Lana Del Rey's Favourite Girls and The Cure: Primavera Sound Barcelona 2026 (Day 02 - Friday 5 June)
LIVE REVIEWS
Mateusz Niesmialek
6/7/2026
Friday morning arrived with brutal clarity. I woke up gagging. The hotel room smelled of a damp basement and rotting fabric, courtesy of the clothes completely saturated by Thursday's monsoon. Paracetamol. Shoes on. Outside, Barcelona wore the sheepish look of a city aware it had overdone it.
We went back.
Primavera Sound Barcelona 2026 (Photo Credit: Mateusz Niesmialek)
Elsa (Photo Credit: Mateusz Niesmialek)
Primavera has long been one of the most credible platforms for brands wanting to build something genuinely worth attending. Vueling put forward one of the more inventive concepts of the day: a full-scale boarding experience. Footfall was impressive, perhaps more than the queuing infrastructure had been calibrated to absorb. I found myself locked alone in the fuselage for three uninterrupted minutes. Whether that counts as an activation oversight or the most effective airline brief ever written is a matter of perspective. I left with a €20 voucher. Combined with an unredeemed €100 from last year's edition, Vueling has effectively bought my loyalty through to Primavera 2027. A tidy return on a hollow aeroplane.
Levi's and Schwarzkopf both ran into the same wall. Thursday's weather event drove an enormous proportion of the 70,000 daily attendees to make purchases and visit styling stations all at once. By Friday afternoon, the Levi's racks were picked clean. They had a much better selection of clothes last year, but the inventory simply collapsed under the weather-induced demand. Schwarzkopf completely bailed on the goodie bags. Last year's haul was excellent. This year, I walked out with empty hands. I joked that I will actually have to buy my own hair products now because my current stock is running out.
Revolut's elevated viewing terrace for Metal and Ultra cardholders had a clear, well-targeted proposition. Exchanging physical wristbands every single day is exhausting. I understand the commercial logic. It forces daily footfall to their activation, but it remains annoying. One detail demands sorting before next year. The beer voucher won through their on-site game was not accepted at any concession point. A ghost beer. It is exactly the sort of small thing that determines whether an experience is remembered as seamless or quietly rubbish.
Primavera Sound Barcelona 2026 (Photo Credit: Mateusz Niesmialek)
Ethel Cain scattered weeds, tyres and rusted metal across the Estrella Damm stage. She turned her corner of Parc del Fòrum into a decayed American backyard. Her songs are torch ballads built on narcotic sludge. What she requires is for the room to hold its nerve. These are extended, patient, quietly devastating ballads that depend entirely on near-silence. It immediately made me think of her Coachella set, which was incredibly atmospheric precisely because of the enclosed Mojave stage she had there. Here, the conditions were fundamentally different. Festivals increasingly programme artists working in a fragile register alongside acts designed for peak crowd energy. There are tools available to manage the gap, but they require better spatial programming.
Ethel Cain (Photo Credit: Sergio Albert)
Shoegaze at Primavera makes complete sense. The audience understands it and respects it. This was a mahoosive crowd for 'Star Roving', confirming exactly where Slowdive sit in the festival's affections. Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead on stage is always a reason to show up. 'Catch the Breeze'. 'When the Sun Hits'. The problem was the mixing desk. It fell short of what the material required, and the atmosphere never quite cohered. Post-set consensus on this point was unusually consistent.
Slowdive (Photo Credit: Eric Pamies Garcia)
The Auditori Rockdelux continues to be one of the most effectively managed spaces at the festival. Acoustically calibrated, appropriately scaled, insulated from the ambient pressure of the open site. This was Neubauten's fourth appearance at Primavera, but their first time on this stage. They introduced new bassist Josefine Lukschy. The set moved from classics like 'Sonnenbarke' through to recent material, closing with Blixa Bargeld's extended treatment of 'Gesundbrunnen'. A piece inspired by his transgender son. He advocated for the complete demolition of all forms of biological determinism. The room received it with complete authority.
Einstürzende Neubauten (Photo Credit: Gisela Jane)
When I saw Addison Rae opening for Lana Del Rey at Wembley last year, she was clearly finding her footing. An influencer persona on a stage a size too large. Friday was a substantively different proposition. The choreography was precise. The production matched the space. The crowd response was earned. She is a popstar now. The lineage is there: Madonna, Britney, Charli. With The Cure headlining later, a significant portion of committed attendees had positioned themselves in the main stage area well before her slot began. Watching a crowd in full Robert Smith mode absorb hypermodern pop was culturally fascinating.
And then, The Cure.
'Alone'. 'Pictures of You'. 'High'. 'A Night Like This'. 'Lovesong'. '2 Late'—their first performance of that B-side since 2019. 'The Last Day of Summer'. 'Burn'—Robert Smith producing his double flute to a crowd that completely lost it. 'Fascination Street'. 'alt.end'. 'The Walk'. 'Mint Car'. 'In Between Days'. 'Just Like Heaven'. 'Trust'. 'Push'. 'Play for Today'. 'A Forest'. 'From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea'. 'Endsong'. Encore: 'Lullaby'. 'Hot Hot Hot!!!'.
Twenty-nine songs. A hundred and forty-seven minutes. Their first show since November 2024. Their first show since Perry Bamonte died in December. Eden Gallup took over Perry's role. Father and son on the same stage, Simon on bass as he has been since 1989. The generational weight of it was impossible to miss. The production was deliberately restrained. No competing visual spectacle. Mid-set, Smith produced a handwritten note and delivered a deadpan apology for still not speaking Spanish. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here all week,” he said, before they played 'Lullaby'. The difference between this and a band going through the motions is not describable in industry terms. It is just the thing itself.
When Robert Smith finally stepped away from the mic, the festival shifted violently into its nocturnal gear. JADE had already started her Spanish debut over on the Occident stage. I had been waiting for this. She seemed genuinely shocked by the reception. Her transition from Little Mix into a solo pop powerhouse is fully complete, completely shredding the media-trained constraints of her manufactured past. She tore through early 00s electroclash tracks like 'IT girl' and delivered 'Angel of My Dreams' with flawless, unvarnished energy. She shouted out her massive LGBTQ+ fanbase and commanded the stage with total authority. A crowd that had no business being that loud at two in the morning absolutely erupted. She is exactly what a modern popstar should be.
Skrillex on the CUPRA stage delivered something arguably more coherent than his Coachella set earlier this year. Here, on the concrete of Parc del Fòrum, it was tighter. The announcement of his new album SOMA mid-set was well-handled and well-received.
The decision to put PinkPantheress on the CUPRA stage was a logistical hallucination. At Coachella this spring, the enclosed environment matched her perfectly, and she even brought out The Dare and horsegirl. On the CUPRA stage, the proportions were off. The iconic stairs became a crowd management problem of a different order entirely. The area kept filling, unimpeded, until half the audience was concentrating on not falling over rather than listening to music.
Amaarae followed, transforming the same space into something between a late-night club and a high-concept fashion event. Black Star gave her the most exhilarating material to work with: Ghanaian highlife bleeding into baile funk and dance music, filtered through her singular voice. The set drew on Fountain Baby too. There was a sultry command to the whole thing that the CUPRA stage, somewhat redeemed from the PinkPantheress chaos, was well-suited to contain.
Amaarae (Photo Credit: Sergio Albert)
Viagra Boys were the final, necessary wake-up call. Disgusting, sweaty Swedish post-punk. Sebastian Murphy commanded the Occident stage with terrifying ease. He spent the set spitting beer, doing push-ups, and pacing like a caged animal. The crowd needed a minute of convincing, but it quickly turned into wholesome, chaotic mosh pits that felt like a collective release of tension from the Barcelona heat.
Viagra Boys (Photo Credit: Clara Orozco)
Primavera Sound holds a position that cannot be manufactured and cannot be bought. It is built over years, through artists who would not otherwise play Barcelona, through moments that do not happen anywhere else, and through an audience willing to come back despite the sore throat, the wet shoes, and the eight hours on concrete.
Friday showed that when a festival operating at this scale meets logistical turbulence - whether driven by weather, by an artist's unexpected momentum, or by a gap between activation concept and operational execution. Precisely because the standard here is set so high. That is not a criticism. That is the particular burden of being the benchmark.
The good news is that every problem on Friday has a known solution. None of them touch what actually matters: the programming, the instinct for booking at the right moment, and the quality of what happens between an artist and an audience when everything else gets out of the way.
Saturday, then. Lessons noted. Let's go.
Elsa (Photo Credit: Mateusz Niesmialek)