WAY OUT WEST 2026

In a European festival season overflowing with options, Way Out West stood out. Taking over Gothenburg’s sprawling Slottsskogen park for three days, the Swedish festival delivered one of the most impressive and eclectic line-ups of the summer — but for FOXES, it was the festival's darker side that made the trip impossible to resist.

Photos by Wanda Martin / Words by Tina de la Celle

Alongside some of the year’s biggest pop names, including Lorde, Zara Larsson and Lily Allen, the bill brought together an extraordinary collection of artists from the alternative world: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Cure, Gorillaz, The Hives, Jehnny Beth and Geese, with The xx, Moby, Blood Orange, Lykke Li and others, making the line-up feel pretty incredible. And the audience reflected it. One of our favourite sights of the weekend had nothing to do with what was happening on stage. Everywhere we looked, there were young faces dressed in black, eyeliner, lace and leather. It felt like a new generation discovering the music, style and attitude that have always been part of what we love about Foxes. In 2026, rock ’n’ roll still feels very much alive.

There is also something unusual about the setting. Rather than escaping the city entirely, Way Out West unfolds inside Slottsskogen, Gothenburg's huge green park, before its Stay Out West programme spills into venues around the city after dark. Despite the scale of the artists on its stages, the festival retains a surprisingly relaxed atmosphere.
Its environmental approach is equally integral to its identity. Way Out West has been completely vegetarian since 2012, with a huge selection of vegan food across the site. The festival says that removing meat from the event reduced its emissions by 40 percent, while its wider sustainability programme includes circular merchandise and workwear and the removal of single-use plastic plates, cutlery and straws. It is one of the rare major festivals where environmental responsibility feels built into the event rather than added as an afterthought.

We caught up photographically with a couple of familiar FOXES faces along the way, including The Hives and Jehnny Beth, both of whom we've previously shot for the magazine. The Hives, naturally, were impossible to ignore — one of Sweden's greatest live exports playing to a home crowd with all the swagger and controlled chaos we've come to expect from them.

But it was the pairing of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and The Cure that made the evening feel particularly special.

NickCave shot by Timothy Gottlieb

Nick Cave began in an unexpectedly heartbreaking register, before gradually taking the crowd through the darkness and towards the songs that have become monumental live moments over the decades. Few performers can make a festival field feel intimate, but Cave still somehow manages it — moving between grief, menace, humour and complete abandon, with the Bad Seeds creating the kind of intensity that makes the rest of the festival temporarily disappear.

Then came The Cure.

Their sprawling headline set felt less like a festival appearance and more like a full Cure concert that happened to have landed in the middle of Way Out West. Robert Smith and the band moved through decades of material, balancing the beautiful gloom of their catalogue with the songs that have long since escaped goth culture to become genuine pop classics.

And then came perhaps the most perfect image of the weekend — one we didn't even know about until afterwards.

While we were watching The Cure, Nick Cave and members of the Bad Seeds were watching them too. Images and clips soon appeared online of Cave and the band at the side of the crowd, dancing and enjoying the set like everyone else. It quickly became one of the most shared moments of the festival: one icon of the darker side of alternative music watching another.

There was something beautifully uncomplicated about it.

Maybe that image also summed up what we loved about Way Out West. The festival didn't feel particularly interested in separating music into generations or rigid genres. You could watch Geese, Jehnny Beth or Blood Orange and then stand among thousands of young goths waiting for a band formed almost half a century ago.

Gorillaz shot by Pao Duell

In a summer packed with enormous European festivals, Way Out West managed to feel both major and strangely intimate. Great music, a beautiful city, an unusually thoughtful approach to sustainability — and, perhaps most importantly for us, considerably more black eyeliner than we expected to find in a Swedish park.

We'll take that as a very good sign.