Geese have stopped playing and masses of people are breaking apart, scattering in different directions. A torrential downpour has beset the first day of Barcelona’s Primavera Sound 2026, but groups of devoted fans are still gleefully singing the band’s choruses: a “Like a sailor” here, a “Doctor! Doctor!” there. Nobody knows it yet, but Geese have, in effect, become the day’s headlining act, as every set that was supposed to follow over at the main stages will be cancelled, including Alex G, Doja Cat, and Bad Gyal. Massive Attack, who cancelled in 2022 due to illness, were pushed back two hours before adverse weather made the show impossible, forcing the already-frustrated crowd to swarm back out. Smaller sets also faced technical issues, but for the most part, the rest of the performances went ahead as planned.
This wasn’t like the time thunderstorms courted Mitski‘s performance in 2022, if only because the rain was persistent and accompanied by strong gusts of wind. In the half a decade that I’ve been covering the festival, I’ve never seen a more chaotic scene that lasted this long: people being shepherded away from the main stages, loads of others being denied entry, and no information on the giant screens that still displayed ads while attendees were desperate for updates. (This morning, the festival announced refunds for day ticket holders.) Like everyone else at the Parc del Fòrum, my day did not go as planned. After Geese, I was supposed to see oklou’s full set at the Cupra stage, but, wrongly assuming there was no chance it was going to move forward (“I hope that the festival can offer better working conditions in the future,” she later posted on her Instagram story), headed over to the indoor venue where I comfortably watched three mesmerizing performances, including Panda Bear’s tight, head-spinning show.
By the time I got out of the Auditori Rockdelux, the maelstrom had mostly quieted down. Disappointed faces couldn’t help but move their bodies while others seemed to have reached the stage of acceptance during blissed-out late-night sets from Fcukers, Overmono, and ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U. Here are five highlights from the first day of Primavera Sound 2026.
Cameron Winter’s Tumble of Light
The queue for Cameron Winter was not a line but an ouroboros. The Geese frontman was scheduled to play at at 5pm, making his set a top priority for anyone willing to camp out at the site early; although I was planning to stay up another twelve hours, I managed to make my way into the 3,000-capacity auditorium. (I’ve never seen a line at the press entrance, but it was considerable even an hour and a half before the performance.) When the doors opened, it seemed like thousands of people wanted to verify the same thing: Cameron Winter is actually real. It’s a silly thought everyone has when they see one of their favorite artists for the first time, especially at an impressionable age. It shouldn’t have crossed my mind when he waved at the crowd – I’ve interviewed the guy – but all the hype, memes, and controversies make it easy to forget where the music’s coming from. They all soon faded away. There was Cameron Winter, ramming the piano bench into the floor before sitting down and making a show of his humanity.
The show time also ensured that most people would stand in awe of his performance before the chance to get inebriated, at least not within the festival grounds. You could only chalk up the sense of rapture his songs invoked to the emotion reverberating through the hall, where every tiny move or variation in sound had its own resonance. His humour especially cut through, inducing audible chuckles with lines like “I don’t like what happened to Jesus/ But I sure do like Saturday morning” from the unreleased ‘Emperor XIII In Shades’, or even with musical gestures, like plunking a single note over and over. (Not to mention sending kisses – I cringe at writing the word “smooches,” but it is more accurate – when someone yelled out “Te amo!”)
If you’ve seen anything about the solo shows Winter has been playing over the past year, you’ll know attendees are treated to just his voice and piano. That alone is an incredibly dynamic combination, considering how he plays around with tempo, intensity, and silence. But there was another element at play that felt like its own character, which was light: the way it was shooting out at him during ‘Drinking Age’, you might mishear the line as “Everything is light” instead of “lying.” The unreleased songs stood out to me as stormy and ambitious, and when he sang “The devil will work even in the rain that is pouring” on ‘If You Turn Back Now’, he might have known something was up.
Geese: “Barcelona! Underwater!”
Cameron Winter and Geese clocked out early on Thursday, finishing up before 9pm. When their set began, there was only a light drizzle at the Parc del Fòrum, and most fans had come prepared with ponchos. But the weather seemed to get more torrential the more rambunctious Geese sounded, slowing down the second half of their set only for the crowd to sing along to ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’. Winter’s voice was starting to give out, but he powered through, probably more intoxicated than before and flipping out at the scene. While he allowed himself some slogginess, the rest of the band remained locked in, throwing it down like any other day. When I saw someone crowd surfing, I thought of the line “I was a sailor, and now I’m a boat” and laughed to myself; Geese’s discography makes way for plenty of nautical jokes. Winter grabbed the chance on ‘Cowboy Nudes’, pausing as if to acknowledge the cruel irony of changing the lyric from New York City to a place that’s not supposed to be experiencing these conditions in the summer: “Barcelona! Underwater!” Though they cut their set short a few minutes, they still ended with ‘Trinidad’, which didn’t make the situation seem any less menacing. It was a true blast.
From Total Chaos to caroline’s ‘total euphoria’
For many people, caroline‘s set at the Auditori was a kind of saving grace. I don’t know how full it was at the start of the show, but when I got in halfway through, there were no seats left, and people were sitting and standing around the edges of the venue. But given that security guards were yelling “This is not the exit!” as I got in, I have to assume not everyone there was familiar with the London octet’s ambient symphonies. In previous years, Black Country, New Road and black midi – two bands associated with caroline – have drawn big crowds at Primavera, and seeing the same amount of people who sat in for Cameron Winter listening to them felt gratifying; they deserve the exposure, even under these circumstances. The group’s individual members were moving not unlike swathes of people were outside: toward and away from each other, aware of everyone even when they weren’t making eye contact. For a moment, we were even transported to a London house, as caroline brought to life the memory of simultaneously recording two songs: one in the kitchen, another in the living room. I would have loved to catch their full set, but they seemed to stretch time even in that limited window, and the closing performance of ‘total euphoria’ was on another level.
With Father John Misty, Hope Dies Last
“The optimist swears hope dies last,” begins ‘Screamland’, one of the best songs of 2024, before Johsh Tillman sings, “Honey, take me down to the water’s edge/ Mama said that we could get my hip brace wet.” Adverse weather persisted, but Father John Misty’s showmanship was unmarred; if Cameron Winter’s show is slightly ruffled in its reverence, Tillman and his band retain every bit of elegance they can. Not a fake or ironic kind, his performance made clear, but a poised gravity that matches the hefty questions his music poses, which loom much larger than some rain and wind at a festival. Braving towards the Cupra stage as they played ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)’, I managed to catch melodious yet haunting renditions of ‘Mental Health’, ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, ‘Mahashmashana’, and yes, ‘Screamland’, which collectively seemed to explain why ‘Pure Comedy’ – once the climax of his show – has been left out of the setlist. Its brand of satire seems to have no place in the present, shoved away by the perpetual mingling of hope, despair, and romance. We could count on it a little longer.
If You Still Wanna Party, Come Over to Fcukers’ Show
If you were still at the festival after midnight, you’d have been soaking wet long enough that the rain no longer mattered. I was part of the crowd leaving after the second time Massive Attack was cancelled, by which point the options were two: leave with your head down or decide that the party’s only just starting. There was plenty of music to support the latter. Not long after Father John Misty’s philosophical musings, 2hollis blazed out of Cupra with a mesmeric and energized set, which you could follow directly with Fcukers on the Schwarzkopf stage, cranking out nearly every song from their debut album Ö and the preceding Baggy$$ EP. Not only was their music bolstered by their live band energy – smoothed over and slightly dampened on record – but by an added emphasis on tweaky, fun visuals, which, more so than previous years, was a marker of every electronic set I caught. (None surpassed Panda Bear’s set, though, which melted the boundaries between image and sound.) As they made clear before launching into ‘If you wanna party, come over to my house’, Fcukers were not surprised but simply glad so many people still wanted to shake it up. All things considered, they made it feel effortless.
