After a year’s hiatus, Psychic Hotline’s Good Moon will rise above downtown Durham once again.
The festival returns the weekend of October 8-10 with two headlining performances by Sylvan Esso— the founders of Psychic Hotline, alongside manager Martin Anderson—at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC). Country music star Tyler Childers will also take the main stage at DPAC alongside special guest performances each night from neo soul and jazz singer Meshell Ndegeocello, poet aja monet, and Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada.
Other performances will take place throughout downtown Durham at The Pinhook, Bay 7 at American Tobacco Campus, and the newly opened BOOM Club. The small clubs’ format marks a shift from the event’s previous freewheeling ballpark iterations in 2022 at the Historic Durham Athletic Park (DAP), where it was billed as “the greatest show on dirt,” and in 2024, at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.
This year’s lineup includes a range of artists across genres, including Leenalchi, Tash LC, Annie & the Caldwells, Circuit des Yeux, Babe Haven, and Hex Files, and more.
Of probable special interest to locals is Saturday, October 10’s daytime event—a free concert at the Amphitheater at American Tobacco Campus, featuring North Carolina’s MJ Lenderman and Woke County Speedway, as well as a screening of guitarist William Tyler’s music film (a medium apparently different from a musical or a music video), Time Indefinite.
Sylvan Esso, the electronic music duo of Amelia Heath and Nick Sanborn, has been an integral part of Durham’s music culture since the band’s 2013 debut. Their first foray into anchoring a major local music event came in 2022 when the pair kicked off a three-night run at DAP, which drew a crowd of 12,000. The highs from that successful concert series segued directly into the debut of Good Moon Festival the following year at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, though Meath told the INDY in 2024 that “we’ve been reaching towards doing something like this for basically the entire time we’ve been a band.”
In the intervening time between festivals, Psychic Hotline has stayed engaged with their fans, local and abroad. Last summer, the label opened up its “mailroom” retail space at 316 Holland Street for pop-up shows and other collaborations. Psychic Hotline has also recruited international touring artists from their label to the Bull City, like Reyna Tropical, the Mexican-born pop singer who performed at the last Good Moon and at Motorco Music Hall months later, and Japanese folk singer Ichiko Aoba, who made her Durham debut earlier this month at Carolina Theatre, highlighting the label’s diverse sonic palette.
VIP tickets for Good Moon go on sale this Friday. General admission single-night tickets will be available on May 22.
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