In its time Abbey Road’s Studio One has witnessed some of cinema’s most nerve-jangling scenes: scores to Star Wars, the Lord of The Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series were all cut in this legendary room. For Sally Davies, Abbey Road Studios’ managing director, it wasn’t the images on the projector that had her on tenterhooks, but the judgments from movie greats on one of the biggest moments in the studio’s history: Studio One’s long-overdue revamp.

It was the first time the room had been refreshed and each decision – should the walls be repainted, or merely cleaned? – carried the jeopardy of impacting the acoustics of a beloved room. The space can host a 100-piece orchestra and was initially used by classical musicians before becoming the preferred recording space of score composers. Following a session earlier this year conducted by two-time Academy Award winner Alexandre Desplat for Jurassic World: Rebirth, the verdict was in: “The room sounds brighter,” Desplat told a relieved Davies. 

These are some of the challenges facing Davies in one of the U.K. music industry’s most important and unique roles. “You’ve got an iconic heritage in your hands, and have to make sure you do it justice,” Davies tells Billboard U.K. in the lounge overlooking Studio One in late August. She describes the position as a “custodianship and guardianship” and likens it to the titular role of TV show Dr. Who.

Abbey Road Studios in St. John’s Wood, London first opened in 1931 and was the home for classical music in Britain with Elgar, Prokofiev and Stravinsky all conducting orchestras here. It was known as EMI Studios until 1976, and saw off the threat of redevelopment when EMI put it up for sale in 2010. Ownership eventually transferred to Universal Music subsidiary Virgin Music in 2012. 

In its time, the Studios have been at the heart of some of the most beloved and successful recorded music ever released: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1974), and Radiohead’s The Bends (1995) to name a few. Recent occupants include Stormzy, Ezra Collective, Little Simz and Florence + The Machine. 

But while fans of the Fab Four still queue up outside to walk the same zebra crossing seen on the front of the band’s 1969 LP Abbey Road, Davies is tasked with looking to the future. With the centenary anniversary looming in 2031, the wider brand is undergoing a refresh to continue its place at the heart of music culture. “I see my job as being here to fuel and turbocharge the next decade of Abbey Road,” Davies says.

On Oct. 2, the studios will host the latest edition of the Music Photographers Awards and honor U2 and Depeche Mode collaborator Anton Corbijn, as well as upcoming snappers. Amplify and Equalise, two programs that champion emerging recording and performing talent (particularly for women), are as important to Davies as the latest superstar swanning through the corridors.

“Those programmes help us stay at the forefront of music, otherwise people just associate us with Beatles and Pink Floyd – which is great, by the way – but I want to talk about the other stuff too,” Davies says.

Davies was appointed managing director by Universal Music in 2023. Her resume includes stints at the capital’s Science Museum and The O2 Arena; her last role prior to Abbey Road was as chief executive of live producer and promoter U-Live, owned by Vivendi. When David Joseph, then CEO of Universal Music U.K., tapped her for the position, she was hesitant and wanted to know more about how her people skills would mesh with the environment.

“He said that it’s a really complicated environment, and it’s a bit like managing a football team. You’ve got the players who need the locker room chat to deliver their best performance; the sponsors in the stands which help pay the bills, and then the fans who have expectations. There’s a lot going on there…”

The best way to learn the ropes, Davies says, was to simply observe. She spent the first nine months connecting with studio engineers, producers and runners to understand the rhythm of Abbey Road and received a crash course in achieving audio excellence. Getting to know people’s distinct points of views was key to cracking the studio’s unique “hierarchal” culture. 

“I liken myself to being a conductor in an orchestra. I don’t play an instrument, but I can put you together and make sure you play the right moment in time together and that it sounds great.” She says empowering the studio’s 100 full-time employees to speak up when necessary is vital to a positive, collaborative atmosphere. “We need to make sure we’re capturing different perspectives and debate them; that’s far better than someone holding onto a viewpoint and not being able to air it.”

Now settled in the role for two years, Davies is keen to reaffirm their place in the creative process on a global scale. “What is a studio without the music that’s made in it? We have to be a home of music making and a hub of creativity, because it’s that that brings Abbey Road Studios to life – otherwise we’re just real estate.”

The portfolio is constantly expanding and decentralizing the Studios is a key aim. She points towards AudioMovers, an app that enables remote collaboration on recordings, which was acquired in 2021, and the Abbey Road Institute which trains budding students in Amsterdam, Mumbai and Miami as examples of this change. A recent collaboration with Adidas Originals saw the construction of a new studio in Manchester’s Co-op Live, and received a co-sign from Bruce Springsteen when he played the venue and toured the space.

Davies says the goal is to increase their global footprint and their presence in the consumer space. “The brand is well known across the globe, but the business is still here. We want to see how we can make it a truly global business, and also how to bring Abbey Road into your lounge, pocket or your car. We can influence your audio experience in so many ways.”

Abbey Road Studios remains one of the crown jewels in the U.K.’s music industry, and should be a shining example of British excellence. The space continually attracts global superstars (SZA, Harry Styles, and Frank Ocean have all recorded here in recent years) and Davies says it’s her job to ensure that the studio – and the wider U.K. scene – recognizes itself for its achievements.

“The music we make here is world-moving. It travels all over and makes people happy, and we should be shouting about that,” Davies says. “One of my main focuses is to share the breadth of what we do, and the level of ambition and innovation. We’re wonderfully British and too modest and humble, but maybe we need to be a bit more celebratory.”

The most recent phase of the refresh includes a reception area that spotlights the studio’s role in audio innovation, with priceless pieces of recording equipment being displayed to visitors. Next will be a rethink to ensure the Studios offer a welcoming atmosphere for first-timers. An improved concierge service for talent is also on the agenda, and Davies likens the atmosphere to a “boutique hotel.”

These are all stepping stones on the road to 2031’s big centenary anniversary, an opportunity to take stock of a British success story. “We want to show we’ve shaped music recording, music production and creativity over the past 100 years,” Davies says.

Diane Martel, a beloved, prolific music video director who helmed iconic clips for Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey, Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, among many others, has died at age 63. According to Rolling Stone, Martel’s family said she died peacefully in New York at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital surrounded by friends and loved ones after a long battle with breast cancer.

The native New Yorker with a nose for unique, sometimes provocative visuals was best known for a pair of 2013 videos that pushed the boundaries of the medium, the controversial “Blurred Lines” clip from Robin Thicke feat. T.I. and Pharrell and the mind-bendingly weird house party video for Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop.”

Speaking about the impact of that rare double-double headline-grabbing duo in 2013, Martel told RS, “My s–t is on point right now. I do have to admit I like being provocative. That’s punk, that’s rock & roll, that’s hip-hop. It’s passionate. We’re not doing pharmaceutical ads.” 

“Blurred Lines” spent 33 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 during its massive run, but it was the lascivious video that drew almost as much attention as the song’s lyrics, which were criticized at the time for objectifying women and playing too loose with notions of sexual consent. The video featured a sprig of mylar balloons that spelled “Robin Thicke Has a Big D–k,” in addition a parade of nearly naked models cavorting with the fully clothed male performers.

Martel told Grantland that her intention was push back against the “misogynist, funny lyrics” in a manner in which the women overpowered the lascivious male gaze, forcing the men to feel “playful and not at all like predators” by asking the models to stare directly into the lens to show that they were in control. She said she didn’t think the resulting clip was sexist because the lyrics were “ridiculous” and the men looked “silly as f–k,” calling her work “meta and playful.”

Several years later, however, one of the models, Emily Ratajkowski, claimed in a memoir that Thicke sexually harassed her on set, grabbing her breast, an account Martel seconded, saying she asked the visibly upset model if she was okay during the shoot and screaming “in my very aggressive Brooklyn voice, ‘What the f–k are you doing, that’s it!! The shoot is over!!’”

Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” drew attention as well for its bold, suggestive imagery from the singer who was transitioning from Disney royalty to hip-hop-adjacent provocateur. Wearing gold grillz and writhing on a bed in a white bra and hot pants, the clip featured the then 21-year-old Cyrus surrounded by friends eating sandwiches made out of $100 bills, building french fry skulls, twerking, butt-slapping, pretending to slice off their fingers and dirty dancing with giant teddy bears.

Cyrus’ clip has more than one billion views on YouTube to date, with “Blurred Lines” on the cusp of that mark.

According to RS, Martel was a high school dropout who began making performance and street art in the late ’80s and working as a dancer and choreographer, skills that clearly came into play in her directing salad days while working on dance-oriented clips for Spears, Ciara and Timberlake.

Born in New York on May 7, 1962, Martel got her start in directing in 1992 with the PBS hip-hop dancer doc Reckin’ Shop: Live From Brooklyn, which led to her first music video for grimy rap crew Onyz, “Throw Ya Gunz.” That led to her first of several collabs with Mariah Carey on the dancing in the field video for “Dreamlover,” as well as gigs directing visuals for S.W.V., Gang Starr, Method Man and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

An early high point was her home video-like video for Mariah Carey’s perennial holiday Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 smash “All I Wan For Christmas Is You,” which featured the singer frolicking in the snow with Santa and an adorable puppy.

Though her work could often push the envelope, Martel also had a keen eye for putting her subjects in a flattering, emotionally direct light, such as the elegant clip for Beyoncé’s 2011 single “Best Thing I Never Had,” which found the singer posing in lingerie and a wedding gown as she kisses of a former lover who never got her, capped by sweet footage of joyous nuptials.

Her reputation blossomed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with credits including Aguilera’s breakthrough “Genie in a Bottle” and “What a Girl Wants,” Khia’s provocative “My Neck My Back (Lick It),” the Clipse’s gritty “Grindin’,” Timberlake’s dance-heavy “Like I Love You” (as well as JT and Ciara’s “Love Sex Magic”), Alicia Keys’ “If I Aint’ Got You” and Spears’ “3,” among many others.

Though her sweet spot was choreo-heavy pop, R&B and hip-hip, Martel — who notched only one best direction nomination at the MTV VMAs, in 2005 for her work with Francis Lawrence on Jennifer Lopez’s “Get Right” — also dipped into rock as well with the Killers’ “Read My Mind,” the White Stripes’ “Conquest,” the 1975’s “Give Yourself a Try,” The Bravery’s “Fearless.” In addition, she helmed videos for American Idol alums Clay Aiken (“Invisible”) and Adam Lambert (“Whataya Want From Me”), P!nk (“Just Give Me a Reason”), Avril Lavigne (“Nobody’s Home”), John Legend (“So High”) and Addison Rae (“Obsessed”).

Frequent collaborator Ciara paid tribute to Martel in an Instagram post on Friday (Sept. 19) featuring a number of clips from their work together, writing, “You believed in me and I believed in you! You will forever hold a special place in my heart and I am forever grateful for all the magic we’ve were able to make together. I know it was all God! Heaven has just gained an Angel. I love you so much @DianeMartel_ A.k.a. Miss D! Rest In Paradise.” Her final known music video was for Ciaras’ “Ecstasy,” which was released earlier this year.

Check out some of Martel’s most beloved work below.

Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond. 

This week, Cardi B brings an end (and/or a new beginning) to her long-awaited Drama, Miley Cyrus lets a couple of Rock and Roll Hall of Famers in on her “Secrets” RAYE searches for her not-yet-found “Husband” and much more.

Cardi B, Am I the Drama?

If you were wondering where the time went with Cardi B in the seven years since Invasion of Privacy, you can certainly hear a lot of it in her supersized second album Am I the Drama? Nearly double the length of Invasion at 23 tracks and 71 minutes, Drama contains a variety of new guests, subjects and sounds for the rap great, including the merengue exercise “Bodega Baddie,” the 4 Non Blondes-interpolating “What’s Going On” (with Lizzo) and the drill-influenced “Safe” (with Kehlani). It’s an overstuffed but thrilling listen, reminding us why we’d been waiting so breathlessly for the return of Full Cardi for so long in the first place.

Miley Cyrus, “Secrets”

Never a bad idea to get two members of one of the most beloved rock bands of all time on your new song — but Lindsay Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood are particularly good fits on “Secrets,” one of two new tracks from the deluxe reissue of Miley Cyrus‘ underappreciated Something Beautiful album. (The other, “Lockdown,” also features a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer in Talking Heads’ David Byrne.) The guitarist and drummer help lend a sweetly breezy ’80s Fleetwood Mac-style groove to Cyrus’ promises of “Anywhere you go/ I’ll follow” — making it a worthy follow-up to her Stevie Nicks-featuring “Edge of Midnight” remix of “Midnight Sky.”

Lola Young, I’m Only F–king Myself

U.K. singer-songwriter Lola Young‘s first new LP since scoring a global smash with “Messy” shows why she’s gotten fans on both sides of the Atlantic so excited far beyond the one hit. From the grungy bisexual anthem “F**k Everyone” to the fuzzy failing-relationship power ballad “Spiders” to the shuffling post-breakup waltz of “Sad Sob Story! :)” the album is bursting with hooks, personality and vivid songwriting, confirming Young as one of both pop and rock’s most impressive breakout talents of the mid-’20s.

RAYE, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”

With blaring horns and jazzy drums worthy of mid-’00s Rich Harrison, RAYE conducts her frantic search for her future husband, wondering with increasingly manic verses what could possibly be taking him so d–n long to get her. As the song winds up tighter and tighter — with her grandmother’s sampled promise of “Your husband is coming” detonating the song’s ultimate climax — it really earns the all-caps stylization of its title, as well as the exclamation mark where a question mark would normally be.

Nine Inch Nails, TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

A year after releasing one of their most celebrated scores to date with the pulsing electro-house of the Challengers soundtrack, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are back — this time under the Nine Inch Nails moniker, and with recent DJ tourmate Boys Noize in tow — to take on the TRON: Ares soundtrack. Like Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy OST before it, the set here is mostly divided into beatless atmospheric works and neon-hued dancefloor instrumentals, but Reznor does bring his trademark howl to a few songs, including the scorching top-five Rock & Alternative Airplay hit “As Alive as You Need Me to Be.”

Editor’s Pick: Wednesday, Bleeds

Prolific indie-rock heroes Wednesday are back with the band’s first album since breaking through to wider notice and acclaim on 2023’s Rat Saw God. The Karly Hartzman-led five-piece — which includes similarly critically beloved MJ Lenderman on guitar as a recording, but not touring member — delivers another spellbinding collection of scuzzy guitar crushers and twangy midtempo swayers, with some of Hartzman’s most piercing lyrics and alternately tender and pulverizing vocals.

When indie rock band Rainbow Kitten Surprise returned after six years away in 2024, fans weren’t sure what to think.

The band — which had become known since its genesis for its folk-meets-rock-meets-pop sound — threw a curveball at their audience with Love Hate Music Box, an expansive, genre-fluid LP that upended not only the group’s established sound, but their lineup as well, with bassist Charlie Holt exiting the group due to creative differences with lead singer Ela Melo. Critics praised the group’s experimental comeback. But as Melo describes it, fans weren’t as sold.

“We had been pursuing these sounds for so long,” Melo tells Billboard over Zoom. Sitting on her screen-in porch and dressed in a fluorescent blonde wig, a black choker necklace and a T-shirt, she takes a drag from her cigarette and sighs. “Then when we made Love Hate Music Box, it felt like the fans told us, ‘Okay, well, we’re not ready for this.’”

When it came time to start thinking about their next project, the quartet found themselves back at the drawing board, looking for something that could give them an opportunity to explore the new stations they occupied — Melo came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022 — while still giving the fans what they wanted.

Bones, Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s fifth studio album, manages to stick that landing. With a tight runtime and 10 freewheeling new songs, the band embraces the energy of its beloved live show throughout the new project, as the members jam out in the studio while riffing off of one another to make a collaborative, occasionally improvisational project. This time, Melo says, the goal was much simpler than reintroducing themselves to the world: “We really just said, ‘Let’s make a good rock album.”

Below, Melo breaks down how Rainbow Kitten Surprise created their new album, why many of the album’s lyrics were off-the-cuff ad libs, and how her transition has changed her approach to performance.

First off, congratulations on the new album Bones. How are you feeling about this almost being in the hands of your fans? 

It’s pretty incredible. We started working on the demos for it in June last year, and at the time, I remember we were scheduled to get in with Jay [Joyce, the album’s executive producer] in March [of this year], and it was just like, “Well, that’s forever away,” and now here we are. It’s just exciting to see something that started so small, even sonically, become so big. Just to see it come to life has been cool. Usually, album cycles for us — even on the shorter end of things — tend to be two or three years. Obviously, Love Hate was a lot longer than that, but even so, it’s just like seeing something come basically into full fruition in a year. It’s very fast.

Yeah, it feels like Bones came together lightning fast by RKS’ own release pattern, whereas Love Hate Music Box came together after a six-year hiatus. What about this album made its quick release necessary?

I mean, we put it out just about as fast as we could, but that’s true for most music. Most of the time it hits the label and then there’s, like, another six months of prep that goes around it to release the thing — that’s just the reality that the industry takes a lot of time, because you gotta print vinyl and stuff.

But as far as what was actually different between the last run and this run, there was just an excitement, I think. I almost felt like I was explaining myself on this record. It felt like [the fans] were telling us, “Wait, you just took six years off, and then you came with something that was really different. That’s cool, but like, what happened?” And so, this record is like, “Well, this is what happened.” We went down the rabbit hole.

So now, Bones is almost like a personal journal, lyrically and sonically. The goal really was, “Let’s make something that sounds a little bit more like RKS.” I remember we were doing a media training thing ahead of the last album, and I remember saying to the coach at the time, “Here’s how I see RKS; musically, it starts with a whisper and ends with a roar, and the band is that roar.” And I have to say, you really hear the band roar on this record. 

The lyrics on this album do feel very cathartic in that way it sounds like you’re saying what you’ve been wanting to say for years. How did you go about the process of putting the lyrics together for this album?

It’s very interesting that you say that — the process was, I would write the first verse, and then I would ad lib the rest. It was, “Okay, hit record,” and we would just roll with it. That’s why there are little interesting bits where it sounds like we’re just kind of playing with sounds almost. It became a stream-of-consciousness situation. When you take that approach, you just don’t get to censor yourself. What comes out is what comes out, right? That’s how you get that really raw sound and those emotional, vulnerable lyrics, because you literally can’t overthink it, and you don’t get to second guess, and you don’t censor. You just let out what you got, and sometimes that comes from a deep place that your conscious brain is not even really clicking on — you’re thinking one thing and what comes out is something different entirely.

That makes a lot of sense, because the sound of this album felt directly influenced by your live show. 

Yeah, and that’s partly because we cut it live. Once the demos were put in the studio, we would kind of riff off each other at the start of the day, playing around on our instruments, and we would eventually land on what felt like the right song to work on that day. And then once we’d found it, we’d establish our own guidelines. Like, “We need to play this guitar part in this spot of the song, and then we want that drum part here for this many bars,” and we would piece it together from there. I would pull up something on Spotify, play it, and go, “Can we get something that feels kind of like that for this part?” And then we would just roll tape and hit it.

For “Friendly Fire,” for example — [what you hear] was like the first or second with the band. We obviously hit it a little more when we went to Jay’s, but it happened very fast. That last build on [album closer] “Tropics,” for example, was us saying, “Dude, can we do something that sounds like this Flume song called ‘Free?’” It has the build over the whole song, and I really wanted to try that. We hit record, and everybody just went off, you know what I mean? I don’t know where it comes from sometimes, but I know when people are inspired and when you feel connected, good music happens. So we felt connected, for sure.

Has that improvisational approach to recording this album has made rehearsing and playing these songs in a live context any harder?

Way easier, actually! Because people remember how it felt, if that makes sense. Even if we’re like, “I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was I did,” we can still say, “I remember it went something like this.” Your muscles remember the feeling, especially when you have to do it in a high stakes situation. Those are honestly the kinds of parameters that we like to operate under. It feels like it’s the last minute and we got to get this together, thats how we roll.

Like, sometimes, I couldn’t tell you what the lyrics are to these songs. But as we get going, I’ll remember them, or they’ll come out one way or another. It’s part of what made this whole process faster. Love Hate was a much longer process, because we were like, “Oh, we’ve got to dial in all these synth sounds again, and we have to make everything just right.” For this one, it was just like, “Nope, we gotta go, let’s hit it.”

This is all coming in the middle of this huge amphitheater tour that you guys have been on — what’s the live experience of these songs been like so far, especially at another sold out Red Rocks show?

It’s been awesome. Yeah, it was definitely fun to come back to Red Rocks, man. In the week or so since that show, I won’t lie, we were struggling, because performing there is a hard thing to top, just emotionally speaking. But we’re gonna try, damn it!

The band has been using this tour as a simultaneous fundraising opportunity with the work that you have been doing with PLUS1 — why did you feel it was vital to make sure portions of those ticket sales were getting back to the LGBTQ+ community?

We’ve done it for a lot of reasons and causes before: Flood relief, when hurricanes came through North Carolina where a lot of us grew up, for a lot of other issues. It’s kind of a thing where there’s so many local agencies in every part of the nation that desperately need funding. So, being able to chain that through PLUS1, and through our umbrella company in order to make sure that money is getting to folks who are actively helping out the LGBTQIA+ groups was a no-brainer.

It’s all about the boots on the ground, the grassroots moment that we are in. That’s where the difference is often made. And you can really tell, it’s really palatable when you donate locally. I think it’s always important to do that kind of stuff, and that’s why we’ve done it for as long as we have. 

I know that this tour, along with the Love Hate Music Box Tour that you did last year, have both been your first experiences getting to tour with the group ever since transitioning. What has that experience of getting to perform now as the truest version of yourself in front of your fans been like for you?

Freeing. Incredibly freeing. It’s changed my singing, it’s really changed everything about the live experience for me. One of the things that I had to reconcile with that I didn’t know bothered me for so long was the tonal quality of my voice in transition. There would be times where I said, “Oh, s–t, this sounds too deep.” It was a weird sensation where, when I imagined myself talking, I didn’t sound like the way I did when I actually talked. I didn’t even realize I’d been wrestling with that my whole life. And I had to broker some kind of peace with it, especially ahead of these tours, because this is my voice. It’s not changing, it’s not going away, so I need to make good with that. Because if I don’t, then frankly, I’m not going to sing. 

It’s kind of made everything easier to sing. In early recordings, I was living under the false assumption — and in some ways, the false indoctrination — that I should have a deeper voice. You can hear it on those recordings, where it’s me pulling down, thinking, “OK, go for baritone, or baritenor. I gotta sing lower.” Because that’s what I thought people wanted to hear, that husky kind of voice, or that smooth, Frank Sinatra kind of thing. And when we got to Love Hate, I was just like, “What if I go the opposite direction? What if I try to soften and what if I try to get high and falsetto and breathy?” With Bones, I just sent everything right down in the middle. Now, I know what my voice can do either way I want to go. Let’s try and just do it all. Let’s just see what happens. And it f–king shows on this record. It’s crazy.

There’s all these webs you create in your own mind. Do you just run in circles, chasing your tail? No, what’s going to sound the best is just you just just singing. Like, you know how you want to sound, so make sure it’s what you want to be doing, not what you think everyone else wants you to be doing, not what you think you should be doing. 

“Every festival booker has their own process,” says Danny Bell, the founder and booker of San Francisco’s Portola. “Mine is definitely more mad scientist-y than other people’s.”

Bell’s metaphorical lab is a spreadsheet, which he begins tinkering with a year before the festival itself. The sheet allows Bell to see “all the different looks at once,” he says. “You have your money grid, your mock set times, your poster.” He’s made algorithms that let him organize it by an artist’s subgenre, gender, race and home country. There’s one designed around when the sun sets and when there’s full dark. He works to select a group of artists who are unlikely to play any of the same tracks twice over the weekend.

“Can you do it quicker?” Bell, the SVP of talent at Goldenvoice, asks rhetorically while talking to Billboard over Zoom from his office in San Francisco. “For sure. There’s probably a much simpler way, but I do it like this. I want to make sure to have all these different visualizations because this stuff is is important. It all works together.”

From these datasets eventually emerge the lineup and set times for Portola, which since its 2022 debut has become a dance festival circuit standout for putting artists who helped develop the dance/electronic genre alongside many of the moment’s most essential stars and emerging artists. Every year Bell also reserves a set time for a pop icon, a space that in 2025 belongs to Christina Aguilera, who Bell promises will perform “banger after banger.”

While Portola has put a whole host of big names in front of the 40,000-person crowd that gathers at the festival site at San Francisco’s Pier 80 (past headliners have included Flume, The Chemical Brothers, Eric Prydz, Skrillex, Rüfüs du Sol and Justice), this year puts an especially heavy emphasis on “showcasing the legends and pioneers of the scene and some of the most influential people the last 30 years,” Bell says. “This lineup is a real ode to to where the current sounds and state of electronic music came from.”

He’s not being hyperbolic. The fest this weekend (Sept. 20-21) will unpack the influence of the ’90s era U.K. underground via sets from Underworld, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, all of whom bent electronic music to harder, darker and more intense shapes during their heydays. There will also be U.S. artists whose work functioned as inflection points for the development of indie dance and dance punk — namely LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and Moby. The Rapture’s performance comes towards the start of a reunion tour happening fifteen years after the NYC group’s last headlining run. Meanwhile Moby, who hasn’t toured the U.S. extensively in years, will perform with a live band and run through much of his 1999 LP Play, an album whose prolific syncing helped introduce electronic music to a generation of young people living far from clubland.

These acts are matched by several of the moment’s key scene stars, with the lineup’s other big font names being Peggy Gou, Dom Dolla, Mau P and Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo playing as Anti Up.

“We now have fans who’ve been deep in the genre for 15-plus years, but 2010, 2011 and 2012 were the early days of electronic music being popular in the U.S.,” says Bell, who in this era was booking shows for HARD in Los Angeles. “Back then everyone was just learning about these artists for the first time. No one knew if Carl Cox was a new act or a legacy act.”

But with the people who got into dance music in this era now staring down middle age, “people have had enough time to dig deeper into the history and really understand who the pioneers were and where these sounds came from,” says Bell. “That’s allowed acts like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld to have a stronger and larger U.S. fanbase than they had before.”

To wit, a new wave of demand for these acts manifested in The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy both drawing huge crowds at Coachella 2023 and 2025, respectively. Meanwhile Underworld’s Boiler Room set from London has clocked 1.4 million views since it was put online three weeks ago.

“When I started in festivals, the acts that were being played on Spotify Mint [the streamer’s mainstream dance playlist] were like, Alesso and Avicii,” says Bell. “It was all progressive house and some dubstep.”

With Mint now populated by artists like Sammy Virji, Fred again.., Sara Landry, Ki/Ki and Kettama — all of who have played Portola in years past or who will be there this year — Bell says it’s been “really fun and rewarding to see the acts I work with who I’ve considered left of center and really progressing the sound and the scene making their way up the ladder to be the artists Spotify Mint is programming.”

There’s also the lineup contingent Bell lovingly and correctly refers to as “the divas.” In 2023 this was Nelly Furtado, who performed her ’00s-defining hits “Turn Off the Light,” “I’m Like a Bird,” “Say It Right” and “Promiscuous.” Last year, Natasha Bedingfield drew a tightly packed crowd that included fellow lineup artist Four Tet, while performing her pop holy trinity of “Pocketful of Sunshine,” “These Words” and “Unwritten.” This year, Aguilera is teed up to deliver her own arsenal of generational anthems.

“She knows what the assignment is,” says Bell — who also places previous Portola artists like Cobrah, Slayyter and Charli xcx in this diva category, a realm of the lineup that will also be filled by Ravyn Lenae this weekend.

Delivering these pop moments has helped Portola carve out a kind of quirky, if-it-feels-good-do-it identity that also manifests on the event’s Instagram, a channel that’s often deliciously unhinged and IYKYK funny.

“That’s another part of the ethos of the festival,” Bell says. “It’s very serious music, but presented in a very unserious way.”

The social media team of ten includes Bell, other staffers at Portola’s producer Goldenvoice (which also puts on Coachella) and a team from the marketing and creative agency Benchmob. The secret sauce is Bell’s longtime friend Dashiell Driscoll, a comedy writer whose resume includes the After Midnight With Taylor Tomlinson and a run at Funny or Die.

“I call him our staff copywriter,” says Bell. “I have him write our e-blasts and captions. Working with a real comedy writer, I can say ‘Hey, we need to tell people we’re 100 days out from the festival,’ and he comes back with 12 different ideas. (The idea the team ultimately went with was a “100 types of people you’ll meet 100 days from now at Portola,” IG carousel featuring 100 photos of many varieties of raver, along with Steve Harvey, Parker Posey, Ariana Grande, dogs, cats, a goose and other individuals with that special flair.)

“Let’s be real,” Bell continues. “There are a ton of festival social media pages and lots of other music pages and accounts that are all kind of similar. Anything I get that looks like something anyone else would post I’m like, ‘Come on, we an do better. Let’s try a little harder.’”

This extra effort extends beyond the internet and even beyond the festival site. Call it the mad scientist in him, but Bell cites a “strange obsession” of “always wanting people to have programming or something to do at all times of the day. I don’t expect everyone to do everything. It’s more just having these options so people can choose their own adventure, whether they want to start early then go to the festival, or go to the festival then to an afterparty.”

This year these afterparties are also happening before the fest. This is Portola’s most robust year of tangential programming, with Portola-blessed clubs nights starting Thursday (Sept. 18) and extending clear through Monday at more than ten local venues. “It’s exciting that we could do upwards of 40,000-plus tickets a day at the festival, plus sell an additional 30,000 tickets for the after shows throughout the weekend,” says Bell.

The goal is also to compliment what’s happening musically with Portola picks of things to do around with, with the festival partnering with a variety of restaurants, clothing shops and fitness centers. “One of Portola’s main concepts is just reminding people about how amazing San Francisco is,” Bell says, “and not just as a city to live and visit, but also as a place to party. We really want to bring the city to life over these four days.”

And yes, Bell is already working on the spreadsheet for next year.