The problem with making a festival incredibly good, as Manchester Psych Festival 2025 was, is that it’s hard to top it. Where do you go from last year’s lineup featuring Goat, PINS, Helicon, and much more? You go BIG – and that’s what the team at Manc Psych Fest did for this year’s edition, and then some. First they added some huge headliners – The Beta Band, Ty Segall, Stereolab – and some artists who could headline the festival in any other year, like White Denim, Gwenno, and Allah-Las. Another few dozen excellent bands filled out the schedule across venues in double figures – absolutely stacked.
And then they added the world’s most viral band for good measure.
Indeed, the majority of chatter before Manchester Psych Fest 2026 was about Angine de Poitrine. Where would they be playing (the Apollo) – and how difficult would it be to get in to see them (incredibly)? Their late-afternoon stage time, likely designed not to clash with any headliners, proved to be the must-see set of the day. Apparently, anyway – I couldn’t get in there.
What I was doing instead was heading to see Bleech 9:3 at the O2 Ritz, one of Manchester’s longstanding-and-best venues. Already a massive crowd with 20 minutes to go, the Irish band don’t let the audience down. There are 20+ photographers in the photo pit for the first 3 songs , a suggestion of the group’s nascent popularity, and their energy matches their burgeoning reputation. The crowd are well into it – I head somewhere less claustrophobic after the first 2.
On the way from the Ritz to the next venue, there’s a brief stopover at the Festival’s HQ at Circle Square, Oxford Road. The hub is where you get your wristbands and passes, but there’s other stuff here too – there’s crafting and food trucks, an AdP themed photo cutout board, and an admirable splash of colour amongst the towering Oxford Road student flats. It’s a nice change of pace though and reminds you this is a festival, not just a series of venues that can occasionally feel disconnected due to the sheer size of Manchester city centre.
This feeling persists for the next band Ghostwoman, at Projekts Skate Park. Projekts as a venue is brilliant – under enough cover to (mostly) protect you from the Manchester weather, yet open and outdoors enough to remind you it is a festival. And the novelty of watching live music while you’re stood at the top of a drop-in that you’re at least 20 years too old to be near. But this would be all for nought if the music wasn’t up to par – thankfully the Canadian/Belgian pair are brilliant. Like many bands on the poster, there’s a strong 70’s-via-surf-rock thread through the music, and what they lack in additional band members they make up for with volume. They’re ace. Less abrasive live than they sound on records, they put the psych in Psych Fest and deliver a fantastic set to a crowd that are perhaps made up of a lot of people that can’t be bothered walking back to the main Oxford Road strip, but will definitely be leaving as fans. The venue is the most out of the way, but with a Bundobust pop-up and some excellent trendy bevvies set-up there – not to mention one of the best line-ups of any stage – you could genuinely set up camp there for the day and go home happy.
The downside to such a stacked line-up though is the inevitable missing of other great bands. The Beta Band vs. Ty Segall vs. White Denim will be a hard choice for most music lovers – is this year’s line-up a case of too much of a good thing? These worries do melt away when you’re actually at your chosen acts, though – when you’re one of a few thousand people in Manchester Academy later that night as Segall closes with a mash-up of his own She and a Stooges song, you realise you’ve had a fantastic time and make peace with the alternative headliners you couldn’t see this time around. The strength of the lineup is a real testament of the promoters’ hard work in building the festival up to this level while keeping – just – the intra-city psych vibes just right.
There’s talk in all the photo pits of the best acts of the day – one photographer thinks Ty Segall’s secret set at The Abbey can’t be topped by his headline show later that night, while another is genuinely ecstatic to have seen Automatic earlier on; yet another agrees and suggests Adult DVD are up there too.
For me though, the undisputed highlight of this year’s festival is Allah-Las. Psych rock, garage rock, surf rock – all of the above put through the band’s lo-fi California filter, and they were packing out Manchester Academy. They played the festival back in 2023, too, an afternoon slot at Albert Hall. But tonight the venue is packed, and the band deliver an hour of sun-kissed, West Coast vibes (other cliches are available), enough to ward off any thoughts of the approaching Autumn for the couple of thousand Mancunians in attendance. The band’s set opens with Ultramarine from new instrumental album Sirenas, released a few days before their appearance in Manchester. But with 6 albums in total to draw material from, the setlist weaves through the last 15 years of the band, highlighting how consistently good their music has been since the start. At times behind the band, a huge red sun beams out from the stage casting warm, red light over the crowd, matching the music. LAHS provides a few songs, along with penultimate jam Could Be You from Calico Review, but it’s the self-titled-debut’s Busman’s Holiday and Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind), that get the biggest response. This crescendo naturally leads to Catamaran – one of the all-time surf-bangers, from the same record – to close the set, and leave the crowd feeling a little warmer, a little sunnier, than how they first arrived.
Manchester Psych Fest 2026