There’s a particular kind of guilt that comes with looking forward to a music festival these days. For me, anyway. It’s low-grade but constantly sitting somewhere behind our sternum. It rests there in stark contrast to checking your phone for the latest dispatch from Gaza or another headline about the administration’s latest attempt to strong-arm the press. Maybe it’s footage of ICE agents snuffing out your neighbors or an update on a war that could’ve ended months ago or not even started months before that. You almost feel like you have no right to stand in a park waiting for a band to play a song you’ve loved since you were a teenager. Joy in a year like this can feel like a luxury, something rationed and embarrassing to admit you still want. I thought that something about a lot while preparing for Riot Fest 2026.
But that’s kinda the trap, isn’t it? To let the accumulated weight of authoritarian atrocities talk you out of joy isn’t exactly solidarity. It’s surrender. It’s letting the people damaging our communities do it twice. Riot Fest, whatever it is or what you think it has become, has never asked its crowd to pretend the world outside Chicago’s West Side doesn’t exist. Instead, it asks something closer to the opposite. Across its 21-year run, the punk, rock, metal, alternative music festival asks for your refusal to go quietly. Almost as if perseverance is its own personal kind of protest.
Throughout Riot Fest 2026, that theme wasn’t just subtext; it was the mission statement.
Storms rolled through the weekend, threatening sets while turning Douglass Park into a mud pit. Legendary Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling came out of retirement to track what was coming. Delays had doors closing early and opening late. Schedules shifted, sets clashed, and some acts didn’t even get to play at all.
On stage, the handoffs told their own stories of perseverance. If it wasn’t the elders passing the proverbial torch of rock n’ roll to the new generation, it was the current generation getting a history lesson and a peek into the future, simultaneously. It’s poetic for a modern act like Sincere Engineer or Aim High playing yards away from grandparents like Iggy Pop and Patti Smith, artists who’d weathered their own storms before most of us were born.
Day 1 started with me meeting up with fellow BGM writer and photography extraordinaire Oscar De Leon as we mapped out our schedules.
Cardinals opened the festival with their Robert Smith-meets-early Radiohead garage rock at the Riot Stage. Next, Glixen educated Gen Z on the noise of My Bloody Valentine and the vulnerability of Mazzy Star. Speaking of vulnerability, Greet Death offered an emotional touch to their otherwise emotionally exhausting brand of shoegaze-meets-emo.
The one-two punch of Soul Glo and Fleshwater followed before I had to book it back to the press area for my first interview of the weekend. Afterward, I caught some of 3OH!3’s pseudo-obnoxious, late 00’s party rock before enjoying the ethereal atmosphere of Tricky. Bratmobile offered up the kind of fun more to my liking as I made my way to Bayside. Later, I split the set between Guttermouth and Motion City Soundtrack before heading to my second interview.
For the second portion of my day, I sampled Santigold before parking at the Rise Stage.
As pretentious as it sounds, I’ve never been a Sex Pistols fan due to how insufferable John Lydon has become. So seeing former Gallows singer Frank Carter take on the role of Johnny Rotten gave me a nice incentive to check them out. I’m glad I did, too! Their set was so much fun that I skipped Frank Black’s current iteration of Pixies so I could end the night with Iggy Pop. His set unsurprisingly became my favorite set of the day.
And before you even ask, no, I didn’t attend the Twenty One Pilots set. I had reached out to their PR for a meeting with the band in an effort to bury the hatchet in my one-sided rivalry. Alas, as a headlining act, they were too busy for the brief interview. If they were too cowardly to call a truce, then I was too busy to entertain their set! (In reality, I was much more stoked to see Iggy live while I had the opportunity.)
Day 2 is when things got a little weird, thanks to the threat of nasty weather.
The day started off with an interview and enough time to be introduced to the slick industrial production of ASAVA. Next up was Show Me The Body along with a surprisingly fun set from Melt-Banana. I followed things up with the puzzling and popular art-house rock of Angine de Poitrine. Despite the bizarre theatrics and liminal nightmare outfits, the duo put on a spectacular display of virtuoso prog. Is it for me? Not really, but I can’t say I was bored!
Around that time, I got an email notification that the threat of severe thunderstorms caused the Riot Fest crew and the City of Chicago to make the tough call of shutting down the festival early. But instead of closing shop completely, the remaining bands agreed to shift their sets so everyone could go on a few hours early. While some bands cut their sets short, Descendents had no problem burning through their setlist as usual. Meanwhile, the reunion of Sugar saw Bob Mould and Co. speeding through their set in under a half hour, inadvertently giving favorites like “Helpless” and “The Act We Act” a Hüsker Dü flavor.
I did a quick hangout with Chat Pile before Oscar interviewed them, and we were all shocked that Morrissey actually showed up. I then experienced the weirdest set of the weekend: Tool closing out a festival at 6 pm in broad daylight.
Day 3 of Riot Fest 2026 was even weirder.
Unfortunately, the looming threat of bad weather came to pass, and unholy amounts of rain and mud flooded Douglass Park. That led to the other painful decision the Riot Fest crew had to make: delaying the opening from 11 am to 2 pm. While on paper, that could’ve given festival-goers a tighter evening with virtually no downtime. In practice, it meant that a few smaller bands (including Afroman) had to be cut altogether. Although it was sad to see some artists cut, I’m glad that safety is a priority. It was clearly the correct call.
The revised schedule saw me burning through Murphy’s Law, Sincere Engineer, Arm’s Length, and Haywire before the polite comedown with The Beths. Things picked up again with Pennywise, complete with their tasteful cover of my favorite Nirvana song, “Territorial Pissings,” before a much-needed break to dry off.
I then enjoyed millennial emo stalwarts Taking Back Sunday, as they played the entirety of their biggest commercial album, Louder Now. I’m not gonna lie and say it didn’t feel a little weird to have Eddie and Mark no longer part of the lineup. Hopefully their band ME gets to play Riot Fest 2027. But it was great to see John Nolan on the same stage as Fred Mascherino. While the band gets dunked on for their live performances these days, it was an energetic and extremely fun set to experience in the moment.
Sadly, that was my last full set at Riot Fest 2026.
The rain hadn’t let up from the night before, and by 7 pm on Sunday, the park was next to impossible to walk through. I caught the quick opening of William Shatner’s novelty-laden performance as well as Alanis Morissette‘s intro as I made my way on the grueling trek to the exit. I really wanted to see Elvis Costello and the return of Insane Clown Posse, but the mud was getting more difficult to traverse by the minute. It didn’t help that my bad knee started acting up, and I think I might have sprained my ankle. I knew that if I didn’t sacrifice those sets, it would’ve been even more difficult to find my way to my car outside the festival grounds.
With that, my Riot Fest 2026 experience came to a close.
Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t help being reminded of the topic of perseverance. From the weather issues, schedule conflicts, and hard decisions, everyone involved still managed to press on and have an incredible time. We’re all getting older, and seeing this many bands can be a daunting task. For the younger goers, festivals might even seem like an archaic fossil of a bygone era. But for this particular weekend, it felt like we put all of that aside and refused to roll over. That ties back to my initial thoughts of unjustly thinking of our own joy as a luxury.
Of course, none of this erases anything. Three days in a muddy park doesn’t cancel out genocide, rescue the free press, or save democracy. And to be clear, nobody at Riot Fest, on the field or behind the scenes, was pretending it did. But there’s a difference between forgetting and refusing to be erased. And for one muddy and occasionally chaotic weekend in Chicago, thousands of people made the second choice. Still run without a corporate parent, still DIY to its bones over two decades later, Riot Fest 2026 became less an escape from the moment than an answer to it.
All photography by Oscar De Leon
