From Primavera Sound and All Things Go through to All Points East, End of the Road and Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields, we are in a golden age of live music curation that ticks almost every conceivable box.

Syd for Solen – an event most music fans outside of Denmark were probably unfamiliar with until recently – spread its train of feathers this year with a disarmingly confident bill: just 36 artists over three days on three stages in a Copenhagen park. Headed up by Turnstile, Lorde, Geese, The XX, Wilco, Blood Orange and Dijon on the top end, with Fcukers, Dove Ellis, Ninajirachi and Bleech 9:3 on the undercard, this is a lineup that screams business. Throw in Fine, Alba Akvama, Brimheim, eee gee and Iceage – repping the quality leftfield in Danish music – and my interest is more than piqued.

The people guiding Syd for Solen have pointed to the very open dialogue they've had with their audience to inform the shape and feel of this year's event. And while consultation exercises may not be so rock and roll, this is a crowded, hard market in which festivals can survive and thrive right now. Syd for Solen's bill this year firmly squares it up on the international market against three other late summer contenders in the region: Sweden's Way Out West, Øyafestivalen in Norway, and Flow in Finland. Venn diagram the lineups of all four and there's a crossover – although Syd for Solen's is the most compact – and, I would argue, perhaps the most brilliantly utilitarian for someone who wants to see as much of a festival as possible with minimal clashes and a short step count.

This year the festival has expanded its footprint across the home it moved into a year back. Valbyparken is Copenhagen's largest public park, opened in 1939 on a former landfill site and covering almost 65 hectares. Around a 15-minute metro journey from the centre of the city and a further 25-minute walk from Mozarts Plads metro, it's one of the easiest city festivals to commute back and forth from each day. With a sold-out 25,000 capacity, this is an event firmly on the smaller side, and the shape of the site does a very good job of balancing intimacy with space. Two main stages lie a few hundred metres from one another; a third tented space – christened "De Første Stråle" ("the first rays") – is another three minutes away in a more secluded area. This is where you'll find some of the bands well on the rise (but perhaps a little newer to most of the audience at the festival): Supermodel*, Freakslug, Horsegirl, Tyler Ballgame, Bleech 9:3.

As the head booker for Syd for Solen, Xenia Grigat has been central to shaping the programming of the festival's first half-decade, but this year was a real curveball for the lineup. The challenge, she tells me, was to consider the festival for the first time as a cohesive event rather than treating each day as a separate thing with its own genre throughline. "We asked the people who were going if they would prefer a more mixed bill and if they would go more than one day, and so that's what we did. It's still a challenge getting the artists in because logistically they have to play several festivals in one weekend and there's only so much they can do."

Grigat points to Thursday's headliner Medina as one of this year's more surprising successes for her at Syd for Solen this year. "She's not that well known outside the Danish borders and she's been going for 20 years – her audience age range spans from the early 20s into the 40s – but we know everyone knows her songs and people want to dance to them." Medina's headline slot closes the first day of the festival, sitting alongside a string of brilliant performances from Amyl and The Sniffers, Ravyn Lenae, Wednesday and Dijon, but the highlights here are very much about context: Lorde playing what must be one of the smallest capacity festivals on this entire tour-run; Dijon's virtuosity shining brighter than ever in his first show on Danish soil, with a ready-made fan-heavy audience lapping it up; the sheer physicality of Turnstile's Brendan Yates and Iceage's Elias Rønnenfelt, owning every inch of the Over Havet ("above the ocean") main stage.

There's just no slack anywhere and almost zero clashes: the festival's final day, for example, sees an easy route from Ninajirachi – turning in a 2pm opening set to a few hundred early doors fans under a blistering sun and constant dust – to Brimheim to Horsegirl to Anna von Hausswolff to Fine. Then it's the home stretch of Geese to The XX and then Fcukers. It's about as perfect a day of music as any you'd get at Primavera Sound or Glastonbury, with zero fomo.

Copenhagen's status as a mecca for a certain type of vibes-heavy experimental music right now has been well documented over the last twelve months, and fuelled by Spotify's Cph+ playlist and the graduates of the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC), a school that's doing for avant-garde Danish sounds what the BRITs has managed for mainstream UK pop. The only school in Denmark specializing in contemporary music training programmes, Erika De Casier, Fine Glindvad, Astrid Sonne, Scotland-born ML Buch and Smerz's Henriette Motzfeldt have all studied here.

A day ahead of her set at Syd for Solen, I catch up with Helena Heinesen Rebensdorff – the Danish/Faroese artist who records as Brimheim and is another RMC graduate. After completing her undergraduate study in Aarhus, Rebensdorff did her master's at the RMC at the tail end of the last decade . "All of these projects people are talking about now – all of these people were making music at the time I was there," she tells me. "ML Buch had put out her first music [2017 album ] and Smerz were at the school much earlier than that too. There was definitely a vibe that all these people were cool and talented, but this was before it became a thing!"

Rebensdorff shares the festival stages at Syd for Solen this weekend with fellow RMC graduates Fine and Alba Akvama, and is effusive about the current spotlight shining on the city's music. "It's the only cool export situation we have here!" she adds.

With Roskilde's capacity more than four times that of Syd for Solen, and few festivals in the country a match for the same kind of lineup, it's clear there's a definite gap in the market that Syd for Solen can easily fill – and one that can help the city's more experimental sounds venture even further into the international space. Rebensdorff points to the now-defunct Haven festival as the only thing that came close to what Syd for Solen managed to pull off this year. The 20,000-cap experimental arts, music, food, and beer festival was co-founded by the Dessner brother and held in the Refshaleøen area of the city, but only ran for two editions, in 2017 and 2018.

Brimheim, Fine, Akvama and Iceage remain three of the strongest performances at Syd for Solen this year for someone like me who is eager to finally see these artists on their home soil, and it's easy to forget how long some of them have been doing this. For Nis Bysted – who runs Escho, the ultra cool label responsible for many of the artists synonymous with CPH+ including Smerz, Fine, Sonne and Akvama, as well as Iceage – this current vogue for the city's much-discussed music renaissance might be something of a fugazi in some ways, but it has little in the way of downsides. "I get the question a lot about what it is in Copenhagen right now. What is the moment? And I'm reluctant to answer that question," he tells me with when we meet at Escho's offices.

"It is … but I like to tell people that this isn't something special for Copenhagen. There is a certain group of people that are incredibly curious – and their curiosity has completely seeped out into the corners of other people's thoughts and ways of doing things, and that's what made some of this music that's doing relatively well – this curiosity.

"If you speak to Henriette from Smerz, she knows . Talk to Elias, or anyone from Iceage – they all know so much about so much music. They constantly listen to other artists and are always looking constantly for new sounds, new books, new movies, new situations. That's what I think it is: just curiosity. And when bands love other bands, that's where the best music is created. Music that touches me is music that's created in a situation where it's not the product or a vision of what it's supposed to be, but it's created through some sort of symbiosis."

As for the CPH+ playlist? "I love anything that's curated," Bysted laughs. "If someone wants to say: 'Here's a list of stuff we think is connected' … it has meant so much in terms of opening doors for all of the artists here. And of course, playlists can be closing things down too and there's all these things you can criticise about it, but in the end, someone said, 'I can hear something going on in Copenhagen and I wanted to make a playlist for that,' and I think that's great."