Outer Waves Festival 2026

Outer Waves is only two years old, and already it’s doing something that takes most festivals a decade to figure out. Its 2025 debut at the Invisible Wind Factory and Make North Docks announced a festival with a clear sense of what it was for: not a genre, not a scene, but a particular temperature of music. Visceral, ritualistic, international. The 2026 edition doubles the ambition, with a line-up that’ll get the experimentally-minded hot under the collar.

From Poor Creature to One Leg One Eye, the side projects of Lankum members are consistently great, but ØXN might take the biscuit. The Dublin quartet – featuring Lankum’s Radie Peat, the band’s producer John “Spud” Murphy, singer-songwriter Katie Kim and drummer Eleanor Myler – released their debut album CYRM in 2023 on the reborn Claddagh Records. Their sound sits between doom folk, drone and post-punk, with Peat’s voice doing things that are difficult to place in time: rooted in Irish traditional song, aimed at something quite different. Slow-burning, ceremonial, slightly terrifying.

Dame Area, the Barcelona duo of Silvia Konstance and Viktor Lux Crux, offer something more propulsive. Born from the now-defunct underground club Màgia Roja, they’ve spent the years since touring relentlessly and honing a live show that’s punk in spirit but musically untethered – Konstance’s volatile vocals riding polyrhythms borrowed freely from flamenco, EBM and heavy metal.

Jarboe, the avant-garde artist and former co-frontwoman of Swans, performs with percussionist Thor Harris and vocalist Joy Von Spain, drawing from her new album Sightings, out this spring on Consouling Sounds. Then there’s the world premiere of Hand To Mouth To – a commissioned live work by Keeley Forsyth and pianist Matthew Bourne, developed with Outlands Network and Full of Noises. Forsyth has built one of the more singular bodies of work in British music since her 2020 debut Debris. A commission like this is what separates Outer Waves from festivals that are merely well-programmed.

Elsewhere, HHY & the Kampala Unit – the Portuguese-Ugandan collective built around producer Jonathan Saldanha and trumpeter Florence Lugemwa, released through Nyege Nyege – bring dub, techno, ceremonial percussion and brass into dense, trance-inducing combination. Waq Waq Kingdom, the Japan-born Berlin-based duo of Kiki Hitomi and DJ Scotch Egg, fold Japanese Minyo folk tradition into footwork, dancehall and tribal rhythm. Liverpool’s a.P.A.t.T. and Mugstar represent the city’s own; Mohammad Syfkhan brings his euphoric reinterpretations of Syrian Dabke. Commissioned new works from local artists and a visual art programme run alongside. After-parties at Quarry extend proceedings into the small hours.

The festival notes, helpfully, that all headliners finish in time for the last train to Manchester.