Pepsi Presents Leeds Festival 2026 @ Bramham Park - Day Two - Friday 28th August
- John Hayhurst
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Florence Soars, Kneecap Erupt and Leeds Festival 2026 Gets Into Full Swing
Words - John Hayhurst
Photos - John Hayhurst & Abbi Draper Scott
Thursday gave us a relatively gentle introduction to Leeds Festival 2026, but it certainly wasn't an insignificant one. Arkayla became the first band of the weekend to step onto The Grid, The Lathums followed and then Kasabian made Leeds history as the festival's first ever Thursday night headliner. It also gave us our first proper look at the revamped arena before all five of Leeds' new stages came into play on Friday.
With considerably more ground to cover, Friday starts for us at The Gallery with Mulaa Joans.
The London-based artist is still at the stage where plenty of people walking into The Gallery won't necessarily know what they're about to get, which is exactly why these early festival slots are worth making the effort for. Mulaa Joans mixes alternative R&B, rap and electronic influences without sitting particularly comfortably inside any one of them, and the production of The Gallery gives the music a much bigger setting than you might expect this early in the day.
From there it's our first proper visit to The Ballroom for Westside Cowboy.
The Manchester four-piece — Reuben Haycocks, Aoife Anson O'Connell, Paddy Murphy and Jack Grundy — have quickly become one of the most talked-about young guitar bands around, but there is still something pleasingly uncomplicated about watching them play. They describe their sound as "Britainicana", which makes considerably more sense once you hear it.
I've Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You) gives the set one of its more melodic moments, while Drunk Surfer and Alright Alright Alright reveal the scruffier side of the band. Recent tracks including Kick Stones and Big Wheels give them more to work with, and The Ballroom feels like the right sort of space for them: big enough to attract a curious festival crowd without losing the intimacy that makes a band at this point in their career interesting.
Back at The Gallery, Julia Wolf brings something entirely different.
Wolf has built much of her music around contrasts. Songs can be intimate one minute and considerably heavier the next, and live she has the presence to stop those quieter moments getting swallowed by the room. Kill You Off makes an immediate impression, while Loser and Deep End show the darker edge to her writing.
Jennifer's Body is one of the obvious highlights, its title perhaps doing some of the initial work before the song itself takes over, while Sunshine State and In My Room give Wolf plenty of opportunity to demonstrate why her audience has been growing so quickly. There's an intensity to her performance that works particularly well inside The Gallery rather than out on one of the festival's open stages.
We head next to The Canopy for Violet Grohl, and this is one of those Leeds sets where curiosity is always going to bring people through the door.
Being Dave Grohl's daughter inevitably means Violet arrives with a surname that attracts attention before she has played a note, but she's increasingly making a convincing argument for being judged separately from it. There is a confidence to her voice that quickly becomes the focus, particularly when the music strips back and gives it room.
It's still early days for Grohl as an artist in her own right, which makes The Canopy — Leeds' new home for emerging music — probably the most appropriate stage she could be playing this weekend. Rather than feeling like we're watching the finished product, there's the much more interesting sense of watching somebody work out exactly what kind of artist they want to become.
Our first trip of the day to The Grid brings Role Model, otherwise known as Tucker Pillsbury, and by this point there are considerably more people filling the arena.
Role Model understands the theatrical side of performing perhaps better than his deliberately laid-back music initially suggests. Look at That Woman and The Dinner are made for the kind of audience participation that festival sets need, but it is Sally, When the Wine Runs Out that has become the real event in his live show.
The now familiar search for a "Sally" gives the set an element that can change every time he plays it, before Deeply Still in Love provides another reminder that beneath the personality and crowd interaction there are some very good pop songs holding everything together.
Back to the Gallery for Holly Humberstone and the best production set in that tent so far, beautiful backdrops and a much more animated Holly, I've never seen her connect so much and this is certainly a grown step up from the early days of performing on a raised platform and not moving from a six foot radious.
Later we witness Blossoms , Stockports most famous band "tear up" if thats the words , I'm sadly finding them blander by every performance and can't wait for Gary to go away for a while, still many were here for their indie power pop performance.
In my haze of indifference I decide to wander to the Canopy to watch Simon Cowell's new promotion December 10 and by the looks of it he's on to the best young boy band karaoke session for 14-20 year old girls that money can buy. They loved it and it was the biggest crowd at the canopy so far.
Later, we're back at The Grid for Florence + The Machine.
If Thursday belonged to Kasabian making Leeds history, Friday's main-stage moment belongs to Florence Welch and to top it off it's her birthday today.
The current show opens with Everybody Scream, the title track immediately establishing the darker theatricality of Florence's latest era, before Shake It Out provides the first huge release. From there the set moves comfortably between different points in her career rather than simply saving the familiar material until the end.
Which Witch is suitably dramatic, Spectrum sounds built for a crowd of this size and Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) remains one of the songs where Welch's voice is allowed to completely dominate the space. You Got the Love needs very little introduction but safe to say that the barefoot floating performance from Welch brought a tear to many a manly eye.
What continues to separate Florence + The Machine from plenty of other festival headliners is the physicality of Welch herself. There is an elegance to the show, but very little restraint. She moves constantly, frequently appearing as though standing still simply isn't an option.Hunger and King bring us into the band's more recent history, while Howl and What Kind of Man add some necessary aggression. Eventually Dog Days Are Over provides the moment everyone has been waiting for. It's a song that has been played thousands of times since its release, but put Florence Welch in front of a festival crowd and it still works. "Put Your Phones Away and live in the moment" she cries, 20,000 or so comply and we have 4 minutes of utter bliss as the sun sets in the background. without doubt the headlining set of the day and probably the weekend.
Our Friday doesn't finish there.
From the enormous scale of Florence, we head back towards The Ballroom for Paris Paloma, where the mood changes considerably.
Paloma doesn't need spectacle to hold people's attention. Her songwriting does most of that for her. labour is inevitably the song that many have arrived wanting to hear, but reducing her set to that one viral success does her a disservice. the fruits, drywall and as good a reason demonstrate the dark folk sound underneath it, while Paloma's voice can move from delicate to surprisingly forceful without the songs ever feeling overplayed.
When labour does arrive, though, there is no pretending it isn't the centrepiece. Hearing its repeated refrain picked up by a festival crowd gives a song originally built around anger and frustration an entirely different weight.
There is then one final destination for Friday. Kneecap in The Gallery.
If there was one booking on today's schedule that looked potentially chaotic before anybody even arrived at Bramham Park, this was probably it.
Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí don't approach live shows with much interest in easing an audience into proceedings. Recent sets have been opening with Éire go Deo before moving rapidly through Smugglers & Scholars, Better Way to Live and Sick in the Head, and the enclosed nature of The Gallery only adds to the intensity.
Get Your Brits Out gets exactly the response you'd expect at Leeds, while Sayonara and Fine Art keep the momentum moving. By the time H.O.O.D. arrives, the distinction between the stage and the crowd feels considerably less important than it did at the beginning.
Kneecap remain provocative, political and completely uninterested in making themselves universally likeable. Whatever anyone thinks of the trio away from the music, as a live act they're extremely difficult to ignore.
Walking back we see Chase and Status set the main stage alight with their fire and fireworks, but that brings a very long Friday to an end.
Saturday doesn't offer much opportunity to slow down.
We'll be starting with Bleech 9:3 in The Ballroom, one of the emerging bands we're particularly interested in catching after seeing their name appearing increasingly often across this summer's festival bills.
Then it's over to The Grid for KEO, whose rise continues with a main-stage appearance at Leeds, before Geese take over The Gallery. After the reaction surrounding their recent live shows, Cameron Winter and the rest of the New York band could end up providing one of Saturday's more unpredictable sets.
But the big one for us comes later. Fontaines D.C. headline The Grid on Saturday night.
The Dublin band have made the journey from playing much smaller festival stages to the very top of the Leeds bill, and watching Grian Chatten, Carlos O'Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan III and Tom Coll walk out as headliners should be one of the defining moments of the weekend.
Friday took us properly around the new Leeds Festival for the first time. Saturday looks like it's going to make us do it all over again.
