The festival itself struggled to outstep the volatility, beset by weather delays (opening their Saturday gates 3 hours late due to a flood watch), missing equipment (RIP to the Neighborhood’s drum kit and Geese’s guitars) and malfunctioning equipment that affected headliners (The Smashing Pumpkins) and daytime artists (an indefatigable Amber Mark) alike. 

Still, Lollapalooza is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a four-day journey of endurance, musical surprises, and befriending strangers as you’re packed tighter than the subway to catch sight of your favourite musical guest. With over eight stages, there’s more music than any one person can cover, so please accept our apologies for missing your favourites. From what we saw, here were ours. 

Blood Orange’s tender groove 

Fuzzy white static came over the projector screen of the Bud Light stage as Dev Hynes, the mastermind behind the British group Blood Orange, began his Thursday afternoon set, murmuring the words “I wanna see you” to a fresh-legged and eager audience. 

Somewhere between art rock, R&B, and experimental jazz, Blood Orange is a project unbound by genre, inhabiting a unique pocket of sound all its own. The songs are filled with tremolo and Wurlitzer, percussive bass lines, and a steadfast rhythm like a slightly elevated heartbeat. Three vocalists swap lead on tracks that both comfort and churn with emotion. 

Hynes, a true multi-instrumentalist in a festival whose artists often rely on tracking, glides effortlessly between keys, synth and guitar, while soulfully crooning over each track. Four songs in, he switched over to cello to cover Bjork’s “All is Full of Love”. Truly transcendent, it lifted the audience into an almost churchlike intoxication. “You’ll be given love,” he intones, “maybe not from the sources you’ve poured yours”. There’s a paean-like quality that runs through the music, a glow of gratitude and warmth that pulses through even the most melancholic of lyrics. 

The band closed their set with “Champagne Coast,” a song that took over TikTok well over ten years after its initial release. Heavy synth glides over the air, punctuated by the deep chime of bells. “Come into my bedroom,” Hynes invites warmly, in a song that offers tenderness and thoughtful devotion. 

Little Simz stands on business 

Thursday was a day for the UK. Little Simz, the British actor and rapper, dressed in a navy blue, ankle-length thobe, took full advantage of the crowd before her. “This is my first time here,” the 32-year-old shouted, “so we’re gonna have some fun”. Less than halfway through her first track, Simz had the crowd jumping and singing like freshly made acolytes.

Simz is her own hypeman, effortlessly commanding her audience to join her in jubilation as she skips across the stage like a kid on the playground. Her lyricism and flow are virtuosic in live performance, blending the genre’s signature self-aggrandisement with lines that somehow maintain a unique wit and self-awareness. 

Her music plays on nostalgia without centring its references, sampling hitmakers like D’Angelo and Outkast with a subtlety that draws the ear in with familiarity before spitting a fresh verse line that transforms the nostalgia into something brand new. 

Halfway through the set, her three-piece, leather-clad band exited the stage and a DJ booth was rolled on. Without a moment’s lag, she began spinning while leading the crowd in a tight call-and-response, followed by what felt like ten minutes of bodies launching themselves into the air. 

“Do you guys have energy or what?” she boomed over the mic as the crowd regained the ground between songs. “I was told Chicago knows how to party. I don’t know if I believe them,” she goaded. The crowd gleefully took up the challenge. 

CMAT and her very sexy CMAT band 

Direct from Ireland, CMAT’s sexy-ass six-piece band shimmied onto the Grove stage covered by the park’s natural canopy of shade. CMAT is far from a household name, yet her recent album EURO-COUNTRY is making a big splash from across the pond, landing her an opening spot for superstar Olivia Rodrigo’s recent tour and bringing her to many a festival across the world.

From the set’s first number, you can immediately see her allure. It’s an anarchic, uncompromising authenticity that most pop stars can’t afford to access because of their fame. She saunters on to the stage wearing a muted pink and purple paisley head scarf, big amber sunglasses, and plaid tights that would feel at home in a Grey Garden’s satire.

The band rolls right into the chaos of “Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” a brazen song that vibrates with love and rage for a world that feels like it’s eating itself in front of you. The lyrics are acerbic and hyper-specific, as CMAT playfully acknowledges, remarking that “this song is making no sense to the average listener.” 

CMAT’s sound careens between pop and country in a way that feels uniquely Irish, infused with a healthy dose of fiddle and pedal steel guitar. The energy of the show is one of pageantry and playfulness even as it makes space for head-to-the-sky catharsis in numbers like “When A Good Man Cries”. 

For someone who hasn’t quite broken through to the mainstream, CMAT knows how to keep her audience’s ear and eye. She is campy, charismatic, funny as hell, with a voice and lyricism that are a full course in and of themselves. 

Slayyyter came here to party 

You would be forgiven for not knowing who Slayyyter was, given what seems like an overnight rise to fame. On Friday afternoon, a light rain misted down onto Grant Park, as a white vinyl trailer stood center of the Bud Light stage. As the gentle tick of drums from her viral song “DANCE…” settled into the air, Slayyyter opened the trailer door to gaze out at 50,000 people. 

She strutted onto the stage with a bedazzled Bass Pro hat, a flannel button-down cropped around a beige bustier, and Daisy Dukes sporting a line of fish tackles. “Chicago!” she shouts in greeting to what was likely the largest daytime audience of the whole weekend. 

“DANCE…” is both an obvious and dangerous choice to begin her set. Achieving virality through TikTok and Reels, it’s a hook you’ve heard even if you don’t know to whom it belongs. 

I was nervous as the song came to a close, won over by its undeniable catchiness and Slayyyter’s unflagging confidence. I wondered if she could maintain the energy beyond her viral hit. 

A sea of cell phones fell to the side, satiated with a usable social media post. And that’s when the party really began. Slayyyter’s music simply refused to let up. From CANNIBALISM to OLD TECHNOLOGY, it tapped into a booming, trancelike drone that hacks into your legs and makes you want to get down. While Slayyyter feels like a pastiche of many a pop superstar before her, what she offers feels truly feral. It’s hyperpop that lives on the edge of breakage, her voice blaring almost beyond the speaker’s capacity to hold it. It’s sex and rage and club delivered with nonchalant confidence. 

As I watched the set from beyond the 100-yard line, I could still feel the undeniable devotion of her die yards, broadcast on the screen, lip syncing every lyric, thrashing like the possessed. That devotion translated itself backwards to the far reaches of the enormous crowd. Slayyyter came here to party, and even after her set ended, it felt like that party had only just begun.

Running wild & free with Wolf Alice 

An orchestral drone surged out over the Lolla’s grounds, freshly transformed into a soggy marshland by a steady night rain. As the festival goers sank into the moist earth, sonic waves, dissonant and enveloping, cut through the mist. A grungy, leather-clad Wolf Alice had taken over the stage.

Saturday in Chicago was met with flood warnings, which pushed back the festival gates’ opening by three hours, cancelling and truncating the sets of almost every artist on the day’s lineup. Wolf Alice was no exception, their scheduled hour-long set slashed in half. As their show finally began, the band wasted no time capturing its audience’s attention. 

At the centre of Wolf Alice’s staying power as a band that’s managed relevance in a diminishing rock scene is their innovative sense of groove and lead singer Ellie Roswell’s towering vocals. Roswell’s voice swings freely between lush expression, steady rock belt, and a searing upper register that cuts through the air like a supersonic jet. 

“The last time we played here was 10 years ago. We were literally thirteen years old,” she exaggerated after finishing their first number, “Bloom Baby Bloom”. The song is a tender yet forceful banishment of self-insecurities, built around a propulsive piano hook.

Their songs don’t follow traditional structure. They glide and soar and go where they need to. Like the best kind of music, it carries something nostalgic into fresh, alien territory. Their latest single “The Sofa” fuses chamber pop with psychedelic folk into a soaring anthem. It reflects an undecided mind held gently with newfound self-acceptance. “I hope I can accept the wild thing in me,” Roswell sings, “hope nobody comes to tame her and she can be free.” 

Only moments later, Roswell is behind a megaphone, screaming into the audience, “I’m not a fool, but I have a rage, and it’s blinding”. All softness is gone, as the band thrashes through “Yuk Foo” and “Play the Greatest Hits,” Roswell’s lipstick smeared across her face, a wild thing running free.

A mudbath with Geese 

Is Geese a psyop? An industry plant? Or a bunch of talented Brooklynites hell-bent on taking the piss every chance they get? Who knows. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate a band that seems to have captured the generational ennui of Gen-Z, with its opaque yet piercing lyricism, sludge guitar intermixed with cadenced melody, and relentlessly savage drumming. 

Geese gives off the impression of jazz. Much of their set feels like it’s improvised, even inside of the singles that have shot the band into fame. “Now we’re gonna play our hit song,” singer Cameron Winter says in his reliably deadpan delivery. What’s admirable about the band is how unmarried to their own recordings they are. It allows the songs room to surprise their audience (and maybe even the band themselves). As a result, the music feels fresher than a daisy sprouting up through mud. 

And there was a lot of mud! The field in front of the Allianz stage was pockmarked with gluttonous pits of wet dirt that even the most spatially aware person would have trouble not slipping into. Pity the fool who wore white shoes to Lollapalooza. 

Yet Max Bassin’s almost militant sense of rhythm got people sloshing around with abandon. The dancing it evokes feels earnest, which is a strange response to a band that seems to defer any sense of seriousness. Yet the band’s lyricism manages to tap into the vein of disenchantment with the American dream. “If you want me to pay my taxes,” Winter intones to a crowd swaying and shouting back like congregants, “you better come over with a crucifix”. 

The set closed with “Trinidad,” a bewilderingly brutal track off their latest album Getting Killed.  Saved for last, the track plays like a bomb waiting to go off; the crowd holds its breath waiting for the explosion. “There’s a bomb in my car,” Winter screams over a guitar that sounds like a car’s engine squealing to gain traction. The crowd threw their bodies around in the muck, singing back the paranoia with a playful rage. 

Adéla takes us to the barre 

Sunday at Lollapalooza was for the pop girlies. Ushered in by Saturday night’s astoundingly cinematic set from pop god Charli XCX, the final day of the festival seemed curated for the girls, gays, and theys. Wearing hot pink stilettos to match her razor-straight hair of the same colour, Slovakian superstar Adéla, took the stage with a troupe of dancers, stomping the ground until the noise ballooned into a thunderous track. 

Adéla’s music feels like hyperpop with a fresh infusion from her K-pop colleagues. It’s bratty bubblegum with a sharp edge that retains its flavour for a full set, but doesn’t hold much in terms of sonic surprise for the genre. The music seems laser-focused on a self-empowerment that’s rarely tempered with even a note of self-doubt. 

And that’s just fine, especially for a performer like Adéla, who brings something special to the table as a trained ballerina. “I just wanna go,” she belts out, “hair stuck to my face, I put on a show”. She does exactly that, thrashing about on stage in her stilettos and revving the audience up before making a surprise exit that leaves her dancers front and centre. 

A hot pink ballet barre pens in the stage. The dance troupe makes full use of it, swirling and flexing over the barre to create a routine that morphs between ballet and modern, creating a pulsing mural of bodies. 

Adéla reenters in pointe shoes, grande jete’ing across the stage like a leaping deer. As the set continues, Adéla bends over backwards (literally) to give her audience something they’ve never seen before. “Steady on it,” the electroclash track blares, as Adéla showcases the precision of a ballerina with a devil-may-care popstar alter ego. It felt impossible to look away. 

* * *

And that’s a wrap! Thank you to Lollapalooza and the hordes of fans who got down and dirty with us in the sun, the rain, and the mud. We’ll see you again in 2027. 

The post Lollapalooza 2026 Recap: Best Sets from Blood Orange, Little Simz, CMAT, Wolf Alice & More appeared first on Quip Magazine.