After wartime trauma, Europe’s youngest country has developed an outsize musical clout that packed this year’s Sunny Hill festival in Pristina. What fuels its pop success?
The fields above the Kosovan village of Bërnicë e Poshtme offer a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. Blue skies are cut through with silhouettes of the mountains surrounding Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The horizon is punctured by thin, silvery minarets and red-roofed houses. As day turns to night, this scenic backdrop turns to black, as the stages light up and the bass starts to thud.
This is the Sunny Hill festival, a four-day pop music fest organised by international star Dua Lipa and her father, Dukagjin Lipa. The crowd here looks like a screenshot of TikTok’s For You Page: trendy crop tops and wide-leg flares abound, with many attendees under 18. Vesa and Urta, both 17, live in Pristina and are attending the festival for the first and second time respectively. “The nightlife here is crazy,” they enthuse. “We love the vibe and the energy.”
Having only declared independence from Serbia in 2008, Kosovo is the youngest country in Europe in more ways than one: the average age of its citizens is 29.5, possibly aided by the fact that young Kosovars until recently could not take advantage of freedom of movement inside the EU. Its population of 1.8 million is less than a quarter of New York City’s, its land mass only 3% of Germany’s – which makes the small Balkan country’s outsized impact on international pop music even more remarkable.
