PHOTOS: Jane Remover, Jockstrap, Kenny Mason, & more at Outline Festival at Knockdown Center 7/12/2025

For three years now, Knockdown Center’s Outline Festival has been a gold standard for artistic curation, with the budget to flex its muscles. Curating lineups of artists of similar kin resulting in a cohesive sound and sensible crowd, the concert series has hosted a massive range of artist on Knockdown Center’s various stages, including Injury Reserve, Arooj Aftab, Laraaji, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Armed, Yaeji, Thurston Moore, and many more. Lineups rarely offer a dud or an unknown; every artist gracing the stage arrives with vast history or potential. With Jockstrap and Jane Remover promised as a yin-yang marquee, Outline Festival brought the house down with a noisy, eclectic, bass-heavy, young night of freakout fun.

Jane Remover

The mid-summer edition of booked from a diaspora of artists whose pop, rap, and electronics all converged on danceability without delving fully into the walls of strict dance music. Opening the main hall, Dazegxd was the only artist on the bill who originated in the club circuit, flexing a barrage of massive jungle beats, PinkPantheress club edits, and enough claps and builds for an uninitiated audience to stay on board. Even when seeing artists they were evidently unfamiliar with, the audience never froze, dancing equally to HiTech’s flowery beats or Kenny Mason’s gunfire raps. Easily the two outliers of the bill, their tracks stood strong for themselves. HiTech pulled out Chicago and Detroit house-laced tracks like “SPANK!” and “WHYYOUFUGGMYOPPS” while Kenny Mason reached for Dreamville Festival classics like “Stick” and lit the crowd on fire, regardless of their initial familiarity. It’s a testament to the wisdom of Outline’s curation. Jane Remover, Kenny Mason, and Jockstrap have few overlap fans, but Mason’s festival mosh pit energy made a perfect aperitif to Jockstrap’s brainy electronics, and a healthy digestif to Jane Remover’s turn-up-or-die.

Kenny Mason

Though streaming numbers or tour portfolios may tell a different stories, Jockstrap and Jane Remover emerged as the night’s clear primary entertainment, at least based on the swaths of artist merch seen in the audience. Though they work from vastly different backgrounds, their aligning ethos made for a compelling pairing. Jane Remover’s rage-pop borrows from many of the same new club influences as Jockstrap’s electronic art-pop. Glitchy and amorphous song structures based on big sounds moved bodies in the crowd, even if in varied ways. While Jane Remover’s “JRJRJR” and Jockstrap’s “The City” both rely on lulls and builds to generate friction amongst the bodies, the climax manifested in violently different ways behind the crowd.

Georgia Ellery of Jockstrap

Outline’s ethos, for several years now, has pursued an artist-centric perspective on curation, dropping notions about adjacent genres, similar sounds, or any former boundary around the opener-headliner relationship. It’s easier to push the art crowds towards a broader reception of unknown sounds and territories (a feat Outline has achieved many times around), but much harder to have the partiers liven to foreign artistry. As audience attitudes and taste fragment, curation that follows in a likeminded way will offer crowds a broader journey they didn’t know they wanted.