Sounds of the Atlantic South: Iron Blossom Festival 2024 Recap

Richmond, Virginia is a city of thriving arts communities, but arguably fewer large-scale musical events than one might expect for its size and slate of potential venues. Nevertheless, as people continue to flock to RVA and its population quickly climbs—Richmond ranked #15 in terms of city population growth in the U.S. in the last few years—new festival ventures have gotten their feet under them to reflect the city’s status as one of the cultural hubs of the Atlantic south. Granted, there are definitely a few longtime fests here beloved by various communities, such as the enduring Richmond Folk Festival, about to celebrate its 20th year. But although the city is rich in concert series that bring individual acts to town on a regular basis, what it has not really had is a high-profile, weekend-long indie rock and Americana festival of the sort that Paste has so often covered, ‘ala Atlanta’s Shaky Knees. This it finally received with the debut last year of the Iron Blossom Festival, which this weekend returned for its sophomore encore, following a sold-out, 12,000 strong crowd in 2023. There’s no doubt it was another strong lineup of bands and songwriters checking a handful of key boxes: Pop, indie rock, soul, Americana and bluegrass, among others.

All are welcome under this big tent. Iron Blossom has styled itself as a thoroughly modern, trend-seeking festival appealing to the widest possible demographic, a celebration of Indian summer frivolity as we collectively brace ourselves for the dreary return of early darkness and a chill in the air. This is a last hurrah for sun dresses and overalls, fresh tattoos and painted nails clutching THC seltzers. In a sign of the times, despite mentions of the city’s “thriving craft beer scene,” (our guide to the 40+ local breweries is quite robust) there’s scant few IPAs to be seen. These days it’s vodka and whiskey lemonades, ensconced in omnipresent clouds of cannabis. Iron Blossom has read the room, providing the tastes and sounds that appeal to the average wristbanded 30-something attendee.

Victoria Canal

Having not been familiar with pianist Victoria Canal in advance, and arriving in the midst of her early afternoon set, it was strikingly easy to be immediately taken in by her sweet vocals and the accompanying, gentle guitar arpeggios of “swan song,” a 2022 single that rose above the fray of the festival hubbub. How fortuitous to catch that particular tune: It was also apparently one that caught the ear of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, given that he referred to it as “one of the best songs ever written” before inviting Canal to join him as a featured pianist at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. And then another shock: Canal concluded her set, and stood up to thank the audience, revealing something any of her fans would of course already have known, that she is missing the forearm on her right side due to a congenital disorder. Suffice to say, that she played so beautifully on the Iron Blossom stage was incredibly impressive, and my interest in the 26-year-old Spanish-American songwriter’s obvious talent has been thoroughly piqued. After releasing a handful of EPs to date, her debut LP Slowly It Dawns is due out Jan. 17, 2025 via Parlophone Records/Elektra. I’ll surely be paying close attention.

Julia Pratt

Philly singer-songwriter Julia Pratt is the kind of artist who can do a whole lot with relatively little, something on display during her relatively stripped-down Saturday set, anchored by just bass and guitar, but then filled out by prerecorded drums and even backing vocals. The indefinable Pratt soared above it all, with vocals dashing from song to song between soul, jazz and indie rock, freestyling and adding flourishes atop the bedrock of tracks from her small collection of EPs released to date. She has impressive command over her voice, particularly in the high range, while emanating a sort of laid-back, hip, sultry demeanor on stage during songs like “Julia Baby,” from 2023 EP Two to Tango. There’s no disguising the personal nature of a song with your own name in the title, and Pratt doesn’t hold back in the righteous conviction of its performance, recapping the guilt of a failed relationship that has been slowly recontextualized into strength. Another stunner: “Carolina,” a track from latest 2024 EP Family Feud, a recording she described on stage as being about the essential dissolution of her family unit. Set simply to acoustic guitar and delicate drum beats, it has a breathy, ethereal crescendo that had the Saturday crowd drawn in close.

Sarah Shook and the Disarmers

Veteran alt-country/Americana act Sarah Shook and the Disarmers enlivened a Saturday afternoon steadily growing hotter with a set displaying their usual defiant rockabilly verve. They played a good amount of material from new 2024 album Revelations, with “You Don’t Get to Tell Me” landing most triumphantly flush. Outspoken LGBT activist, atheist and non-binary band leader River Shook made their declaration of purpose: “I built my life on the edge of a knife / When nobody believed that I could / Pull a chair up to the table, I am willing I am able / And we don’t need no god to feed each other good.” We wouldn’t dream of objecting. They closed with more rollicking stuff, including “Keep the Home Fires Burnin'” and 2022 album Nightroamer closer “Talkin’ to Myself.”

Sumbuck

Caamp bandleader Taylor Meier was pulling double duty this weekend, with the Ohio folk band performing a 90 minute closing set on Sunday night, but his side project Sumbuck also slotted into Saturday’s lineup. His set took the energy down a bit for a late afternoon siesta, projecting a relatively laid-back singer-songwriter vibe with the occasional big breakdown, highlighted by a nice infusion of gospel-sounding electric keys. Meier’s gruff, earthy vocals shone through on tracks like the somehow rueful-sounding (despite the lyrics) love song “Hey Honey,” a track that feels like it would be right at home during the regretful post-breakup montage of a romantic comedy. It’s a straightforward style the singer describes as “songs from the Midwest for lovers and lovers alike,” slotting in effortlessly among the Iron Blossom Festival’s many folk-adjacent acts.

Trampled by Turtles

If there’s one band I would almost inherently expect to find while scanning the lineup of a festival like Iron Blossom, it would surely be Trampled by Turtles, those indefatigable festival warriors. Their well-worn fandom was happy to listen to some relatively new material from the band, which featured a few tracks from new 2024 EP Always Here—actually only the second EP in their more than 20 years together, oddly enough. “You Never Let Me Down” is a new crowd-pleaser, a heartening fastball down the center plate of their progressive bluegrass/indie folk sensibilities. Banjo player Dave Carroll, one of four members who has been with Trampled by Turtles ever since the group was founded in 2003, put on some dazzling displays of virtuosity in particular, but as ever with the band one of the pleasures of watching them play is the way they allow each individual member to occasionally stride forward to become a shining star.

Their set swung back and forth between furious barn-burners and more playful fare, with the band particularly leaning into the delight of covering Loudon Wainright III’s “The Swimming Song.” At pretty much any event like this where they appear, Trampled by Turtles sets a high bar for energy and tempo, a veritable maelstrom of plucked strings and pulled bows. Their energy remains off the charts after more than 20 years.

Indigo De Souza

Sometimes, an early stumble leads to a unique festival experience that sticks out later in your mind, and it was the case when Indigo De Souza‘s bassist unexpectedly broke a bass string on the very first song of her Saturday set. The Asheville songstress, needing to adjust on the fly, decided to perform a brand new song she revealed she had written just two weeks earlier. That song, as yet seemingly unnamed, felt like a piece of material picking up right where the closing notes of monumental album closer “Younger and Dumber” left off when De Souza released All of This Will End in 2023, an album that placed prominently in our 50 best albums of the year. Soulful and searching, De Souza poured herself into solo guitar, selling lines like “Feels like the summertime ate me alive, now all I’ve gotta do is leave it behind,” and “I take a drink and pray I forget what it was like waking up to the sound of your voice.”

Suffice to say, the time it took to ultimately fetch a new bass string was a blessing, a welcome little preview of where the evolving indie rocker could stylistically be headed. The band replenished, she than dazzled the crowd with a more aggressive, guitar-driven assault, occasionally showing off a certain classic alt-rock crunchiness that brought to mind the likes of Matthew Sweet. But mostly I’ll be thankful for the chance to hear that new track, which I can’t wait to eventually hear again.

S.G. Goodman

The hard-edged, earthy Americana or folk of S.G. Goodman, which you might hear on a recording, or in a live studio session, seems to be almost another presence entirely from the wilder energy her band manifests during a bigger festival set. As I walked up on this session on Sunday afternoon, the weather having turned more cool and gray than the Indian summer warmth of Saturday, you could have sworn that it was a punk rock band whipping the crowd into a frenzy. They were aggressive on the attack, though the harder edge soon smoothed away to almost surfy sounding guitars, and then parked itself in the garage rock/honky tonk sphere of a track like “Old Time Feeling,” the title track of her 2020 album. That song, which issues a challenge to more progressive southerners to affect change in their own cities and towns rather than fleeing to more immediately comforting surroundings of a liberal bastion, feels like a solid statement of the principles Goodman is all about. She closed her set with an oddity: A cover of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” a choice I’m not entirely sure worked naturally with her high, raw vocals. Still, it was about the last thing you’d be expecting to hear in that moment.

River Whyless

Asheville’s River Whyless has perfected their own thoroughly modern distillation of old-time music over their now 12-ish years together, a sound often composed of dualities: Distinctly southern and swampy, but also crisp and pristine. Look toward the lovely blend of higher male harmonies that run through some of their tunes on a festival stage like Iron Blossom, evoking the soul of Simon & Garfunkel or CSNY at times. I love the way they’ll put an unorthodox source of melody front and center for a song, like when playing “Sailing Away” from 2016’s We All The Light—violinist Halli Anderson’s delicate, crystalline plucking of the fiddle strings takes on the lead melody to delicious effect. I realize now that it’s been a little while since I’ve last heard River Whyless’ particular brand of progressive folk rock, but I’m not sure why that is—not when they’ve been out there penning beautifully moody and mysterious songs like “Michigan Cherry,” from 2022’s Monoflora, as pretty a folk tune as I’ve heard in recent memory. It’s one that hints at still-covered depths yet to be fully explored, and I will gladly follow where they lead.

Joy Oladokun

If you caught only part of Joy Oladokun’s set, you’d probably leave impressed but at a serious disadvantage in trying to untangle everything that is going on in the Nashville singer and instrumentalist’s sound, which evolves noticeably not just across her career but across the time spent in a single festival performance. Her band kicked off its slot absolutely exuberantly, a plethora of voices, pounding keys and propulsive beats in a genre one might peg as folk pop with an almost psychedelic tinge. But soon enough, the basslines grow funkier on the delightfully sunny “Keeping the Light On,” from 2023’s Proof of Life, or the defiant “Sunday,” an ode to the free expression of love that is no doubt precious to Oladokun as a queer person of color. “Bury me under the weight of who you need me to be,” she sings in one of its most wrenching lines, standing tall against the potential isolation of complacency. That earnest track then gave way to a steady transition into songs with more overt R&B and soul overtones, material I could imagine coming from the Grammy-winning likes of Ruthie Foster. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Oladokun with that sort of stature one day.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and entertainment writing.