Festival Review: Mad Cool 2026
Mad Cool stepped it up for its 10th Anniversary resulting in an unforgettable weekend in Madrid.
Mad Cool turned ten this July, and it celebrated by throwing one of its most eclectic, hottest editions yet at its Iberdrola Venue in Villaverde, Madrid. Four days, five stages, more than 200,000 people through the gates, and a lineup so diverse that no two festival goers seemed to have watched the same show.
For its anniversary edition, the organisers leaned hard into range rather than a single big theme: legacy rock names like Foo Fighters, David Byrne, Pulp and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds shared bills with pop's current reigning names such as Lorde, Zara Larsson, Frost Children and many more, and somehow the whole thing held together across four very different days.
Wednesday belonged to the guitars, and Wolf Alice made sure everyone remembered it. Ellie Rowsell gave everything she had under almost 40 degrees, throwing herself into the crowd's energy rather than fighting the heat. By the time "Play the Greatest Hits" tore through the main stage, half the crowd had already forgotten they were melting. Other acts such as The Last Dinner Party and Foo Fighters made the first day of the edition one for the books.
Thursday flipped the script entirely, turning into a parade of pop powerhouses. CMAT opened the afternoon delivering the funnest set of the whole festival, mock-fainting, wiping sweat with a towel, joking about dying of heatstroke before launching into "Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" like nothing could touch her. Zara Larsson threw a full pink-fantasy stage show, glitter and choreography included, and a crowd that occasionally outsung her on "Lush Life”, “Midnight Sun” and “Stateside”. Jennie brought K-pop's high grade production values to the festival for the first time, with fans camping out hours early just to catch "Like JENNIE" live.
But Thursday night really belonged to two towering, very different divas. Lorde, making her long-overdue Madrid debut, with a genius festival set including reworked “Virgin style” classics such as "Royals" and “Buzzcut Season”. "Supercut" and "Green Light" turned into mass singalongs, and during "David" a huge banner reading "I don't belong to anyone" sailed over the crowd, which more or less summed up her whole performance which was fiercely on her own terms. Then Florence Welch closed it all out with something closer to a séance than a concert, flowing black silk, dancers in white circling her like an offering, "Shake It Out" and "Dog Days Are Over" detonating one after another until the whole field was airborne.
Friday tried to be the comedown day, and Halsey made sure it wasn't. Opening the main stage absurdly early, she still managed to needle the crowd into shape, joking that there was no excuse to hold back since the Spain match hadn't even kicked off yet. That line turned out to be prophetic: Spain's clash with Belgium ended up dominating a good chunk of the evening, phones out everywhere on the big screens around the grounds, denting the crowd's focus even during Pixies, who nonetheless ploughed through a lean, unbothered set as if the World Cup weren't happening at the same time. The moment the final whistle blew, word spread across the site before it even reached the screens, and by the time Kings of Leon took the stage, "SPAIN HAS WON" was flashing behind them, briefly upstaging Caleb Followill mid-song. It didn't matter for long: Twenty One Pilots closed the night with an unhinged, genuinely bizarre spectacle in which a masked Tyler Joseph climbed a scaffolding, Josh Dun scaling a sound tower to play a full drum solo mid-set, and the duo singing classics like “Believe” by Cher and “Seven Nation Army”, along with all their usual hits.
Saturday was the send-off, and it saved its strangest, most graceful moment for last. After Nick Cave delivered a career-spanning, almost evangelical headline set, David Byrne took the stage on the festival's final night in matching orange jumpsuits with his full band of dancer-musicians, running through Talking Heads classics alongside solo material with the kind of sharp, joyful choreography that felt more like theatre than a rock show, no drum kit in sight, just bodies constantly in motion. It was the perfect closing statement for a festival that spent four days proving genre barely matters anymore with rock veterans, K-pop royalty, pop divas and art-punk elder statesmen, all sharing the same stages in Madrid.
Ten editions in, Mad Cool still can't quite decide what kind of festival it wants to be, and that is precisely the point. Ask five different attendees for their highlight and you'd get five different answers spanning half a dozen genres, three continents and at least one football score. Nobody who was there this July left agreeing on which night was the best one, which, for a festival this size, might be the highest compliment there is.
Words by Marcos Sanoja
