Mad Cool festival 2026 review: Wolf Alice, Pixies, David Byrne, Pulp and more deliver scorching sets under Madrid sun
The biggest acts in the world raise the temperature at the hottest festival of the year
It was an apocalyptic 39°C as Madrid’s Mad Cool festival kicked off its tenth anniversary celebrations last week, and the festival’s organisers pulled out all the stops. For good reason, too: at this rate there might not be a planet left for a 20th anniversary return.
Making the most of the time we’ve all got left, Mad Cool nabbed the line-up of summer 2026, with headliners Foo Fighters, Lorde, Pulp, Florence + The Machine and Nick Cave soaking up the UV for our sweaty pleasure across the July four-dayer.
Having melted for the cause to bring you highlights from the festival each day, here's our full final review of what's certain to be the festival to beat for 2026.
JULY 8th | DAY ONE
Jehnny Beth
Like a vampire boxer eyeing up the Mad Cool crowd for its next throat, it feels almost criminal to put Jehnny Beth onstage while the sun’s still shining. But Jehnny Beth’s familiars come out in force for the Mad Cool tent’s opening act. She puts them to the test — not only with the nu-metal tinged onslaught of Broken Rib from latest album You Heartbreaker, You, but with a literal onstage push-up competition (resulting in a very respectable 23 push-ups in 39°C heat from one game fan).
It’s with a wink and a smirk that Beth prowls — the dark tunes cut through with wit and humour. If there were any doubters to challenge Beth’s place as the coolest act at the festival, a brooding cover of Bjork’s Army of Me lays them to (eternal) rest. (GL)
The Last Dinner Party
One of the benefits of a European festival over a UK one is you can often see acts that would inhabit just-off-headliner slots earlier in the day — and with smaller crowds, too.
The Last Dinner Party’s 7:30pm Mad Cool slot equates to around 4pm in London day festival currency. And while the band’s regency era lampshade dresses aren’t the obvious fit for heatwave weather, the catchy pop tunes and knowingly arch dramatics are fit for all seasons.
As ever, singer Abigail Morris lights up the stage’s video screens with her Kate Bush-referencing dancing, while the unabashed pop structure and dynamics of the songs keep the crowd up. And when the tempo and energy is brought down with one of Lizzie Mayland’s lead tracks, they’re well signposted enough to act like a hydration break, not a derailing.
The only issue was sound bleed from the main stage, with the somewhat more po-faced Mexican rock band The Warning’s set running through the first half of The Last Dinner Party’s. But given Mad Cool’s tightly designed festival ground layout, these things are as much down to the whims of the wind as anything else. (AW)
The Vaccines
Some of the best festival bands are those that don’t require you to be a fan beforehand to enjoy. The Vaccines fit into that category even if the heady days of their 2011 debut album are now far enough away to justify a 15-year anniversary tour.
The songs are catchy, unfussy and never outstay their welcome. And if you are at least of a certain vintage, there’s a good chance you know more of them than you’d guess beforehand. Their original signature sound had perhaps undesirable, unfashionable results in just the previous decade, but on stage they have little of the baggage of those often more preening forebears. And little of their more synth-heavy recent style comes to the fore in this festival set.
The Vaccines: an altogether good time for fans and non-fans alike. It’s just a shame that having to compete with concurrent sets from Foo Fighters and Moby would doubtless have squeezed out many potential casual wanderers-by — not that the third-batting stage was left wanting for viewers. (AW)
Wolf Alice
Britain’s best band? Right now Wolf Alice might be the best band in the world, period. A day one highlight, the Camden crew tore through a scorching early evening main-stage set drawing mostly from latest album The Clearing and 2021’s Blue Weekend, seesawing between tender heart-tugging (The Last Man on Earth) to buzzsaw scream-alongs (Play the Greatest Hits).
That emotional pendulum swing is personified in Ellie Roswell, on stage both soulful and savage, playfully trying out some GCSE Spanish before pummeling the crowd with megaphone howls. By the time cathartic closer Don’t Delete the Kisses rings out, the crowd’s left torn between confessing unrequited loves long lost, or simply smashing the place up. Gorgeous. (GL)
Moby
Richard Melville Hall — Moby — looks simultaneously not all that different to the man who put out the iconic Play in 1999, and also like a version of Santa Claus who has got far too into Ozempic. His schtick is the same delightfully watchable thing as ever.
Moby is the most incongruous element on his own stage. The unremarkable white man in white. The singer who can’t sing. The guitar-wielding non-star sprinting from one end of the stage to the other while never achieving — or even attempting to achieve — an actual rock star gait or presence.
And yet, it all just meshes with the top backing band and vibrant AV light show, forming a good-time party gumbo.
At the root of it all is what has given Moby such decades-spanning longevity: the tunes are rock-solid all timers that are recognisable remix after remix, not to mention once they’ve been rearranged to hell and back. A suitable alternative headliner to Foo Fighters for those who feel more at home with house than rock — a trickier goal than it sounds. And not only because Moby and Grohl have both been enmeshed in a face-palm relationship scandal in recent years. (AW)
Foo Fighters
As far as penitential rites go, Dave Grohl and crew’s two and a half hour sprint down memory lane wipes the slate clean. The Foo Fighters’ hearts-and-minds approach to touring in 2026 sees them rattling through three decades of hits in raucous fashion, kicking off with the heartbeat stab of All My Life to a giant crowd of sweat-glistened fans. It may be a festival headline slot, but Mad Cool day 1 is very much a Foos gig, judging by the sea of double-F t-shirts and tattoos on site.
For the 57,000 capacity crowd, this is as much a lesson in alt-rock history as it is a fan-favourites set: the Foos nod to each member’s past glories, with Pat Smear’s turn in US punk pioneers Germs celebrated with a cover of Manimal, Nate Mendel’s Sunny Day Real Estate getting a nod with a verse and chorus of Seven, and Chris Shifflet’s No Use for a Name cover Invincible inspiring the biggest pit of the night. Two, in fact, swirling despite the heat in a mirror battle on either side of the crowd safety divider. It’s a reminder that the Foos were a supergroup of sorts long before stadiums became their home.
The night’s a reminder, too, of the Foo’s knack for writing a killer pop song. Learn to Fly, My Hero, Breakout and Monkey Wrench are hook-filled entries into the rock and roll canon, while Aurora (dedicated here to late drummer Taylor Hawkins) and its cosmic balladry reveals the heart-on-sleeve core that’s made them a favourite around the world.
From the bubblegum delights of early hit Big Me to the roar of Best of You, there’s something for everyone here — and Grohl’s campaign to turn every human on the planet into a Foo Fighters fan gets permission to march on for another 30 years. (GL)
JULY 9th | DAY TWO
CMAT
“Someone has a flag of me not winning the Mercury Prize. Thank you so much — you can't win ‘em all” says Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, AKA CMAT, who instead wins the ‘Opener of the Festival’ title on day two of Mad Cool. It’s a day-glo crowd of devotees who turn up for the brisk seven song set, seemingly shipped in straight from the UK and Ireland, if the number of Tricolour flags on show are anything to go by.
The Dubliner’s breezy alt-country set mixes love with laughs (Ciara should be a comedian if the pipes ever give way), with Take a Sexy Picture of Me inspiring a mass singalong in the early evening sun. It’s another scorching day in Madrid, and CMAT calls for one final two-step sway from the crowd “if you're excited to join CMAT in our last gig before we die of heat stroke”. They’re only too happy to oblige as I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby! kicks in — squint through the heat haze and this Dublin-via-Madrid hoedown could whisk you away to the Grand Ole Opry itself. (GL)
Lorde
Now here’s one that caused a rift in the Shortlist team. Is Lorde one of the most interesting big-name pop acts going, or just too low energy and grey-adjacent to really fly sat amid the technicolour style and energy of Zara Larsson and CMAT?
I’m a firm believer in the former. Her impressive Mad Cool set spans her entire discography, mildly reworking some of their arrangements with a backing band in (non)holy cross arrangement of keyboard and synth units — a Kraftwerk visual but not one that pushed this pop icon into anything but a lightly electronic-laced pop act. Business as usual.
The staging is a little odd, though, with giant back boxes for Lorde to clamber about on. They occasionally hint at lightshow elements as a definitely-not-real display of her heart rate ticks on like a hummingbird. At one point she dons a jacket with basically a small army of laser pointers glued to its fabric. You can’t help but feel some of it would land better without blazing sunshine and near-40-degree weather — but darkness is a luxury not many Summer festival acts get, in either Madrid or the UK.
She ends the set deep in the crowd, a sea parted by a handy security corridor, while letting loose some undeniable late set bangers including Green Light. And even if you aren’t enraptured by her lower-voltage sonic energy, you may at least be shamed into going back to the gym — Lorde currently looks like she’s come fresh from competing at the Olympics. (AW)
Zara Larsson
The sheer popularity of Zara Larsson tested the seams of Mad Cool’s staging. Larsson had a second stage, third-place act set, putting pressure on the mid-capacity space. And with no main stage act on as alternative programming, the enthused crowd swamped half of the festival ground as a massed sea of people.
It was headliner vibes three hours early, but Mad Cool’s tight stage arrangement doesn’t allow for secondary sound towers, leaving those who didn’t get there early to either accept transistor radio sound or start pushing through the masses. The results were worth a bit of crowd-weaving aggression though, even if that risked elbowing countless pre-teen girls in the face.
Larsson’s set dressing was based around a song that doesn’t bother her Spotify most-listened list, but fits the festival scene visual. Part way through the set, a campy pink Barbie-indebted car prop enters the stage, letting Larsson reference the Hot & Sexy lyrics about hanging out with your hot girlfriends — a viral TikTok sensation as well as a perfect match for the crowd sentiment. Most of them were singing along, even if they couldn’t quite hear Larsson herself as well as they hoped.
A stunning, high-energy set matched with unparalleled audience energy. But also proof Larsson needs a main stage placement next time. (AW)
Florence + The Machine
With more than 15 years of festival headliner experience under her vintage market belt, Florence Welch makes the top-slot job seem effortless and natural.
The band can now mine decades of recognisable hits, delivered with an earnestness that’s still light, and a call for emotion and feeling that manages to mostly avoid being too cloying or performative. The dance-led theatrics are offset by a simple focus on what Florence + The Machine are — a band with an undeniably captivating singer and the Earth Mother witchy bangers to back her up.
You’re encouraged to scream, to put your bloody phone away and enjoy the moment for once — a command almost all of the audience obeys. While some of the closing songs are now old enough to be the subject of a nostalgia tour, Florence + The Machine are consistent enough (and always just outside of trendy enough) to avoid seeming a retro throwback among the day’s younger and hotter acts. (AW)
We also saw…
Chloe Slater from Manchester, who plays light and digestible guitar-led pop-rock with chunkier themes than that summary might suggest, including the plight of the Palestinians in 2025 single War Crimes.
You’d have to try a bit harder to work out what New York electronic sibling act Frost Children are singing about, though. Their glitchy electro pop made for starkly different counter-programming to Florence + The Machine — a soundtrack fit for a swig of Monster Energy and a Fortnite headshot.
JULY 10th | DAY THREE
Pixies
Remember a couple of days / paragraphs ago when I said Wolf Alice are the best band on the planet? Yeah, well, Pixies are the best band in the world, too — we’ve just been taking them for granted over their 40 year run.
Frank Black and crew spare us any onstage banter in favour of a back-to-back-to-back 23 song set that plays out like the gospel for indie kids. From the beautiful sway of Wave of Mutilation to the deranged Vamos, the surf-pop perfection of Here Comes Your Man to the sci-fi magic of Velouria, it’s a breathless run through the blueprint texts for the last four decades of guitar rock.
There’s something to be said for seeing Pixies here in Spain — with so many of the songs featuring Spanish lyrics, there’s a kinship and pride coursing through the crowd when the likes of Vamos and Isla de Encanta erupt. There’s even time for a little virtuosity, with Joey Santiago summoning ray-gun sounds from his guitar pick ups by dragging his baseball cap across them.
A ferocious Tame makes every other band on the bill look, well, tame by comparison. And though the sea of iPhones raised for Where Is My Mind? may make for the most incongruous ‘lighters out’ moment of the weekend — arguably the band’s only true ‘hit’ in today’s TikTok obsessed social currency — we’ll let that indiscretion by the Johnny Come Latelys in the crowd slide. If they watched this set, at least they received the equivalent of an Oxbridge-grade crash course in alternative rock mastery. (GL)
Kings of Leon
Sex on Fire really did a number on Kings of Leon — one of the all-time great mega songs, it sits up there with Hey Jude, Seven Nation Army, Mr Brightside in the pantheon of untreatable earworms. But it’s an anthemic high the Tennessee rockers have chased ever since with diminishing returns.
Which is a shame, because when Kings of Leon drop the singalongs and get weird, they’re still awesome, and it shows in a superb mainstage Mad Cool set that sees them notably draw more heavily on their pre-2010 output than anything more recent. Cuts from 2007’s Because of the Times, such as My Party and On Call, have a between-the-legs swagger that few bands of the era managed. Aha Shake Heartbreak’s King of the Rodeo has a metronomic intensity that manhandles hips, and The Bucket is just about the prettiest song any band wrote in the naughties.
Of course I screamed out Sex on Fire along with the 50-odd thousand crowd as the set draws to its close — I’m not a monster. And if anything I left more in love with Kings of Leon than ever before — there’s still another great record in there, somewhere beyond the allure of the stadiums and festival crowds. (GL)
Interpol
While mainstage headliners Twenty One Pilots bring the pyro, second-stage closers Interpol bring the New York cool, still sharp suited and impeccably put together even in the oven-like heat of their witching hour slot.
For a band whose melancholic staccato runs the risk of feeling detached, there’s an emotional through line to the songs that sees Interpol received with an almost religious fervour by some portions of the sizable crowd. NYC shimmers with an elegiac potency that draws actual tears from the eyes of a bulldozer of a man next to me, despite everyone struggling, Dune-like, to retain any and all moisture that they can.
But Interpol are always at their best when they let the bass and beat do the talking. C’mere, Slow Hands, Obstacle 1 and PDA have lost none of the hi-hat braggadocio that still make them perennial indie-disco floor-fillers. (GL)
We also saw…
The bombast and flash of Twenty One Pilots draws a massive main-stage closer crowd, with an off-kilter nod to Cher’s Believe a fun aside from their hip-hop-electro-rock fusion.
A Perfect Circle, the gateway drug for the Tool-curious alt-art-rockers in attendance, play a technically brilliant set for the gleeful, grateful crowd, even if it’s just a touch too precise to feel lived in. Judith still slaps way harder than any song about lost faith and debilitating illness has any right to, though.
JULY 11th | DAY FOUR
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Six songs into Nick Cave’s mainstage Mad Cool co-headliner slot, the goth punk preacher, suspended above the front row crowd by the hands of the faithful, reaches out and grabs the arm of a young fan. He is transfixed, stupefied, as motionless as someone can be when flanked by 50,000 kohl-lined parishioners. He’s struck dumb by the intensity of the stare he shares with Nick Cave, his mute gaze only exorcised when Cave kicks off the shriek-and-response ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah!’ of Tulepo.
The evangelical analogies with Cave are at this point played to death of course, but there’s no better description for it — this lad has had a religious experience at the altar of the Bad Seeds.
It’s a sensation felt in waves through the crowd, and though Cave can’t reach all of them physically individually, he does his damn best to try. The power of the service leaves no-one left to convert as the Bad Seeds tear through a blistering run of The Mercy Seat, Papa Won’t Leave You Henry, and Red Right Hand, Warren Ellis’s fiddle at times seeming on the verge of combustion. As the crowd sway to gentle closer Into Your Arms, it’s all they can do but lift their eyes up to the heavens and thank God for Nick Cave. (GL)
David Byrne
“Showing love and kindness is the most punk things you can do right now” says David Byrne in orange jumpsuit and glow-in-the-dark trainers, quoting director John Cameron Mitchell, and it’s love and kindness — with a huge helping of joy — that propels the Talking Heads’ legend’s set to greatness.
This is euphoric, life-affirming stuff. From the moment his fellow tango’d performers join him on stage with an array of mobile instruments that look as though they were crafted during an episode of Blue Peter, it’s a non-stop party atmosphere. Sesame Street singalong Everybody Laughs sets the tone immediately, with surreal videos playing out over three massive screens as the troupe dance and harmonise around Byrne.
It’s hit after hit, as the crowd grooves along to Nothing But Flowers, and the usually-stark Psycho Killer transforms into a mad hand-waving anthem, belted out louder than any other song we heard all weekend.
But it’s not a passive love-in — the screens also flick to montages of stormtrooping US I.C.E immigration squads pulling frightened faces off the streets. (There was also a clip of that amazing viral video where a total boss evades the clutches of about 10 I.C.E agents as he weaves away on a hire pedal bike, which was cheered with absolute delight).
“Home is where I want to be” sings Byrne on ice-melting beauty This Must Be The Place. Let it act as a reminder that we all should count our blessings we’re not being teared away from our own, and to let that love and kindness face off against the darker forces of the modern world. Never for money, always for love. (GL)
Pulp
Jarvis Cocker and crew fought the hardest double-whammy clash of the entire weekend — David Byrne’s day-go celebrations on the second stage, and (at least for any Brits in the crowd) the crucial England vs Norway semi-final World Cup clash. As such, it was only really the final third of Pulp’s festival closing set we caught.
But if you’re talking heart-pounding finishers, picture this: a dozen journos huddled around a 10-inch laptop screen at the edge of the press tent, dashing in and out for Britpop blasts of Do You Remember The First Time? and Mis-Shapes, nervily heading back inside for a hushed extra time under-your-breath singalong to Babies, the greatest song about voyeurism ever written, before an explosion of cheers as the full-time whistle brings both an England win and the first legendary keyboard stabs of Common People. Cue a dancing rush into the crowd as if there were 12 Bellinghams there in Madrid, and a core memory unlocked for all the English football fans in attendance. (GL)
We also saw…
Classic rock riffage from The Black Crowes was a perfect main stage opener for day four — hazy Georgia soul to match the heat, and just enough crunching licks to wake up everyone still recovering from the night before. Maybe it was the sunstroke, but Remedy felt like it had about eight choruses, great for limbering up the crowd’s vocal cords for the Crowe’s go-to Otis Redding cover Hard to Handle.
The second stage and tent saw Matt Berninger and Nina Kraviz do battle — the former heart-on-sleeve confessional sincerity, the latter raw techno and lasers. We spent most of the clash at the second, and so too seemingly did the rest of the dance-starved crowd, who bopped enthusiastically well beyond the confines of the packed out tent.
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