This summer Øya Festival Norway will be headlined by the ARCTIC MONKEYS on Wednesday 8th August and rapper KENDRICK LAMAR on Thursday 9th August!

ARCTIC MONKEYS are Alex Turner, Jamie Cook, Nick O’Malley and Matt Helders.  Formed in High Green, Sheffield in 2002, the band have released 5 albums to date, their most recent, ‘AM’ released in 2013. The band’s debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not became the fastest selling debut album in UK chart history on its release in 2006.

The release of subsequent albums Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), Humbug (2009), Suck It And See (2011) and AM (2013) has consolidated their position as one of the most successful British bands to emerge in recent times.  They are the only band to have won both Best British Group and British Album of The Year at The Brits three times. The band has now won 7 Brit awards out of 9 nominations since their debut album. Other achievements include an Ivor Novello award, a Mercury Music Prize, 20 NME awards, 5 Q awards and 3 Grammy nominations.

The band’s fifth album AM debuted at number 1 in 10 countries around the world and charted in the top 10 in 27 others.  To date their songs have been streamed globally in excess of 6 billion times, with 5.5 million streams listened to every day.

Arctic Monkeys’ performed at the opening ceremony of The Summer Olympics in London in 2012 and have headlined both the Glastonbury and Reading and Leeds Festivals twice.  The band enjoyed their most successful touring period in support of AM, headlining over 100 shows and festivals around the world.

With the release of their fifth album, AM in 2013, Arctic Monkeys made history as the first independent label band with five consecutive number 1 albums in the UK.  Alex Turner has now released 7 consecutive UK number one albums (5 x Arctic Monkeys, 2 x The Last Shadow Puppets).

KENDRICK LAMAR got his breakthrough in 2012 with the second album good kid, m.A.A.d. city, one of the best albums from that year. Three years later, he reached number one in the US album chart with To Pimp A Butterfly, and won five Grammy awards the following year’s. In 2017 he released his third successful album DAMN., which contains the number one single Humble. It is widely agreed that this is one of the best and most important albums from 2017. Lately he has been involved in the soundtrack to the movie Black Panther and just released the single All The Stars. Soon he will once again perform during the Grammy Award show.

Lamar released his first mixtape at the age of 16, while still using the name K-Dot. He had early collaborations with Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, The Game and Lil Wayne. He mentions Tupac, Miles Davis, Jay-Z, Parliament/Funkadelic and Eminem among the musicians that inspire him. In addition to pure hiphop, you can find jazz and funk in his music. Two Pimp A Butterfly was recorded with, among others, George Clinton, as well as Øya favourites Thundercat and Kamasi Washington.

Damn. is a brilliant combination of the timeless and the modern, the old school and the next-level – Rolling Stone