RALLY has a track record of rain. Other than its 2025 edition, the modestly sized end of summer gathering in Southwark Park has been subject to sideways rain, torrential downpours and any other form of precipitation the mind can comprehend. If you imagined 2025 had broken the RALLY rain curse, 2026 would bring you back to reality.
The typically capricious British weather aside, RALLY’s 2026 showing was very much one to battle the elements for. Scanning the spectrum of art-school graduate indie, bass-oriented dance music and multi-hyphenate electronic music, RALLY’s lineup is incredibly progressive and broad, with this year being one of the festival’s strongest. With this, RALLY stands as one of the best festivals for exploration, where wandering within the small subsection of Southwark Park can bring you to a range of new and interesting sounds you may never come across.
The day begins with thredd on the main Channel stage. A slight delay starts proceedings with early doors punters being kettled for ‘safety’ outside the main fence as the rain came down. Following this a small but growing crowd trickled in to catch the London trio. Behind them, further teething issues were present, with a broken screen having somehow settled on a hybrid image of a Windows 11 home screen and the Thredd background image battling. Their sound is murky and firm, built around minimal electronics, warming synths and drum machines that occasionally summon Gary Numan-esque synthplay. French-house-ish sample switches cut through dubby, trip-hop grooves, with the slower material becoming hazier and more dirgy. When the drums take precedence, though, there is a real sense of purpose: Moin-adjacent, perhaps, but less guitar-centric and more interested in the machine itself.
Over at the cold scaffolding stage of Agnes, spirit blue arrive to another delayed start in front of a suddenly enormous crowd. A click plays through the PA for long enough to become part of the performance before things finally settle into place and the duo promptly regather their composure. The music is moody and dreamy, hypnagogic and sad, an eerie soundtrack for the intermittent rain that peppers their set. There are unmistakable shades of Dean Blunt in the woozy minimalism, though the one-note quality eventually starts to show.
Over at the sheltered Visionaire stage under the trees, Voice Actor feels like a completely different form of weather. Gently glitching electronics warp and run away from themselves while quiet spoken-word vocals drift through the mix. The whole thing feels aqueous, as if the park corner has somehow grown porcelain edges and filled with bathwater. Sleepy, eerie and slightly dissociative, it has the particular strange intimacy of Cafe OTO but with an MOT Unit crowd.
At the dank corners of the Millhouse stage, Yuku Mizuhara draws a full tent with bright, soul-inflected house and boogie. Synths and percussion are everywhere, making for one of the day’s first genuinely warm escapes from the endless August bank holiday grey. Dexter in the Newsagent follows at Channel with a similarly buoyant set of pretty, skippy contemporary R&B. Their visuals are London-focused, with shots of blocks, night buses and Stockwell tube station engulfing the trio, while the music carries a slightly hyperpop-adjacent, early-2000s sweetness, with singalongs, buttery chorus guitar and a general sense that everything might be okay after all. It is difficult to remain miserable while listening to something this bubbly.
Kiss Facility at Agnes provide a darker counterpoint. Breakbeats sit beneath ethereal vocals, with vast amounts of space allowing delayed guitars and liquid melodies to hang in the air. At times it veers into dream pop, at others into something more bass-heavy and Eastern European, the vocal melisma occasionally recalling Cocteau Twins. Midway through a verse, technical issues intervene, prompting the admission that they’re “figuring things out as we go”. It is an unusually honest assessment of a festival set, but somehow suits the slightly unstable atmosphere.
By the time Mark William Lewis takes to Channel, the crowd has become the biggest of the festival so far. The set is slick without feeling overly polished: smoky, dreamy and warm, with harmonica floating beneath delay-heavy instrumentation and fuzzy guitars gradually filling the gaps. There is a sense that the whole operation has found its natural rhythm, Lewis moving through the material with the confidence of someone who knows precisely how much atmosphere a song can hold.
Sam Akpro’s Skehans set is, predictably, rammed. The tent is effectively functioning as a simulation of the beloved Nunhead boozer, with people spilling out into the rain in search of whatever remaining square inch of space exists. His guitar haze is lush and R&B-inflected, somewhere between cloud rap and dream pop, held together by a dubby groove. There is barely any room onstage either, making the whole thing feel less like a festival set then something spontaneous you stumble upon.
YHWH Nailgun arrive as the rain comes down and dry ice pours from the stage, the scaffolding above them clanging in uneasy harmony with the metallic racket of the New York quartet. Muddy mosh pits appear almost immediately and refuse to collapse until the very end of the set, while security are called in for backup as a sudden stream of crowd surfers catches the organisers off guard. Borzone’s guttural grunts rise above the pang of rototoms and blurring guitar howls, the bass lodged firmly somewhere in your throat as you come up for air at the edge of the pit. There is a particular violence to the whole thing, but also an obvious sense of joy. The UK loves YHWH Nailgun, and today is case in point. They leave Southwark Park looking less like another band passing through and more like champions, this muddy, rain-soaked afternoon feeling suspiciously like a coronation for New York’s future punks.
And then there is Blood Orange.
If the rest of RALLY is about discovery, Blood Orange is about the rare moment when an artist you already know reveals just how much territory they can hold. The set is dreamy but precise, sparkling and danceable, driven by a large orchestral band that makes everything feel simultaneously open and enormous. Behind them, images of Britain flicker across the screen: BBK rapping in a flat, England football highlights, Gazza scoring, fragments of a national past presented less as nostalgia than as something to re-evaluate. “Love, England, youth and music” appears amid the imagery, alongside the idea of finding comfort in the past. At points, the visuals feel like the opening of This Is England, except filtered through a warmer and more complicated memory of British culture.
Musically, it is funky and Prince-y, with huge singalongs and ecstatic backing vocalists. There is something reminiscent of Stop Making Sense in the sheer pleasure of watching a band become an ensemble cast, everyone seemingly capable of picking up another instrument at any given moment. Dev Hynes moves between roles with absurd ease, and the arrangements keep expanding without losing their intimacy.
It is, essentially, everything you want from a festival headliner. Not simply bigger than what has come before, but expansive enough to make everything that came before feel like the culmination of the same cohesive sonic world.
By the end of the day, the rain has become less of an inconvenience than a recurring character. RALLY’s particular strength is that it makes the weather almost irrelevant. You spend half the day moving between tents looking for shelter and emerge somewhere completely unexpected: a drum machine, a broken PA, a cloud of guitar, a house groove, a trumpet, a voice you’ve never heard before. The festival’s modest scale makes this possible. There is no need to commit to a route when the best thing to do is simply wander.
All photos by Trew Marsh.
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