TRNSMT music review: Fontaines, Fiddy and flaming fahrenheit
It may still suffer the same gender diversity problems, but Kevin Fullerton found plenty of bands to be excited about at Scotland’s blockbuster music festival. Just don’t mention 50 Cent...

‘This is just like rapping at the mall,’ growled Schoolboy Q halfway through his set, and he wasn’t wrong. Despite the US rapper’s accomplished, knotted bars and the murky lope of his beats, something about his gangster lean (stacking bills, smoking bitches, you get the idea) left Friday’s afternoon’s TRNSMT crowd cold, even in the sub-tropical heat that burned the patrons of Glasgow Green all weekend. It begged the question: do the pop-chart loving audiences of TRNSMT really want rap in their line-up in 2025?
If 50 Cent is the answer to that question, then that answer is ‘sort of’. A relic from an era when the gangster rap genre had descended into overblown parody (being shot nine times is his version of a lengthy keyboard solo on a Rick Wakeman album), his lunkheaded approach to rhymes is easily digestible junk food that clogs the arteries and numbs the brain when stretched across an entire set. He likes bums. He’s partial to oral sex. And, well, that’s about it. At one point, he received a lap dance from a variety of backing dancers, variations on this wretch-inducing attitude to women punctuating his entire set. Unsatisfied with their single-minded failure to ever book a female headliner, TRNSMT organisers have instead found a performer with the most retrograde machismo on the planet (expect Andrew Dice Clay to headline next year with a reprise of his misogynistic nursery rhymes).
Despite your correspondent’s sour grapes, the crowd lapped up Fiddy’s ear-straining mumbling with fervour, his barely-there beats eliciting mid-2000s nostalgia for the older crowd while being enjoyed in vaguely ironic terms by anyone who was still a glint in their parents’ eyes when ‘In Da Club’ was topping the charts. What a relief that local hero Bemz was on hand to headline the BBC Introducing Stage and showcase rap at its most invigorating. He’s muscled up his sound with a full band, adding jittery jazz to his ever-expanding repertoire and giving his lyrics about growing up and getting on in life some extra heft. Balancing all of this would have been Kneecap, who were taken off the bill after band member Mo Chara was charged with a terror offence. Whatever your opinion on their removal, it’s undeniable that the festival lost a firecracker, generation-defining act.
That’s the requisite headliner chat out of the way (Biffy Clyro and Snow Patrol offered the kind of competent and enjoyable end-of-night fun you’d expect from TRNSMT, so let’s not spill too much digi-ink over them). How are some of the repeat offenders to the festival faring? Wet Leg are coming along nicely, transitioning from potential one-hit wonders to a Gen X throwback with songs that emanate razor-sharp wit. Confidence Man continue to have one of the more ecstatic live shows known to humankind, spraying champagne across the crowd while pulling off dance moves that explode with a ‘will they, won’t they start rutting halfway through a song?’ sexual chemistry. Norwegian pop delight Sigrid (pictured above) is still mining likeable pop with an inoffensiveness that’s charismatic rather than dull; she probably deep cleans her dressing room after every gig, just to be bloody nice to the staff. Finally, Fontaines DC (main picture) were the weekend’s unofficial headliners, in part because of Romance’s stadium-ready tunes but also because their outspoken stance on the genocide in Gaza has released a pressure valve for music-goers feeling impotent in a bleak political landscape. ‘Starburster’ may have provoked the biggest singalong, but ‘Free Palestine’ flashing on screen received the largest roar.
All that’s left is to award our Coolest Band Of The Festival Award, which goes to Vlure, Glasgow’s apocalyptic dance troupe who energised the BBC Introducing Stage with an approximation of a bear hug between The Prodigy, Underworld and a thousand underground hardcore acts. TRNSMT’s smallest stage could barely contain the mosh-pit chaos they produced. The same flaws persist at this festival every year (a dearth of female acts, a crowd more interested in star power than tunes) but its willingness to give rising Scottish artists a giant platform is something to be applauded.