Mad Cool festival, Day 1: Wolf Alice, Jehnny Beth and Foo Fighters shine as 2026’s best festival line-up kicks off
The biggest acts in the world raise the temperature of an already-scorching Madrid.
It’s an apocalyptic 39°C as Madrid’s Mad Cool festival kicks off its tenth anniversary celebrations this week, and the festival’s organisers have pulled out all the stops. For good reason, too: at this rate there might not be a planet left for a 20th anniversary turn.
Making the most of the time we’ve all got left, Mad Cool’s 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.
We’re melting for the cause to bring you highlights from the festival each day — keep checking back for more direct from Madrid.
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)
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