Where to begin? I’ve been covering Primavera Sound for half a decade, and the final day of this year’s edition was the most transcendent, and, recency bias notwithstanding, best twelve hours I’ve experienced at any festival. It was delightful to see acts like Little Simz and Big Thief level up to the main stage, where Jamie xx returned with his bandmates for the xx’s first appearance at the Parc del Fòrum since their debut in 2009, the same year My Bloody Valentine stopped by Barcelona during their reunion tour. Both of these bands kept the audience rapt, commanding it with different levels of intensity, while Simz, Kneecap, Knocked Loose, and Ninajirachi all opened up pits of varying sizes.
And those are just the acts I did manage to see on Saturday, June 6, an experience that personally made up for the festival’s chaotic first day. The organizers seemed determined to make it count. Primavera always has a wide-ranging bill that allows all kinds of music fans to organize their schedules in wildly divergent ways, but that day it seemed to almost be split into two concurrent festivals, at least until midnight: you could camp out at the main stages for some of the world’s biggest alternative acts, while the other side of the forum hosted pop favorites from Grace Ives all the way up to the star she’ll soon be opening for, Olivia Rodrigo, who took the Occident stage a few hours before being announced as a surprise guest and debuted a new song with the Cure’s Robert Smith. Here are five highlights from the final day of Primavera Sound 2026.
Grace Ives Is Invincible
The first sign that Saturday’s rumoured surprise guest would be Olivia Rodrigo had to be the fact that Grace Ives, who is opening for her on the Uravelled Tour, was on the bill earlier in the day. Unravelling (cough) on the Cupra stage just after 6pm, it was the only set I caught at this year’s festival where the sun was still blazing, forcing Ives to keep wiping the sweat off her face between songs. The heat amplified the fervid intensity of songs like ‘Fire 2’ from her new album Girlfriend, which sparkled to life with a three-piece setup that included a drummer (awed enough by the crowd to take a photo mid-song) and synth maestro. The opening one-two punch of ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Dance With Me’ was infectious, while ‘My Mans’ was essentially transformed into a power ballad with Ives on keys. When she wasn’t singing, preferring playful grimaces over hand gestures to punctuate her lyrics, she was bouncing all around the stage, at one point causing her yellow sunglasses to hurtle to the ground. As she ended her set with ‘Stupid Bitches’, which might well be the song of the year, you really did believe nothing could hurt her – or you – now.
Big Thief Turn the Forum Into a Giant Living Room
“We’re all just in a giant living room, right?” Adrianne Lenker tells the massive crowd that was just singing along to ‘Vampire Empire’, which Buck Meek then points out was recorded right here in Catalonia. The weather was as crisp as the sound quality of the live mix, which hardly wavered if you were standing further behind. But what mattered more was the ineffable energy the quartet brought to the main stage after gracing smaller ones in the past, and the only way I can think to describe it is by recalling the way Lenker took pause to gesture upward while singing “Like the sky” on ‘Change’, the most subdued and emotionally charged moment of the show. It flew by in a flash.
Bassist Joshua Crumbly seemed like he’d been playing with the band for a decade rather than a year (having joined following the departure of Max Oleartchik; this is as good point as any to note that James Krivchenia’s drums had a Free Palestine sticker on them next to the band’s scribbled name), laying down melodious arpeggios on ‘Not’, which had the whole band singing in unison. Lenker’s guitar solos, more than just abundant, diverged along different paths: one I can only describe as swarmy on ‘Simulation Swarm’, cradling waves of distortion on ‘Christmas Day’, violently sliding up and down the fretboard through ‘Vampire Empire’. Opening with ‘Forgive the Dream’, electrified in its dreaminess compared to the recently debuted acoustic live version, the set also featured unreleased tracks including ‘Mr. Man’ and ‘Beautiful World’. Whether you were hearing them for the first or umpteenth time, though, Big Thief made the songs feel infintely familiar.
Shoegaze Faithfuls Assemble for My Bloody Valentine
I put my earplugs on as soon as My Bloody Valentine entered the stage, expecting the loudest show I’ve ever attended; this is a band notorious for reconciling reticence with ear-shattering heaviness, especially live, and the shaky sound at Slowdive’s set the previous day seemed portentive. Even though I was quite close to the Estrella Damm stage after a mass of people left to catch Olivia Rodrigo, I was surprised by how crisply mixed and lean they immediately sounded, even prompting one nearby fan to shout “Louder!” after the opening ‘I Only Said’. With the full-band charge of ‘When You Sleep’, they seemed to be heeding his request, and for about an hour and a half, Kevin Shields and company vacillated between ferocious fuzz and brain-melting shoegaze voyages. Loveless‘ ‘Only Shallow’ and ‘Soon’ naturally drew the biggest reactions, the latter accompanied by a simple disco ball visual that gave way to a hypnotic 3D tunnel on ‘Wonder 2’, by which point transcendence was no longer substance-dependent. Shields spoke just once, and meekly, his mic still swaddled in effects so as to render his words indecipherable before conjuring an earth-shattering wall of noise at the show’s conclusion. For what felt like a small eternity, earplugs were absolutely necessary.
The xx’s Not-So-Silent Devotion
The xx’s flood of affection – towards each other, the crowd, for the love of music itself – reverberated as soon as the first notes of ‘Crystallized’ captivated the Revolut stage. Early in their immaculate set, they slipped back into songs from their self-titled debut (released only a year before they first played the festival as a group) like an old sweater, aglow with the gratitude that has filled their first shows together in eight years. Speaking between songs, they expressed it simply and earnestly, with Romy noting that they were out there with the fans when it rained down on Thursday. Behind the decks, Jamie xx started subtly raving up the songs around ‘Fiction’, which saw the giant “X” platform descending upon them, emanating purple shards of light that seemed to represent them retreating into their shells. It turned and flashed upward as Romy sang “Can I make it better with the lights turned on?” on the 2017 live remix of ‘Shelter’, but no moment was more stirring and intimate than ‘VCR’. The song sent shivers down my spine as the giant screens settled on a close-up of Romy staring at Oliver Sim as he sang – you could almost feel her gulping down a knot in her throat – and then singing reverently into the mic: “Love, love, love.”
How can a band treasuring slowness make time pass so fast? How did they become superstars before throwing themselves, each in their own way, into “the throes of dance,” to quote a song the Cure did not play during their 29-track set (which Romy also said they enjoyed)? You won’t find the answers in any interviews, but you could feel them embrace their musical evolutions as they seamlessly surged through upbeat solo tracks, never losing hold of each other or pushing any one member back. The group’s euphoria stretched from ‘Loud Places’ all the way to ‘On Hold’. After winding back with ‘I Dare You’, there was nowhere else to go but to the very beginning.
Ninajirachi Has Never Been to London Spain
The Port stage is one of the smallest at Parc del Fòrum, but over the weekend it flooded with fans of Water From Your Eyes, Lambrini Girls, and more. As I made my way from Kneecap’s show at Occident down to the water’s edge, enjoying a few minutes of Nick León’s set at the Schwarzkopf stage, there was already a huge crowd waiting for Ninajirachi, who has been massively hyped since the organizers placed on the second to last row of the original Primavera Sound 2026 poster. And for good reason (the hype, not the placement): the Australian producer’s debut album I Love My Computer will probably go down as one of the best of the decade, and she threw down the best electronic set I caught this year. (Granted, I was absent from the 12-hour program Skrillex curated as SONNY at the adjacent Cupra Pulse, which featured the likes of Arca and Four Tet.) She may or may not have dropped ‘London Song’ as an opener to allude to the fact she had never been to Spain – “best crowd ever,” she said.
No one was surprised when she closed with ‘Fuck My Computer’, her most popular song, but had no issue captivating the crowd before getting there, delivering a fantastic club take on ‘Berghain’ and the brattiest version of ‘Rock Music’, then throwing it under the banner of her own ‘girl EDM’. Abursdly, I found myself drawn back to the memory of Adrianne Lenker singing, “Let me dance in front of people without a care,” a line from a song where the chorus is titular: ‘Incomprehensible’. There’s no better word for it.
