Published in the Quad-City Times the week of Aug. 2, 2024

Hinterland Music Festival wrapped up last weekend in Saint Charles, Iowa, around 40 minutes south of Des Moines. 

The biggest music festival in Iowa has featured headliners like Zach Bryan, Bon Iver and Phoebe Bridgers in the past, with a typical tally of more than 10,000 attendees.

The 2024 lineup was stacked across the board, too, with 30 scheduled performers, including headliners Hozier, Vampire Weekend and Noah Kahan. 

But the 2024 Hinterland experience wasn’t exactly perfect. Temperatures over the weekend consistently creeped in the mid-nineties, with heat indices of over 100. Many fans fainted during the sets, and free water access on the general admission grounds was limited.

The crowds were massive on all three days, but especially on Friday and Sunday, with undercard performers Chappell Roan and Orville Peck drawing headline-level interest. This turnout only increased the water issue. Many fans on social media took to criticizing the festival, comparing it to past disasters like 2017’s Fyre Festival or 1999’s Woodstock. 

Analogies like that are a bit more intense than my personal assessment of things. But Hinterland was far from smooth, and farther from comfortable. Just ask my sunburned legs. 

Still, it wasn’t all bad. With a bill full of legitimate talents — like the next big country star Sam Barber, or gothic-Americana genius Ethel Cain, or theatrical British-pop quartet The Last Dinner Party — there was plenty to sing about in Saint Charles. 

Here are the bests and worsts of the hot, humid Hinterland Music Festival.

Best: Model/Actriz

I went in to the Model/Actriz performance without knowing their catalogue. The show started just after 12:30 a.m. at the Raccoon Motel Campfire Stage. The sort-of-secret stage is tucked in a cool, grassy ravine, and attracted a crowd of just a few hundred fans on Friday, many of whom were Quad-Citians. 

Molly Martin, who opened the stage, described Model/Actriz’s sound as “a mosquito strapped to an electric chair.” I’m here to confirm that that is an accurate and stellar definition. I raise her this one: audio of a train derailment, played at 10% speed. It absolutely rocked. 

Dressed in all-black except for a bedazzled silver conductor’s hat and frilled elbow-height gloves, Model/Actriz singer Cole Haden quickly earned the title of the most erratic and entertaining performer I’ve ever seen. The lanky, emotive singer meandered through the Campfire Stage crowd, walking at least 40 yards into the lawn to gyrate, seductively twirl a black boa and sing in fans’ ears. 

The music itself was a magnetic, metal mix of club beats and industrial synths. You could feel the bass under your ribcage, in the space between your muscles and your bones, in the saliva in the back of your throat. Just after 1 a.m., Haden applied lip gloss and lit a cigarette for a throat-scraping medley of lyrics from performers from earlier in the day like Orville Peck and The Last Dinner Party.

It was the perfect finale for an imperfect first day. 

Worst: Where’s the water? What’s the water?

I heard through the grapevine that water access was a problem at last year’s festival, and thankfully, this year’s Hinterland crew expanded the amount of water filling stations. However, the amount of fans expanded, too.

So the line to fill up your water bottle on Friday — at one of the four stations on general admission festival grounds — consistently tallied over 100 fans at a time. That’s just not enough access.

The situation improved on Saturday, as the crowd didn’t fill up quite as much, and the festival began allowing fans to bring in outside water. If you didn’t bring water or couldn’t stick it out in the lines, you were stuck with cans of the Hinterland-distributed River Water.

River Water was the talk of the fest, and not in a good way. With its sour, metallic taste and minimal digital footprint (their Instagram page has just three followers), I left most sips of River Water with more questions than answers. More water and better water were both needed this weekend. 

Best: Lizzy McAlpine

On record, I like a lot of Lizzy McAlpine’s stuff. “Ceilings” is a genuinely great single that deserved its internet virality, and I consider her to be one of the more creative acolytes of the whisper-singing-over-a-sad-guitar revolution. 

With a full band, though, McAlpine added dimension to songs that, off-stage, feel a little bit duplicative. From the tasteful spins of lap steel to the dynamic drum-thumping conclusions, it was outstanding.

Most of McAlpine’s songs — “I Knew” or “Drunk, Running,” especially — are dense with storytelling, conversational enough to feel intrusive. That feeling is only enhanced by McAlpine’s nonchalant stage presence. For most songs, she sat behind her piano with headphones on.

It turned the feeling of being a passive concertgoer into that of a backstage documentarian. On unreleased song “Spring into Summer,” you could hear McAlpine’s fingernails scrape across the guitar strings.

The 24-year-old’s youth was also apparent. She played a cover of “Bless the Broken Road,” but told fans she only knew it from the Hannah Montana movie, and that the song was recorded by The Rascal Flatts. She also rocked a University of Iowa tee, much to the delight of this eastern Iowa contingent. 

McAlpine was open about not being all that familiar with festivals, and feeling nervous about handling stage banter between tracks. This candor didn’t feel forced. Like her youthfulness, it was actually endearing, and enhanced the vulnerability of songs like “doomsday” and “I Guess,” the latter of which was the best of the evening.

The whole set felt like a handshake, or a one-armed hug between friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. As the sun set at the end of a sweltering Saturday night, that was needed. 

Worst: The heat

Word about the great lineup must have got around, because returning fans around the grounds indicated that the Hinterland crowd on Friday and Sunday had at least a few thousand more people than last year.

I believe it. Hinterland 2024 looked like Disneyland on a stimulant. And the high temperatures were consistently in the mid-90 degrees. The combination of crowds, heat and slim water supply made the first day, at best, frustrating, and at worst, dangerous. 

During many sets this weekend, bands had to stop their performance to get security’s attention for a fan who fainted in the pit.

Hippo Campus had to pull a double-play and start over their song “baseball” twice. With how hot the temperatures were Sunday, the worst of the weekend, the songs in the afternoon felt a little too perfectly titled.

The it’s like 199 degrees lyric on Chappell Roan’s “HOT TO GO” sounded like a statement of fact, and not a sensual plea. On “August,” Florida indie-rockers Flipturn turned up the heat, and lead singer Dillon Basse’s voice crackled with a humidity reminiscent of fellow Jacksonville natives Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The Japanese House lead singer Amber Bain joked that she should bleep out the title lyric in “Sunshine Baby.” Two people fainted during the set. 

“I’m so sorry. I respect every last one of you for bearing with (the heat),” Bain said.

Behind her banter, you could see a layer of true anger that fans had to sit in the oven. She told fans not to dance and save their energy instead. 

“You guys shouldn’t be fainting in the f*****g boiling sun,” Bain said. 

The Hinterland staff handed out cases of water to fans and even shared cups of ice early on Sunday, too. But it seemed like they were always two steps behind. The ice gesture quickly escalated from free ice, to $0.50 ice, to $1 ice, to, finally, you cannot buy ice because we are running out.

Best: Chappell Roan

The hype surrounding Chappell Roan’s set started with the release of absurd videos from the rising popstar’s Thursday Lollapalooza set, which Lolla told CNN was the largest daytime turn-out in the festival’s history. Then there was the instant sell-out of Roan apparel at the Hinterland merch tent on Sunday. 

Three minutes after 5:15 p.m., when Roan was scheduled to go on stage but hadn’t quite arrived yet, the sea of pink-clad fans was storming. They did the wave. They chanted her name.

And then, the Missouri-raised self-dubbed Midwest Princess arrived, and instantly proved all of the hype worthy. Roan opened with lightning pop hit “Femininomenon,” dressed in a nun’s outfit because, she later shared, it was appropriate for a Sunday.

The “Femininomenon” performance was one of the best live songs I’ve ever seen, worthy of sparking full-body chills on the explosive hooks and exorcistic bridges. Roan’s stellar choreography and campy visuals came to life on “After Midnight” and “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl.” 

“HOT TO GO” was arguably Hinterland’s Best Moment. The star’s biggest hit has a “YMCA”-style dance that she walked the crowd through. But it wasn’t necessary. Everyone knew it. There are very few festival acts in the world right now where you’ll see that kind of synchronization. 

Many have dubbed Roan the next in line for pop royalty, and this set proved all of it to be true. It’ll be astonishing, as soon as a year from now, that she performed this caliber of a setlist in a pre-sunset slot at all.

I was one who groaned about Roan not getting a higher booking, but the shortened set time incidentally worked in Roan’s favor. It gave her zero room for filler.

The 45-minute show delivered hit after hit after hit: flawless ballad “Casual”; sonic short-film “Red Wine Supernova”; vengeance anthem for the ages “My Kink Is Karma”; and most recent breakout “Good Luck Babe,” which verified Roan’s goosebump-inducing vocal vigor on its final hook. 

Chappell Roan has been everywhere. The “Pink Pony Club” of West Hollywood. The bedrooms of New York City in “Naked in Manhattan.” Lollapalooza. The top of the pop charts. 

But for a moment in the Iowa sun, the Midwest Princess came home and got Hinterland hot like Papa John. We should all be grateful. 

Worst: The lines

Lines at a music festival are to be expected. Complaining about them is almost a redundancy.

But the lines at the Hinterland entrance, especially on Friday and Sunday, were wicked. General admission fans who got in line around the time doors opened at 11 a.m. waited roughly two hours to get in. Most missed first act Odie Leigh on Sunday. 

The heat made it even worse. The Hinterland crew did, thankfully, hand out free cans of cold water at various stops along the general admission line on Sunday. But more entrance points were clearly needed. 

On Friday night, some fans waited for the complimentary shuttle back to Des Moines until almost 2 a.m., three hours after the fest ended. 

I’ve been to six different large-scale music festivals, as a journalist and as a fan, and none of them were convenient to get to or from. But Hinterland’s line efficiency would rank near the bottom of the list.

Best: The people

Because of the heat, it took a village to make sure everyone stayed safe and sane this weekend. As often as I was discouraged by the festival’s organization, I was heartened by the kindness of the staff and attendees.

Sometimes, concerts can bring the worst out of folks. They can get rowdy, frustrated or outright cruel toward their fellow fans. But I didn’t see that at all this weekend. 

Whenever a fan fainted due to the excessive heat, at least two dozen hands immediately thrust into the air, waving down medical staff for a swift response.

The bartenders, hamstrung by ice restrictions and the heat in their own tent, found a way to help, too. They filled up super-soaker squirt guns with ice-cold water and shot at anybody who requested while passing by. Those arctic blasts helped immensely. 

As the campgrounds dispersed on Sunday night and Monday morning, I watched many campers help their fellow Hinterlanders pack up tents and carry heavy objects to vehicles. 

Little gestures like these all weekend proved concerts don’t have to be spaces for hooliganism, but instead, can be a healing slice of humanity.

That’s the second best thing Hinterland gave me this weekend. After “Femininomenon,” of course.