to dust we return: the 2026 all together now review

This article has a companion episode of Fourth Best on Dublin Digital Radio, recorded the Monday evening after coming back from the festival with good friends. It's a different kind of review, and honestly, I'm pretty happy with how both turned out. It takes me weeks to do a big written piece, but radio's always just one hour. Some day I'll strike the balance.

In 2025 I wrote what is probably my single most-widely-read piece for Fourth Best. An All Together Now review with the audacious title "Do we just call it a victory lap?" celebrated a festival that had managed to bottle the spirit of the country, putting on some of the most exciting Irish music and bringing it to a much larger audience... despite some underwhelming international headliners and a main-stage Irish act that I honestly never got anything from. You could read that review, swap out a couple of names, and honestly, it wouldn't be far from my view of the 2026 slate. It's a good weekend! Irish music is class!

If 2025's festival was a victory lap for Irish music and the Fourth Best agenda, 2026 sees ATN continuing to run those same circles. Not for the worse per se - Pulp on mainstage is a thousand times more a proper headliner than last year's picks of Nelly Furtado and London Grammar (who, it bears repeating, both placed over CMAT, if you want a sense of how quickly time flies).

This time around, I actually want to give you a play-by-play of some of the festival's highlights for me - of which there are plenty, before I ask some questions about what's next for ATN and where some cracks might be beginning to show.

Friday

This Friday section is so much longer than the other two days! I don't know if it's just that I had way more energy (to be honest, I barely slept at all Thursday night, so I don't know if that's the truth), saw more new stuff, have more to say, or what. But in retrospect, this was a near-perfect festival day - so much variety despite heading to basically 95% Irish acts. Like I'm counting it out here and I think if I didn't hit like 15-20 minutes of Friendly Fires it'd be a full Irish.

Echo Northstar

I've been really enjoying Paddy Hennessy's work as Echo Northstar. It's very crisp, atmospheric indie rock with kind of an In Rainbows feel, with some more modern flourishes. I get that it's a solo project, but having seen him with one of the tightest bands in Ireland right now, it was a little bit of a shame to see this one as a solo set. Especially when his bassist is standing right there in the crowd. With that being said, I think this still was an incredible opening note; a more electronic edge on some material works great, and the live instrumental work and vocal remain undeniable. As a Waterford native, his return with a bit more momentum behind him is a dead cert.

Emmy Shigeta

It's going to come up very often in this article that I love the Big Romance Dome, a completely uncharacteristic festival space filled with carpets and enforcing a shoes-off policy, almost like an enormous living room with the RiseUp Soundsystem dropped into it. It feels lush, it sounds lush, and the lineup for the entire weekend looked phenomenal; although I actually didn't get anywhere near as much time in there as I'd have liked to. It was really just this. Emmy's selections across city pop and Japanese electronic music, plus a few curveballs (someone who got in earlier said a Japanese reggae version of Born Slippy landed in this set, which I have caught her playing before) made it well worth the detour.

Some smaller bits and pieces on the way

The Wran: *gesturing wildly at a previous article* I'm not sure that I get it. The Wran played to an absolutely massive crowd, probably one of the densest all weekend at The Last City, and I think my fight to get a place in here put a dampener on my feelings once I got into the crowd. I'll give them another shot. I'm extremely enthusiastic about trad and folk song getting a new lease of life, and about the crowd itself that was in there seemingly loving every second of it.

SexyTadhg: Caught a bit of Tadhg's set after really feeling their show last year and needing to grab their excellent merch for a friend who couldn't make it. Their jubilant set pulls from all sorts; huge and jazzy at times, proper trad stompers at others. But honestly, it's all about Tadhg's infinite charisma at the front of the band - one of our greatest entertainers. It's absolutely built for main-stage. In the review I'm going to touch on how ATN feels like an iterative festival; getting to watch the best of Ireland grow with it. Tadhg played the Bandstand last year, the main-stage this year. This is the best-case scenario for artists making the rebound year after year; RÓIS pulled off a similar leap. Can't fucking believe I missed that Donna Summer cover I've been seeing endless videos of since. Unfortunately, getting out this way meant missing Ahmed, With Love. bring out seemingly the entire Irish hip-hop scene over at the Circle. C'est la vie.

Vaticanjail: Started out with a pretty small crowd but I'm told her audience massively picked up as the SexyTadhg crowd migrated. This was a brief stop but her blend of Latin-tinted, often experimental, often accessible pop is tailor-made for the ATN crowd, and I enjoyed being hit with a Justin Bieber remix of all things on the jump between stages.

pôt-pot: Fuzzy krautrock built around a pulse of harmonium drone, bridging Cork and Lisbon, pôt-pot's breakthrough feels long overdue for anyone who's been to more than a handful of gigs in the Roundy. Mark Waldron-Hyden, Sara Leslie and Elaine Malone need no introduction to the Fourth Best faithful, and this set feels like it's taking the same role that Maria Somerville's did on the same Circle stage the previous year.

Friendly Fires: Saw like ten minutes of their set. Shout out to millennials man, bring back the blog pop energy. Surprised how much of Pala remains committed to my memory.

Rory Sweeney: Caught a glimpse of this between FTIL and Lullahush. While the last few times I caught him were in the universe of Old Earth, this set pushed for club excess. Speaking with Rory later in the weekend, he said that it was primarily inspired by Evian Christ's punishing use of arena-grade strobe lights in smaller spaces, aiming for a total sensory overload. As the primary counter-programming to headliners Pulp, I think it's possibly his biggest crowd yet. Also more than a hint of DJ iPhone Charger silliness hidden inside it, if the fact he played a Pitbull remix is any indication.

For Those I Love

I published the piece I still see their marks that they left in the stone last year about traveling to Belfast in the midst of a horrible storm to see Dave Balfe tour the second For Those I Love record. I really do see him as the most important Irish artist of the decade; constantly escalating the scale and ambition of his output, locked in to a sound that resonates with a generation, carrying a rebellious spirit in opposition to a deeply unequal society, grounded in love for friends, community, and the craft itself. A craft that expands beyond the music. The Carving The Stone tour featured an amount of rather elaborate stage work; building towers of security cameras that were used for stage visuals, carefully mapping moments in the set to be framed by the right angle. The Of The Sorrows video - directed by the artist, probably the best of last year and one I've also written about - feels like it contains a life's work by itself.

51 weeks after the release of Carving The Stone, Balfe would perform two sets at ATN, each stemming from the record but with massive difference in approach. Friday night on Something Kind Of Wonderful, the festival's de-facto second stage, we would see an enhanced version of the set from the Carving The Stone tour, with new custom stage design and film work. The following night in The Circle, we would see the album fully remixed in a one-off "After Dark" performance.

Either piece in isolation would be a festival highlight; the pair taken together is a historic showing. One is an almost one-man arena show; making use of the massive stage in every aspect. At one point he's performing on a treadmill hidden behind an elaborate flower installation, running endlessly at the crowd. At others , we see the film, depicting the story of Wesley and Clance, a son trying to connect with an estranged father who reminisces on a lost Dublin. There's a turn in the ending of I Have A Love: on tour it told a story of the persistent haunting by grief, but in this festival set traces the journey back to the same festival stage he once played with Overmono. The conclusion is the same - "It should have been the four of us up here singing Dear James" - yet this time it feels life-affirming.

"Life-affirming" was also the phrase that most of us left the After Dark set with.

We'll get to that.

Lullahush

After a brief stop by Rory Sweeney I set out for my final stop of the night. It was a good place to call it, because what Lullahush achieves live is one of those things that I can't really explain and I'd spend most of the rest of the night thinking about it if I went somewhere else.

The relatively rare Lullahush live sets are something I've talked about on Fourth Best before, including briefly in the best thing I've ever written, but seeing them this time in the forest, on the Global Roots stage, in full view of every second of the absolutely fucking mad drum rushes that swell around the dense layers of sample collage, seeing absolutely beaming smiles from the trad players up the front of the stage as they ride some of the weirder, seemingly improvised divergences from the album... I felt very locked in. Honestly, even the chatter of the crowd around me felt like it only added to the swelling chaos of the gig. I had to feel it out. The set began with a cut of Midwest Radio's ecstatic coverage of Mayo's recent All-Ireland win, and the trademark sweeps of live and sampled trad music took over from there.

I can imagine Lullahush being not-for-everyone. It's dense, it's intense, it's chaotic, but if it's for you, your eyes won't leave the stage for an instant, whether dancing or simply struck still by awe.

One of the best Irish acts of the decade, and one I can't wait to see keep moving.

Saturday

Saturday's path was a lot more winding, with a lot more partial sets being picked up along the way, and I can't honestly say I did it the right way. At every single moment of the journey, there were about two or three places I could have been instead, and trying to get a good spread at times meant sacrificing the rest of a set I was enjoying. I ended up with bits and pieces of acts that almost certainly deserved more active attention from me, like W.I.T.C.H and The Orchestra (For Now), or getting little snippets of long-time favourites like Negro Impacto or Maruja.

But I think nothing said this better than me having to miss the Cypher section of the Last City's All-Ireland Takeover. Irish Hash Mafia at The Last City last year was probably my favourite single moment of last year's festival, drawing in hundreds to see Irish hip-hop's finest and most unhinged. This year's cypher also seems to have picked up immense praise, with E The Artist on the decks, Ahmed, With Love. on hosting duty, and an immense set of special guests - as well as a look to rising names out of the underground like the Claddagh's own GOMiE and Cork's underground king Beddyminaj. I feel bad for missing it, but at least not entirely.

I will have a lot more to say about scheduling and capacity further down the article, and explain why I have a lot less detail on the Saturday performances in particular. Still, the day had its highlights...

Solo sets at the Last City from Beddyminaj, GOMiE, Lil Skag & Sugabooo

The cypher coming at the end of a three hour takeover of the City meant I got my fill early. There's something about the energy of that stage, the way it captures a crowd, that makes it easy to feel like you're part of something fucking gigantic when you walk in; even as it serves as a home to more DIY and underground culture. And this is music that is made for that moment; I've seen Beddyminaj in a few different rooms with differing crowd reactions but the City was having it. It felt like there was a bit of a passing of the torch happening; set times weren't broken down until just before the event started, meaning a crowd formed for some of the bigger names and left converted by some of the up-and-comers. GOMiE had a few skits loaded into the set to that effect ("I thought we were here to see Skagaboo, not some gomie fella chatting about Galway") but I think I couldn't have asked for a better lead in to the day.

Speaking of Skagaboo, look. I've seen both Lil Skag and Sugabooo what feels like a thousand times already. I have nothing new to say that wasn't in last year's review or elsewhere. Doesn't change the fact that a festival set from either or both them will pretty much always be phenomenal craic. It's their world now. Long live the kings.

Trá Pháidín

In the middle of Trá Pháidín's set, someone approached me and offered me a sprig of lavender that I attached to my cardigan for the night. If you are reading this article, just know that stuck with me. I've called the band the best in Ireland and I really do stand by it. New material from the forthcoming Cloch 's Claí is sounding phenomenal, with a kind of bubbling fury at the neglect and decay inflicted upon na Gaeltachtaí. You can dance forever to it though. Seeing bigger and bigger crowds lock in for their one-of-a-kind take on trad is a joy; between this and Lullahush's set the night before, it's easily two of the best sets all weekend, genuinely stirring a kind of hope for the future through doing something new with our roots.

However, I do have my pick for best set of the weekend squared away...

For Those I Love (After Dark)

After Dark presented an unusual contradiction: louder, harsher, and more intimate. The sonic gap between Carving The Stone and its remix is every bit as deep as the gap between the intensity of the techno kick drums on Mirror to anything on the first album. After Dark draws from a rich patchwork of dance music, surfing the hardcore continuum through jungle, d&b, dubstep and beyond. All marketing has made it clear that After Dark would only be performed once and never again... but until we see some hard drives get ceremonially destroyed, I would hope that it'll surface again. I thought about bringing a little Zoom recorder with me. I'll probably regret not giving it a go.

So why doesn't this remix exist in album form? A vocal sample that clips up during the set along the lines of "Don't clear the sample. Use the sample. Get sued. Get sued. Get sued." might tell one story - by paying homage to the history of dance music, it makes references and leaps that wouldn't fly with the label. Another is simply that this was simply built to be heard on a soundsystem and not on headphones, although that doesn't explain why the decision was "one-off". Yet another is that this was largely just a personal experiment never intended for public ears at all, and the invite to perform it at The Circle is the point at which it became a show.

Awash in thick smoke and relentless lighting, on a much more minimal stage, with time more evenly split between time on the mic and time interacting with the instrumental. Yet in pushing for dancefloor euphoria over the rage of the original album, an absolute all-out-assault mixing the surprising and the familiar, After Dark was an emotional peak for the entire festival. As the smoke cleared, a lot of people were just standing around hugging their friends just trying to process it all. This show feels like stepping out of the shadow of that first record and the grief that defines it. I don't know if the artist would agree, but it feels like the thesis of that second album "I'll carve this stone 'til darkness comes, because I am choosing to live" defines it.

In truth, I was a bit too in the moment to even be able to describe the extent of it. I don't have notes on what each new version sounds like, I can't pick out individual timestamps of when the breakbeats soared and the bass hit hardest. Maybe After Dark will go on in legend to be Ireland's next great lost album, maybe time has other plans for it. All I know is what it felt like to be there. Leaving giddy and excited to take on the next few rounds of the night.

One of the shout-outs at the end of the set was to Robbie from The Avalanches. And it was with The Avalanches that I'd finish out the night; who played what I think was an extremely fun DJ set bringing an enormous assortment of percussive dance music, pulling in rhythms from all accross the spectrum before wrapping up with:

1. a ska cover of Lithum by Nirvana
2. two of the best songs in their own catalog

Couldn't ask for better. Well, okay, maybe a live show from them. They'll be back.

Sunday

Breakfast at Borgo with a negroni set off a quiet start to yet another day of hunting for good times. This day was a bit more open-ended, where I actually had plenty of downtime to try one or two acts I knew nothing about going in. Unfortunately, the ones that I did get to, Getdown Services and Grooveline, simply aren't my cup of tea. My apologies to the many people who've recommended either to me over the last few weeks! I also dipped in for the very end of Avenue 68, some of my favourites from Ones To Watch this year, and caught them previewing a Curtisy feature - somehow the only Curtisy appearance I witnessed this year, as I believe he was hopping across all the stages.

A couple of months back I went to the Light House Cinema to see the concert film Soda Blonde did with the National Symphony Orchestra. It's called Straight Into The Arms Of Something and it's on, uh, the RTÉ player. I went in a casual fan, and left convinced they're national treasures. So it was just really enjoyable to have them in a daylight slot, sitting on the hill, just taking it in. That and SexyTadhg were the only two main-stage acts I made it to all weekend.

There's nothing to say about Soda Blonde that you won't get better from just watching the film honestly. Take that as the big Fourth Best recommendation for the day. Even without the orchestral bells and whistles, the pure confidence and stage presence, the depth that songs take on live, the excellent songwriting - some day I'll just go see them in Vicar St or something. I think maybe the rest of the world might catch up. Hideo Kojima, I am calling in a favour.

After catching a tiny bit of a set from another act that maybe deserves national treasure status in the form of SOAK, who had perhaps the coziest set of the weekend, I ended up with a clash I didn't expect. Turned out I was camping with some super-fans of the Ape Escape games, and needed to see Soichi Terada, a bit of a wildcard for the AVA stage, but who brought the vibes of the day up considerably; the trek to RÓIS mid-sets was fully justified.

RÓIS gets no good photos because the tent was absolutely bursting out the sides. Deserved. I've talked about her live show to no end on the site before, and it's a well-earned highlight of the weekend, but what I will say about this one is the introduction of a guitarist has elevated the set yet again, and the introduction of a big long Donna Summer cover into her own FEEL LOVE was maybe one of the most euphoric moments of the weekend. Getting moshpits opened up for folk songs and bringing probably last year's song of the year to what might be her biggest crowd shows the range she has. I heard that barely ten days later she was performing in a cairn during a solar eclipse. I love this country.

For the home stretch, I completely locked in for Anna Von Hausswolff, pretty much just lying down on the grass and just letting the end of the weekend fall upon me, then got my last boogie of the night at Sloucho. I thought I might sleep soundly through the night, but at some point around 3am in my tent, I opened my eyes. Mano Le Tough's closing bandstand set was just finishing up with Kavinsky's Nightcall, and I was weirdly thankful to be woken to hear that one drifting into my tent.

Then, the horns.

capacity/capability

Last year I complained a bit that moving the Arcadia stage into the campsites was a weird one. It didn't move this year. In fact, I don't know if the Last City always had a truck horn, but why did you give a stage closer to even more camping a truck horn? 

The overall capacity of the festival was raised from 30,000 to 35,000 this year. Fair enough! They have the room (with seemingly more to spare) for camping and I reckon they've shown they can take care of the land. My understanding is that on applications made for next year, it looks like they're not immediately planning a consecutive cap increase.

Yet as cool as I think the Big Romance Dome and the Izakaya stage were (even if I did a lot more eating than dancing at Izakaya), the additions this year were tiny by comparison to the volume of extra people, and issues of capacity were a repeated strain on the weekend. The comedy tent seemed to at all times be spilling over the sides (remember this fact when I ask "why can't we just have music there instead?" later on - this is a blog by and for a certain type of Irish Music Sicko), acts like Christy Moore and RÓIS crammed out their tents under the weight of precedented demand, and the Thursday opening day felt every bit as full as the rest of the weekend, as the crowd had fewer places to be. Exiting the car park on Monday morning, we found ourselves idling in queues for two hours (although I will note the organisers were dealing with the surprise of a funeral in Portlaw that definitely needed delicate routing around).

The Hidden Sounds stage, home to some of the festival's most exciting emerging artists like Rua Rí, or home to some special late night trad sessions, genuinely hardly functions as a stage at all; intended as a cozy and intimate space, the uncomfortable benches instead only work to crowd out attendees. The cramped vibes combined with the dust and it became a skip-by-default type of stage among my friends and I. Which is a shame, because it was the space I found one of my highlights from last year, and probably could have again! I just found myself too distracted to lock in.

The Last City also suffered from success - while one of my favourite areas at any festival, when I dropped into check out The Wran, by the time I made it to the front of the queue to get in, there was another 15 minutes of scrambling around the back of the crowd and down towards the stage if you actually wanted to see anything. Which is a shame because it felt like spaces that were being occupied by non-music entertainment could have easily been reappropriated for more capable stages.

I know a few friends of mine had a fantastic time at the League of Ireland panel, but I am going to be honest here: I don't actually care about the talks / cooking demonstrations / live podcast recordings / comedy at any festival. I understand the reasoning: you're going to be stuck in a field for 3-5 days. Nothing but music for that time is a hard sell. Probably especially to an older crowd, if I'm being honest, and I'm spiritually closer to them than the zoomers at this point.

Secretly though, I think it's time for the concept of the boutique festival to die. Not that I don't like that I can go take a sauna - I went, twice - but I'd settle for just having more showers. Not that I don't like that I could go sit down for a brunch at Borgo and get a breakfast negroni - in fact I loved it - but I'm not choosing to go to any festival on the basis of whether I can have a proper sit-down meal. I'm going for the music first and foremost. If the music takes a hit to provide space for something else, it's not for me. There is absolutely a counterargument that the festival has plenty of land to move into and that this will resolve with time and iteration, without me going to war with Marcus O'Laoire and the foodies to do so. But where's the fun in that? The fact is my favourite festival of all time has barely anything more than three activities: music stages, food stalls, bars. The lineup speaks for itself. I wonder if I just want something equally functional for an Irish audience. Maybe something like Croílár or Féile na Gréine or Other Voices or Sounds from a Safe Harbour - festivals woven into the fabric of a city or a town - are the thing I'm actually looking for. I would just love if someone went even bigger with it.

Ever a festival of contradictions though, ATN was at the same time both a festival of too much and never enough. Towards the end of each days, clashes intensified as every stage raced towards their headliners, meaning that at the end of the day, you faced absolutely frenzied schedules, and every single minute at one set you felt like you were sacrificing three or four other great options.

Like, look at what I'm dealing with here. I didn't get to see The Mary Wallopers, or Pebbledash, or Takuya Nakamura, or Gilla Band, or Paatho & The Bull. That could have been a full other day of programming for me. It's compressed into three hours. And I'm counting Maruja as "seen" when I caught probably a quarter of their set.

But then the headliner for the day, who I have no real interest in, takes the stage. And the whole thing just goes quiet.

And this example gets worse! You'll notice that the screenshots above were on Clashfinder, and I was at My New Band Believe for a good bit of the time above. That band was never even added to the official festival app! It was mentioned once on Instagram and then in a push notification about ten minutes before the set started. The result was a band with a lot of genuine buzz and fans in Ireland playing one of the largest stages of the festival to sixteen people on the barrier and a bemused sparse crowd sitting on the hill. You'll think I'm exaggerating. I'm not.

So maybe this year ATN is beginning to brush up against its limits. It's not ruined by them, but you can feel people beginning to say "You cannot escape the cycle." Even the District Music Podcast, recorded on-site at the festival, is talking about the idea of a festival's life cycle, and trying to figure out where ATN sits on it. It seems to be almost instinctual. Think of it as a kind of festival samsara.

Beyond The Pale is the new All Together Now.
All Together Now is the new Electric Picnic.
Electric Picnic is the new Longitude.
Longitude was the new Oxegen.
Oxegen was the new.

"Colm, you're a music journalist. Shut the fuck up about samsara and —"

The Thursday approach to All Together Now, entering the vast hilly lands of the Curraghmore Estate, featured the jaw-dropping sight of plumes of smoke rising from a wildfire in the Comeragh Mountains. I need to point out here that nobody was hurt by this - but by the time Sunday rolled around, the festival did have to issue an official statement about the smoke. The festival grounds were dried out entirely by the summer drought, and now every time a crowd moved about or a festival vehicle went by, clouds of dust billowed in their wake. More than once I avoided a set because I was coughing up dust at its stage, or took suboptimal paths up the hill if a busy main stage set was wrapping up. At some point in the weekend, I started feeling more drained than I ever was in my life. Festivals are always a trade on your health. You won't sleep well, you're probably hungover, what you eat is probably a mystery. I know the score, and I accepted the cost.

Still, for a brief while on the Saturday after stepping into a sauna and feeling like I could breathe clearly for the first time in two days, I returned to the festival world almost completely emptied out, skipping a few sets. I didn't make it to One Leg One Eye but I definitely felt like I was missing a few parts myself. But armed with a potent blend of filter coffee, Licor 43, Dominican rum and a touch of coffee liqueur — I pieced myself back to life, to move like dust once more.

Here's the thing: I love this festival. It'll win me back. I'll probably think about it when I smell the lavender. When the Loyalty ticket email comes in though, I'm not sure I'm rushing to click the buy button. We'll see.

(fine. one last gripe. whoever decided to lock resale tickets until like two weeks before the festival: who are you? what is your deal? what are you trying to do? do you just hate us?)