Embedded Files
THE RIDDLE AT WILDERNESS FESTIVAL 2025: REVIEW
THE RIDDLE AT WILDERNESS FESTIVAL 2025: REVIEW
Controlled Chaos: Dance, Dare, and Disconnect
Controlled Chaos: Dance, Dare, and Disconnect
12th August 2025
This tucked-away dance music stage ditched mainstream polish for a wilder, more immersive energy – a curated storm of circus stunts, sweaty dance sessions, and face-to-face connection that made The Riddle a festival within the festival.
When people talk about festival immersion, they often mean an overload of light, sound, and spectacle – sensory chaos that sweeps you away and sometimes makes you feel a bit nauseous.
At The Riddle, that immersion feels a bit different. Yes, it’s hedonistic – foot-stomping, bass-thumping house; free-flowing drinks; and a crowd dressed in full cabaret regalia, led astray by roving performers who might pose you a question or lead you somewhere strange. But underneath the wildness, there’s a rare kind of intentionality; it's controlled chaos that feels deliberately curated rather than accidental.
That intentionality starts with the no-phones policy. On paper, it’s simple. In practice, it changes the whole energy of the dancefloor. The absence of a hundred raised screens reframes the space where lit-up eyes and teethy smiles, not devices, shine throughout the crowd. In a festival where much of the wider site leans towards the polished and Instagram-ready, The Riddle stands apart as a place where the music is the point – not the photo of you being at the music.
Music First – But Not Music Alone
It’s easy for ‘music-first’ spaces to sometimes end up a bit bare: great sets in a room that otherwise feels like an afterthought. The Riddle avoids that trap. This year’s circus theme pulled theatricality into the space without drowning it out. The single stretch tent set-up – enclosed enough to feel intimate, open enough to keep air flowing – was brought to life by colour, movement, and an endless low-level hum of natter and conversation. The spectacle supported the music, not the other way round.
The programming itself was exceptional. Returning favourites like Dombrance and Eats Everything brought their signatures but also took risks to offer something new, clearly feeding off the closeness of the crowd. Dombrance’s set – fully suited, playful, and synth-heavy – felt synced with the crowd receiving the rhythms. Eats Everything was similarly engaged, playing playful, bouncy tunes to keep up the energy. For artists like these, comfort is a catalyst; when a space makes them feel at home, they take the audience further out and on another sort of journey.
Newer names also brought fresh energy. From Jade Blakemore and Amy OS to George Plant and Freddie Fricker, there was a sense of variety without losing coherence, and these were some of the best sets of the weekend. Even with so many return acts, the weekend didn’t feel like a repeat of last year. Subtle shifts in curation, the improved tuning of the sound – crisper highs, warmer bass – and an unbroken single-stage layout all worked in its favour.
The Quiet Rebellion of Shared Space
The Riddle’s ethos – intimacy, curiosity, community – might not sound radical, but in the current UK festival landscape, it’s edging that way. It’s a quiet rebellion against the passivity that creeps into big events, where audiences can end up spectators rather than participants – watching an ant on a screen from hundreds of metres away in order to say you have ‘seen’ a certain act. Here, however, strangers danced together, conversations flowed between sets, and the room carried a sense of presence that’s increasingly rare to find.
This is also where The Riddle becomes more than just another stage. Its separation from the core Wilderness spectacle – physically tucked away, thematically self-contained – creates a kind of parallel festival inside the festival. It’s not competing with the main stage; it’s offering an alternative experience with controlled chaos at its core – wild but intentional, messy but meaningful.
Points for Growth
That’s not to say there’s no room for improvement. The most consistent complaint from punters was the queue. At peak times, it could take over an hour to get in – an understandable symptom of demand, but one that risks putting people off returning. The single-entry system, coupled with very busy toilets, meant there was a lot of queues and foot-traffic arced around the stage and on uneven ground.
Two solutions seem obvious: a second set of toilets on the opposite side of the space, and a more flexible re-entry system that doesn’t punish people for leaving to meet a basic need. Neither would undermine the ethos, and both would make the atmosphere inside more comfortable, not to mention safer.
Bigger Questions
Leaving The Riddle, I couldn’t help but think about scale. Wilderness has the budget, the infrastructure, and the branding to do anything it wants – yet here, in this tucked-away corner, is something it couldn’t recreate elsewhere on site without breaking it. That raises the question: if intimacy and trust are this magnetic, why do so few large-scale festival spaces commit to them?
Perhaps it’s because these qualities aren’t easily scalable. You can’t roll out intimacy across ten stages without losing something. You can’t create community on command; it grows best in the spaces where people feel seen rather than counted. In that way, The Riddle works precisely because it’s contained, because entry is limited, because it doesn’t try to be for everyone at once.
That containment, of course, comes with trade-offs – the queues, the exclusivity, the fact that some will never make it past the threshold. Yet, perhaps some parts of a festival aren’t meant to be instantly accessible to all, and flourish in their mystery. They’re meant to be discovered, experienced fully, and remembered because you lived them.
Credit - Tom Russell via The Riddle at Wilderness
This year, The Riddle delivered a space that was at once wilder and more precise than its debut in 2024. The circus theme brought colour, the music brought heat, and the crowd brought themselves fully into the moment. For all the chaos, there was clarity: the knowledge that a stage built on presence, not performance, can still thrive. It also begs the question: can bigger stages learn that chaos, when curated with care, is the most powerful order there is?
The Riddle was proof that controlled chaos isn’t a risk, it’s the point of any festival. It can be a fine line to tread at times, but we hope they keep pushing that balance between order and madness, because that’s where the magic happens!
Many thanks to Will and Jemima for an unforgettable weekend!
All photos by the wonderful Tom Russell via The Riddle at Wilderness. X
Google Sites
Report abuse