REVIEW: Outside Lands 18th Birthday brought A Well-Rounded Lineup and a Few Surprises
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY ELIJAH CLOWER ☆
OUTSIDE LANDS TURNED 18 THIS YEAR, and it came through with what might be one of the most well rounded lineups the festival has put together in recent memory. Turnout felt high across every stage, and even SOMA, which has historically played second fiddle to the main stages, got a serious amount of love this year, with crowds packing the area during sets that were competing with major names elsewhere in the park.
Having gone the last four years (2022, 2024, 2025, 2026), I can say with confidence that this was one of the strongest overall weekends the festival has put on. So let's start where you always have to start with a festival like this: the headliners.
Out of every performance I've caught in my four years going to Outside Lands, Charli XCX's Friday night set might be the best performance I've personally witnessed. From the top down, the stage design, the production, the choreo, all of it was a treat to watch. I'll be honest, Charli isn't my go to music choice and I don't regularly listen to her music, but from an unbiased standpoint, anyone who walked away from that set unimpressed simply can't separate their personal taste from admiring genuine artistry. This was a big one for her too, arriving off the back of Music, Fashion, Film, her eighth studio album, which had just debuted at No. 1 in the UK. Coming off a chapter defined by the neon of the Brat era, she showed up with a completely different visual language, and the shift showed in every second of the set.
The Strokes closed out day two, and for me it was more of a visual experience than a musical one. Julian Casablancas and company are a bit out of my age range, so while I didn't connect with a lot of the songs on a personal level, the visuals, even shrouded in silhouette for most of the set, were genuinely great. The one connection I have to The Strokes is “Reptilia”, as it was in Guitar Hero. Then came the moment everyone will be talking about for a while: Julian brought out Charli XCX as a surprise guest, jokingly giving her the credit she deserved for "defeating The Strokes in album sales," since both acts dropped albums back in July. The two of them then tore into a remix of "Take It or Leave It" together, and it turned into one of the defining crossover moments of the entire weekend.
Baby Keem closed out the Twin Peaks stage with a high-energy set that lived up to the hype. For only having two studio albums, he's built up a surprising amount of hits that keep you locked in from front to back. His stage design leaned hard into the Ca$ino era, with a crumbling, old Vegas style marquee that he climbed on top of to open the set with the title track while slot machines rang out and lights flashed across the stage. A Vegas showgirl joined him for a few songs, adding another layer of glitz to the whole thing, and by the time he ran through "STATS," "Good Flirts," "I Am Not a Lyricist," and "vent," the crowd at Twin Peaks was as rowdy as I've seen it in years. As a cousin and frequent collaborator of Kendrick Lamar, it's hard not to hear some of that shared musical DNA in his flow, though he's carved out his own lane with a flair for dramatic, visually driven performances that's entirely his.
RUFUS DU SOL put on what I can only describe as a brain-altering set that closed out day three on the opposite side of the park at the Lands End stage. I wasn't able to get any photos, but I caught the back half of the set, and there was a different kind of atmosphere surrounding them as they closed the festival out this year. I think that has a lot to do with the role San Francisco has played in building RUFUS DU SOL's career. Another Planet Entertainment, the promoter behind Outside Lands, was one of the first promoters in San Francisco to book the group back in 2015, putting them on at Mezzanine, a now-closed club in the city. They kept booking the trio at progressively bigger venues over the years, and it all built toward this: a headlining slot on the main stage at Outside Lands 2026. The incredible on-stage camera work by Leah Barylsky elevated the set to another level entirely.
Moving past the top of the bill, the "sub-headliner" tier was just as loaded this year. We caught DJO, GloRilla, Labrinth, Ethel Cain, Not for Radio, and Wet Leg, and while we didn't get photos, we still got to enjoy sets from Empire of the Sun and a surprise Leon Bridges’ appearance at the Duboce Triangle stage.
DJO had the most soul-touching set for me personally. I knew I wanted to cover his set the moment the lineup was revealed, but after being there and actually witnessing it, there was some kind of unknown void that needed filling that I didn't even realize needed filling until after the fact. You'll hear me and plenty of others say it, but music is one of the most powerful things that brings people together and gets people through hard times, and it'll always hold a special place in my heart because of that. And even with how heartfelt the performance was, it was ironically just as funny and goofy, with Joe Keery running around with the zoomies for a good chunk of the set.
GloRilla brought that Memphis energy straight to the Bay. It was a fun set, and from where I was standing the crowd was generally vibing with Big Glo, though I do think she got slotted a little awkwardly, sandwiched between Wet Leg and Labrinth, two acts that make entirely different kinds of music. In the past few years I've been going to Outside Lands, it feels like there's almost always a day that leans toward a certain genre depending on who's playing, and it seems like there's always at least one act that gets placed a bit awkwardly within that flow. Look at 2025, for example. On Saturday they had Gracie Abrams sandwiched in between Ludacris and Tyler, the Creator, and when you put Gracie right before Tyler, you're guaranteed a wildly different mix of fans who showed up prepared for Tyler and weren't necessarily there for Gracie. They did something similar back in 2024, placing ScHoolboy Q after Fletcher and before Grace Jones. Maybe GloRilla was only available on Friday and there wasn't a choice to be made, but if there was, sliding her over to Sunday at Twin Peaks alongside someone like Baby Keem, who's in that same hip hop and rap space, would have made for a much smoother crowd transition. With that said, I do think the scheduling overall was noticeably better this year compared to years past. I've mentioned in a previous Outside Lands review that some of the overlaps in past years were genuinely unfortunate, to the point where you couldn't realistically catch another act you wanted to see. This year there felt like enough of a gap between highly anticipated sets that you could actually walk the park and catch a piece of something else, even if it was just the tail end of another set. I hope that trend continues, as I know crowd movement and management are a huge part of what makes a festival run well.
Ethel Cain put on a cool set. I don't know her catalog all that well, but I had a great time watching her work. Her stage was dressed in greenery set against chain link fencing, giving off something stark and lush at the same time, right down to a curved, weathered steel mic stand that fit the whole aesthetic. Her set moved through a lot of different moods, at times a slow burn, at others brooding and intimate, pulling from her most recent record, "Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You," with tracks like "Fuck Me Eyes," "Nettles," and "Dust Bowl," along with standouts like "Perverts" and "Gibson Girl," before closing things out with "American Teenager." Rather than demanding energy from the crowd the way most festival sets do, she seemed to pull people inward instead, and by the reports of fans closest to the stage, it left more than a few people in tears.
Labrinth put on an amazing, fun set. He had this huge scaffolding rig with wires running all over it, almost like he was some kind of madman up there. He'd climb up a few times throughout the set, but mostly stayed down at the bottom, and the whole thing was theatrical, high energy, and a genuine blast to watch. The dystopian look of the stage matched the range he was pulling from all set long, swinging from orchestral, almost cinematic grandeur into raw, soulful vulnerability within the same handful of songs, with bold, colorful lighting shifting right alongside him. He worked through cuts like "Jealous," "Never Felt So Alone," and "THE LIVING" before building toward a real high point with "Genius," his track with LSD, and then closed it all out by climbing back up that metal structure for "All for Us," the song he wrote for "Euphoria" with Zendaya, which sent the whole crowd surging back into motion right as the set wrapped.
Now, while Charli definitely had the best performance of the festival in my opinion, this next one might be a little contradictory to that, because I think Not for Radio had my favorite set of the entire weekend. This is Maria Zardoya's solo project outside of her band The Marias, and she's simply a muse if there's any better word for it. She's someone who creates art at its finest and is always going to hand you some kind of amazing visual. I'm not someone who regularly listens to her slower paced music, but I still enjoy a handful of her tracks, and more than that, I have a deep respect for the visual presentation and storytelling that she and her team put together. If you're someone who doesn't connect with her music, you should still go check her out, whether she's doing her solo project, this Not for Radio incarnation, or performing with The Marias, because you're always going to walk away with a visual treat. Watching her move through a set is like watching poetry in motion.
Wet Leg was another set I was genuinely excited to catch, and they showed up with a ton of energy. I'm still fairly new to the band's music, but I'm not new to their live shows and their overall look, since I follow a lot of music festivals and have already seen clips of what they bring to a stage. Getting to catch them in person was a must. And the more I've dug into the band, the more it's clear just how much of a transformation front woman Rhian Teasdale has gone through, from her more natural look to this pink haired era rockstar, aggressive, and even a little sexy showmanship that wasn't present before. I couldn't tell you whether that's purely a stage persona or just her being more herself now, but you could tell she was fully enjoying every second up there. That shift might honestly be part of why the band has been picking up so much more popularity lately, alongside the music itself, of course. It was a standout set, and I'm hoping to catch them again anytime they swing through the Bay.
I also caught bits of sets from The Temper Trap, Lucy Dacus, Kingfishr, Day We Ran, Britton, Faouzia, and Grace Ives. Britton played her first ever festival set at Outside Lands over at the Duboce Triangle stage, and it was a great moment to be able to capture. She put on a genuinely fun set for the occasion. Faouzia, though, probably had the most underrated set I caught all festival. I went in unfamiliar with her music, which honestly is one of my favorite parts of going to festivals in general, discovering new artists you didn't know you needed. Coming out of her set, after hearing her vocal range and talent, I walked away a big, big, big fan. It was one of the few moments all weekend where I could vividly remember getting chills from a single song.The song is “Unethical” by the way, go give it a listen if you haven’t heard it.
Leon Bridges made a surprise appearance at the Duboce Triangle stage, and while I wasn't able to get any photos, I did pass through the area during it. From what I saw, the festival underestimated how many people would want to see him, which is a little surprising given how big and popular he is. At the end of the day, no festival is without its hiccups, whether that's an awkward slot or a stage that draws more bodies than the space was built for, but Outside Lands 2026 leaned far more into what makes this festival special than what holds it back. Eighteen years in, and it still managed to feel fresh, with a lineup that stretched wide enough to give pop, indie rock, hip hop, electronic, and everything in between its own real moment in the park. That's not an easy needle to thread, and this year they threaded it about as well as I've seen.
That said, as much as I love what Outside Lands has built and continues to build on, I'd love to see them push that range even further in the years ahead. In eighteen years, the festival has only booked one K-pop act, and given how massive that scene has gotten, there's a real opportunity sitting untapped there. The same goes for heavy rock and metal. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have a genuinely strong rock and metal scene, and right now Aftershock is really the only major festival in the region giving that world a proper home. Turnstile's set alone pulled one of the biggest crowds of the entire weekend at the Sutro stage and the crowd was ROWDY. That's a pretty clear sign of how much room there is to grow if Outside Lands leaned into that space more. The current formula works, and it worked especially well this year, but there's room to keep pushing the boundaries of what a Golden Gate Park weekend can sound like.
