
From Piss to Adult DVD: the sets we couldn’t stop talking about at The Great Escape
The Great Escape 2026 delivers three days packed with unforgettable sets and future favourites.
From packed-out basement sweatboxes to rain-soaked beach stages and queues snaking down Brighton’s side streets, this year’s Great Escape once again proved why there’s nothing quite like it in the new music calendar.
Across three slightly damp days, the city became a blur of expensive pints, emergency hoodie purchases, frantic venue-hopping and trying to decide whether it was worth walking 35 minutes across town (up a hill) for a band you’d only heard described as “kind of like if Fontaines D.C. made a Sega Dreamcast game”.
As ever, though, the weather barely mattered once the music started. The Great Escape remains unmatched when it comes to the thrill of discovery, and Brighton spent the weekend overflowing with moments that felt impossible to replicate anywhere else.
Westside Cowboy may already have earned their own dedicated victory lap, while Shame left a sizeable dent in the Dork stage with one of the weekend’s biggest sets, but they were far from the only artists making this year’s festival feel electric.
From abrasive noise rock and rave-punk eruptions to packed-out sing-alongs and boundary-pushing performances, here are some of the other bands and artists who defined our Great Escape 2026.
Piss
Their Instagram bio might say easy listening, but Piss are anything but. The Vancouver-based four-piece create brilliantly abrasive noise-rock that’s not afraid of the occasional moment of tender beauty, while their songs confront sexual assault and violence against women with unflinching honesty. It’s hard to think of another vocalist who gives so much of themselves onstage as Tay Zantingh, channelling hurt, fury and gut-wrenching fear during a 30-minute set that’s part performance art punk, part communal catharsis. Carefully curated samples from documentaries and news reports tie the band’s personal storytelling into a wider conversation about misogyny, and the entire show exists on the edge of emotionally charged chaos. All this to say, there’s not another band around at the moment who come close to delivering this level of intensity. The boundary-pushing group put on a performance so singular and memorable, it’s a bit of a piss-take. (AS)
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