There is a moment every year at Boomtown when you realise you’ve completely forgotten the outside world exists.
Your phone barely works. You’ve lost track of what day it is. You’re dancing next to someone whose name you’ll probably never know, in a venue you didn’t know existed half an hour ago, watching an artist you hadn’t planned to see. For those few days, nothing beyond the city really seems to matter.
I’ve been to Boomtown four times now – 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2026 – and somehow, this year might have been my favourite yet.
Maybe part of that was experiencing it with people who had never been before.
There’s something particularly special about taking a first-time Boomtown citizen through those gates. You know what’s coming, but they don’t. Watching my friends try to take in Old Town, wander through Copperwood Hights, discover tiny doorways leading to even tinier venues and slowly realise that this isn’t really a festival in the traditional sense made the whole thing feel new again.
Because explaining Boomtown to someone who hasn’t been is almost impossible.
You can show them videos of the stages. You can tell them about the actors, the storyline, the sets and the production. You can explain that there are entire streets to explore and rooms you can walk straight past without ever knowing what is happening behind the door.
But until you’re standing in the middle of it, you don’t really get it.
It is ridiculous in the best possible way. Disneyland for adults who live and breathe music and art.
And while the enormous stages are undeniably spectacular, I’ve realised that the older I get – and particularly since starting Fleckies – the more interested I am in everything happening around them.
My favourite venue of the entire weekend wasn’t one of the huge stages. It was The Pomegranate Parlour.
Small, intimate, slightly chaotic and absolutely vibey.
Over the weekend we caught Emma Ash there plus, DmTree, Illexxandra and DJ Shakey Makey’s Mighty Morphin Power Combo and, completely by accident, a secret Ahadadream B2B MESSIE set.
That last one summed Boomtown up for me.
I’d actually decided I was done for a bit. Saturday had gone slightly off-piste, I was tired and heading back to camp alone for a reset before Andy C. On the way, I thought I’d quickly stick my head into Pomegranate Parlour as I was walking past.
Suddenly I’m catching the end of Emma Ash before she handed over to Ahadadream and MESSIE play B2B in this tiny room.
No enormous production. No carefully planned itinerary. Just an unbelievable set, a packed little venue and that feeling of having stumbled across something super special.
Those moments are the reason I love Boomtown.
For all the huge names on the poster, the city still gives an extraordinary platform to smaller artists, DJs, collectives, performers and independent crews. Its street venues are scattered throughout the districts, each with their own identity and programming, and you could quite easily spend the entire weekend ignoring the main stages altogether.
For a platform like Fleckies, built around championing grassroots talent and encouraging people to step outside the algorithm and discover something new, that feels important.
I came home with names I hadn’t known before I arrived. I also watched people from closer to home have brilliant moments of their own – including Northamptonshire’s Madame Electrifie at Helix, while Council of Bens had Bad Apple Bar at capacity when I tried to get in on Saturday.
I couldn’t even see their set properly – and I was genuinely delighted about it. A grassroots collective packing out a Boomtown venue is exactly the sort of thing I want to see.
And then there was The Fool’s Leap, which brought something completely different again. We caught Alphalfa there on Saturday and Panda & The Moniums on Sunday – a reminder that discovery at Boomtown doesn’t just mean finding a new DJ. You can wander from electronic music into live bands, brass, funk, disco, punk, folk or something you can’t quite put a genre on at all. That’s the beauty of it – you never really know what you’re going to stumble into next.
It’s also why I’ve found some of the post-festival conversation about there “not being enough drum and bass” slightly strange.
I saw loads of drum and bass.
Shy FX. Deekline. Skantia. Kyrist B2B Waeys. Andy C., A.M.C., to name but a few, with PLENTY more happening around the city.
What perhaps changed was where some of it was happening.
The biggest stages were noticeably more varied this year, but personally, I loved that. Boomtown has never just been a drum and bass festival. Across my four visits I’ve heard an absurd spectrum of music, and that unpredictability is part of its identity.
This year alone I went from Dutty Moonshine Big Band to Shy FX, Eats Everything B2B TSHA to Ahadadream, Eliza Rose playing disco to Malavita, drum and bass in Anara Forest to Scissor Sisters, SHERELLE and eventually Skrillex bringing out Chase & Status.
Trying to reduce that to one genre feels like missing the point.
Boomtown itself has been pretty explicit about wanting to broaden things back out. Ahead of 2026, co-founder Luke Mitchell described a conscious move towards keeping the festival musically diverse and unpredictable.
Good.
There are enough algorithms constantly feeding us more of what we already know we like. One of the greatest things a festival can do is put something in front of you that you would never have searched for yourself.
But there is another side to Boomtown in 2026 that is harder to ignore.
The festival isn’t the wholly independent operation it once was.
In 2022, following an incredibly difficult post-pandemic period and spiralling production costs, 45% of the business was sold to Live Nation, Gaiety and SJM, with Boomtown’s original owners retaining a 55% majority.
Four years later, I think you can feel some of that commercial presence.
There were activations from the likes of Red Bull, San Miguel and Jägermeister around the city this year in a way I don’t remember from my earlier visits.
And I’m conflicted about it.
Fleckies will always champion independent music and culture, so naturally I’m wary of watching something so distinctive become increasingly intertwined with huge corporations.
At the same time, spend five minutes standing in Boomtown and look around.
Really look.
Someone has built this.
The stages, the sound systems, the lighting, the sets, the streets, the actors, the infrastructure, the security, the crews, the toilets, the campsites, the artists – an entire temporary city appearing in a field for a few days and disappearing again.
That does not come cheap.
Boomtown itself said rising production costs were one of the reasons it sought outside investment in the first place, which I fully understand. And if commercial partnerships help keep something of this scale alive while hundreds of smaller artists and independent collectives continue getting access to its stages, the conversation becomes more complicated than simply saying “big brand bad”.
The question for me is what happens next.
How far can those relationships go before they start changing the character of the city?
Because Boomtown’s value isn’t just the lineup. It’s its weirdness. Its independence of thought. The feeling that you’ve stepped into a world built by artists, performers, set designers, musicians and people with extraordinarily incredible imaginations.
I’d hate to see that slowly sanitised.
I felt something similar around sustainability this year. Boomtown still talks about sustainability as part of its ethos, but personally I noticed less of the prominent “leave no trace” and good citizen messaging around the site than I remember from previous years.
To be fair, the site itself felt remarkably well respected considering the number of people living in it for five days. But that messaging was always part of the culture of being a Boomtown citizen, and I’d love to see it pushed loudly again.
There are parts of the old Boomtown I was thrilled to see returning, too.
Seeing Lion’s Den back in action felt monumental. After the more condensed post-pandemic Boomtown I experienced in 2022, having the festival stretching out again gave the city a sense of scale I’d missed.
Now I’m wondering how far they’ll take it. Could Temple Valley ever return? Could we one day see something resembling Sector 6 again? Maybe I’m just being nostalgic.
Because ultimately, the Boomtown I experienced this weekend still had the thing that matters most.
Connection.
Everywhere.
You make friends dancing. You make friends walking between stages. You make friends in the queue for the loo. You lose your group and somehow acquire another one. Thousands of people are temporarily removed from normal life and given permission to play.
And we don’t get enough of that.
There is something incredibly human about dancing alongside strangers, sharing music and having conversations with people you probably never would have met anywhere else. In a world where so much of our interaction now happens through screens, spending four days physically surrounded by people feels almost radical.
The terrible phone signal helps.
You don’t particularly want to be looking at your phone anyway – apart from occasionally filming an outrageous drop that absolutely has to make the group chat later.
Of course there were sets I missed. There are now countless videos appearing on TikTok that have made me think, how the hell did I miss that?
But that’s the eternal Boomtown problem. There simply isn’t enough time.
You could meticulously plan every hour and still miss something incredible happening through a doorway twenty metres away.
Maybe that’s why my favourite moment was the one I hadn’t planned at all.
Next year I want to do even more of that. Fewer frantic journeys across the city trying to tick names off a schedule. More tiny venues. More unknown DJs. More wandering towards whatever sounds good.
Because after four Boomtowns, I think that’s where its real magic still lives.
Not necessarily in front of the biggest stage (although it is definitely there too).
Sometimes it’s behind a tiny doorway, or through a washing machine (IYKYK).
For all my questions about where Boomtown goes next, I left on Monday genuinely emotional.
Physically exhausted, absolutely. The Thursday trek to Skylark in 32-degree heat nearly finished me before we’d even started – although having a real bed and a shower waiting for us meant we couldn’t exactly complain (fully recommend!).
But emotionally?
My cup was full.
Boomtown still manages to create something that very few festivals can. You walk through the gates and completely leave normal life behind. For a few days, you become a slightly different version of yourself – one that dances more, talks to strangers, follows weird noises down alleyways and doesn’t particularly care what time it is.
Then Monday arrives and suddenly you’re expected to return to reality.
I’m already ready to go back.
See you in the city in 2027.
