Flow festival serves rock, electronics and recession pop

Flow Festival in Helsinki offered a mix of rock, electronic music and so-called recession pop, ERR music critic Neit-Eerik Nestor writes in a review of the event, held from August 14 to 16.

This year’s festival entered Nestor’s summer plans as soon as Pinkpantheress, described as one of contemporary pop’s major figures, was announced in the lineup. Around Christmas, her remix of “Stateside” with Zara Larsson, who was also due to perform at Flow, was the world’s number one song.

In spring, however, the festival announced that Pinkpantheress’s performance had been cancelled for unspecified reasons.

“For the first time, I went to Flow without the one concert I definitely wanted to see,” Nestor writes. The absence meant there was no single performance driving his trip or serving as an anchor for the festival. Instead, he found an unfamiliar sense of freedom, with more room to breathe but less anticipation.

On the ferry to Helsinki, Nestor noticed young people who appeared to be preparing for Zara Larsson’s concert. Larsson had continued touring since Pinkpantheress’s cancellation, and her album “Midnight Sun”, released in autumn 2025, still felt current during the summer.

Nestor speculates about whether the two artists’ popularity had changed, whether the festival had simply chosen Larsson over Pinkpantheress, or whether Larsson’s performance fee had influenced the decision. He concludes that the reasons no longer mattered because Pinkpantheress was not performing at the festival.

After arriving in Helsinki, settling in and having lunch, Nestor noticed the difference in his schedule most clearly. At previous Flow festivals, afternoons had involved rushing between performances to see as much as possible. This year, there was no need to keep running from one stage to another.

He arrived at the festival on the first evening at around 8.30pm. The first performer he heard was the Welsh singer Marina, who was known until the end of the previous decade as Marina and the Diamonds.

Nestor was surprised that Marina remained so active. The crowd in front of the main stage was smaller than he would normally expect on a Friday evening, and the parts of her performance he heard from a cautious distance sounded, he writes, like songs from the bottom five of the Eurovision Song Contest.

He also questioned whether some elements of the performance should remain in the past. When “Primadonna” began, Nestor moved away from Marina’s performance. He had previously regarded the song, mistakenly, as her only and biggest hit.

Nestor links Marina’s renewed attention to the current interest in “recession pop”, a style associated with shared values and elements of contemporary pop music. He compares the trend to the recent enthusiasm for Pitbull, while noting that not every part of the past can be carried forward.