With less than a week to go, music fans are primed for the annual pilgrimage to Stradbally in Laois for Electric Picnic.
Now in its 22nd year, the festival has evolved from a one-day boutique weekender in 2004 to its more recent incarnation as a decidedly and unashamedly mainstream affair.
80,000 music fans are expected over the weekend of 28th to 30th of August, with over 800 performances across 50 stages.
Here are our top ten acts not to miss …
CMAT
If 2025 was the year CMAT became impossible to ignore, 2026 has been something of a victory lap. Her third album EURO-COUNTRY won both the RTÉ Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year and the Ivor Novello Award for Best Album, while the Dunboyne singer also picked up a BRIT nomination for International Artist of the Year. Not bad going. But awards only tell you so much about CMAT, because it is on stage that the full experience really makes sense. Big songs, bigger personality, gloriously theatrical performances and lyrics that can be hilarious and devastating within the space of a few bars have made her one of Ireland’s great live draws. Armed with EURO-COUNTRY, Take A Sexy Picture Of Me and a considerably bigger audience, this return to Stradbally should feel like a homecoming. Suzanne Byrne
Van Morrison
A quick glance at Van Morrison’s recent concert setlists suggests that this hardened gentleman of the road won’t be delivering a crowd-pleasing greatest hits package at EP. This is an artist who shares Dylan’s commitment to life on stage and a steadfast refusal to play the game. Then again, who knows? Maybe the man with one of the greatest back catalogues in all music may let the Stradbally spirt carry him away. In recent months he has been touring his latest album, the peevishly titled Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge, around the jazz festivals of Europe and he and his band are festival fit. Fan favourites Moondance, Have I Told You Lately and Gloria are likely to feature in his Electric Picnic set and he has also been digging deeper with tracks like Vanlose Stairway and Foreign Window. Irish festival veterans will have fond memories of Van at Féile ’90 when he sang Moondance just as a huge harvest moon appeared above Semple Stadium. Alan Corr
sombr
We await the coronation of a new Electric emperor on Friday night. As twilight fades, Shane Boose will stride onto the stage with the best star walk this side of Richard Gere (check out the start of the 12 to 12 video) in a bid to make Stradbally his own. The signs are that he will. A winning debut album in last year’s I Barely Know Her has been followed by a troika of treats in Homewrecker, Potential, and My Body Isn’t Ready to create a setlist to savour. Further proof? Watch the 21-year-old’s performance at Chicago’s Lollapalooza last month. A showman at work and then some, about to meet his match in an Irish festival crowd. Harry Guerin
Fontaines D.C.
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The best Irish band in decades have just announced details of their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, and have been debuting new songs Marianne and Six Shot Morning on their recent European shows. Long masters of doomy atmospherics, it appears that Fontaines D.C. are embracing the gothic grandeur they hinted at on their last album, Romance. Their four albums – Dogrel, A Hero’s Death, Skinty Fia and Romance – have all taken stylistic leaps and proven that yes, rock acts can be big as well as clever and they also deliver live on stage. Enigmatic front man Grian Chatten is a magnetic presence and his bandmates chart new realms of strangeness with their cavernous sound. Expect the hits (Favourite will send EP bonkers) and a smattering of tracks from Dopamine Chamber, which features synthesiser, marching drums, samples and triggers, several songs with no guitars, and the strings of 1960s Italian pop. AC
Bleech 9:3
Who is a good example of an act that is about to leap to that next level? It’s that point where even casual music listeners say ‘yes, I think I’ve heard of them’ – Bleech 9:3 are prime candidates. The UK-based Irish band has sold out their entire tour for the rest of the year, so if you don’t have a ticket for any of those dates but are going to Electric Picnic, this might be your only chance of seeing them. Not that it’s particularly important, but it’s worth noting that they already look like rock stars.
Their latest single Figure 8 clocks in at a respectable three minutes and has that edge that is reminiscent of Stone Temple Pilots and the highly underrated Compulsion. With several singles and an excellent EP, Bleech 9:3 should be one for this year’s Picnic list. Dan Hegarty
Geese
There’s hot and there’s white hot. The dark horses of the past few years, still youthful Brooklyn act Geese exploded into the mainstream with their breakthrough album Getting Killed in 2025. Fronted by the prodigiously talented Cameron Winter – a man with a flourishing sideline as a solo artist – Geese sound like a blear-eyed jamming session caught on tape after a weekend bender in 1974. This is a band who go up and down the gears, from tenderness to frazzled freak-outs, often in the space of the same song, with Winter doing a pretty good Exile/Sticky Fingers Jagger drawl. Its combustible, chaotic and occasionally surreal stuff. If Geese are being heralded at Gen Z’s ultimate rock band then Gen Z must have access to some petty battered seventies country rock records and what Gram Parsons famously called cosmic American music. The crowd will flock (sorry) to their show at EP. AC
Gorillaz
Cosmic, kaleidoscopic, immersive . . . Anyone who witnessed Damon Albarn’s virtual cartoon band in the 3Arena in Dublin last April knows that they can be the best show in town and the wide open spaces of Stradbally will be the perfect backdrop for their epic set. Their current live show hinges on latest album The Mountain but expect the hits – Clint Eastwood, Feel Good Inc, Stylo, On Melancholy Hill – and maybe some surprise guests. With music polymath Albarn as impish MC, Gorillaz are celebrating 25 years as a going concern and they just keep getting better and better. AC
JADE
Leaving one of the UK’s biggest girl groups behind is one thing – establishing yourself as a pop star entirely on your own terms is quite another. JADE has managed it with considerable style. Her brilliantly unhinged debut solo single Angel Of My Dreams announced that the former Little Mix singer wasn’t interested in playing it safe, mixing huge hooks with a knowing swipe at the industry that made her famous. A BRIT Award for Pop Act followed, as did debut album That’s Showbiz Baby!, a maximalist rush of pop, disco and theatrical excess that reached the UK Top 3. Electric Picnic marks JADE’s Stradbally debut and, given the choreography, costume changes and sheer scale of her solo shows so far, this should be one of the weekend’s big pop moments. SB
Florence Road
There is every chance Florence Road will arrive at Electric Picnic with one of the biggest Irish crowds of their young career waiting for them. The Bray four-piece have gone from childhood friends making music together in a garden shed to one of the country’s fastest-rising bands, supporting Olivia Rodrigo, Wolf Alice and The Last Dinner Party while building a formidable live reputation of their own. After 2025’s Fall Back mixtape came the Spring Forward EP, and this summer Hanging Out To Dry became the most-played track on Irish radio, another milestone in what has been a remarkable rise for the band. Their combination of big-hearted indie rock, grunge-edged guitars and instantly sticky choruses feels tailor-made for a festival field. Catch them at Stradbally and you may well be watching an Irish band make the leap in real time. SB
The Stunning
Few bands managed to garner the popularity in their native land than The Stunning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Songs like Brewing Up A Storm and Half Past Two are now woven into Irish culture. When the band split in the 1990s, many thought that would be it. Chapter two of The Stunning would happen many years later, and it would see them become even more popular than they were the first-time round. Seeing The Stunning live is something special; you’ll find people talking about seeing them live in Galway or Waterford in recent years just as much as in McGonagles or at Féile back in the early 1990s. It’s not all about playing the older songs; they brought us the single Stand Up In This Wicked World last year, and with rumblings of a new album, it looks like things will continue on that upward curve. DH
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