackness. Round its ferrofluid - pummelled into so many spiked ringlets by a sub stream of bass - her mantra-like lyrics take on a Holzerian affect. "Promises, promises, deals, deals" seems suddenly to describe the true rhythms of life, particularly those forged underground, in basements draped over by night, or magnetized by culture's extreme poles. Really, Tirzah deserves to be played in these little locked boxes, where forty sweaty people sway in a trance, and the singer is surrounded only by the little lights of eyeballs (promises) and teeth (deals). It was a redefinition of what you might expect a Stage 1 festival act to be, but Tirzah turned out perfect for that slot in a festival where the crowd are just starting to arrive, and everyone - very coolly, unbothered - rocks in the breeze, not really dancing but not really standing still, either. With drums like hotplates beneath their feet. Tirzah kept her locked box underground.

As if styled after these low frequencies, all the way to Massive Attack's red-eyed, political detonator (a stirring headliner that will get its own write-up, soon), the infra turned out to be the operating system for the day-fest. Yasiin Bey, who hasn't released an album for almost two decades, teamed up with Alchemist for the first UK live-set as their new duo (debuting music previously released only via NFC embedded in merch) suitably titled, The Forensics. Reappearing like it was a midsummer night on a magic stage, hidden in Central Park, pigeons cooed through imaginary trees at Bey, entering left, dressed like a trench-coat wizard - one part cypher sage, one part rambling hobo - tossing crumbs at the crowd from an oversized bag. The crowd, dutifully, moving forwards. Behind Alchemist's decks, a large display of starfall streamed before a loop of forensic architecture, various sites from around the globe. Bey presumably took, atop the sweatless wordplay requisite for a vet returning after so long, the added mantle of cosmically unifying them all. The resulting experience was a live album that revealed itself as surprisingly conceptual, a spiritual affair, but only via motifs and refrains, like a book of psalms. Bey's iconic, but previously ad-libbed catchphrase, "Peace, peace, peace, power, power", now an existential project. His exercise earned its psychedelic, ego-less return to enlisting the help of the entire audience to sing a childhood nursery rhyme and, after taking on galactical corruption with bullet sized bars, only bliss'd out smiles were left standing when he blew out the smoke: "Am I really gonna stay cute forever? The honest answer is, I fancy my chances,"