All Points East presents Outbreak Festival 2026 took place in Victoria Park, London on August 23rd, 2026. Back for its second year in London, Outbreak – the Manchester-born hardcore festival that has spent 15 years building a world around the idea that alternative music is a lifestyle, not a genre – has plugged into the corporate machinery of All Points East, filled Victoria Park with 50,000 people and put Deftones at the top of the bill. A Faustian pact of sorts, but miraculously, the machinery hasn’t swallowed it.
A diverse bill spanning genres
Outbreak began in hardcore and punk, but treats those less as musical boundaries than a set of cultural instincts: curiosity, community, a suspicion of received wisdom. It’s a bill that can move from hardcore to black metal, witch house, techno, hip-hop, post-punk and Australian pub rock, curated by longitudinal taste rather than automated by the trends of the algorithm. The festival has grown significantly since Turnstile successfully headlined it last year, and the team have made the most of the extra space by booking hands down the most diverse, exciting line-up of a festival in the city all summer.
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At 1:55 pm, the much-hyped Show Me The Body are already packing the North Arena, their grimy collision of hardcore, hip-hop and electronics making an appropriate opening statement. An hour later Deafheaven turn the same tent into a blackgaze apocalypse, proving there’s room for even the most challenging bands on this bill. Shortly after, witch-house pioneers Salem arrive out of semi-retirement to perform King Night beneath an indoor snowstorm, making the North Arena feel like an early-2000s Tumblr being cyber-attacked by an AI agent. This is just the first three bands in one tent. By 4 pm we’ve already had a multi-genre, multi-generational music lesson.
Infrastructure and the main stage acts
Victoria Park’s All Points East is now a well-oiled component of the British festival-industrial complex. Outbreak’s trick is to use all that hardware without adopting the worldview that usually comes with it. The corporate festival has provided the scaffolding; Outbreak has brought the taste. It helps that Outbreak remains culturally Manchester, even when physically east London. There’s a constant on-site battle between Outbreak and All Points East branding — not quite No. 10 North showing Westminster how to do it, but certainly the upstart showing the incumbent a thing or two.
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¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U turns the North Arena into a rave for people dressed almost exclusively in black. Blawan does the same next door under the X Stage. Over on the main stage, things follow a more predictable pattern. Interpol’s mid-afternoon set is boring, but that’s OK because that’s literally the point. The sun is beating down just enough to be pleasant, and the vibes are immaculate. Similarly, Aussie pub rockers Amyl & The Sniffers show us all a good time, proving that no matter how big a stage they’re given, you still feel like you’re catching their spit in your eye.
For All Points East’s part, it has upped the infrastructure considerably from recent years. Toilets are clean and plentiful, food options abundant… but most crucially of all, they’ve finally fixed the sound. For years a trip to APE meant seeing your favourite bands perform in sub-par conditions, but this year that criticism simply cannot be levelled. It all looks and sounds awesome. In fact, the only real criticism is that there’s too much of a good thing — meaning we missed Basement opening the main stage, IDLES headlining the second stage and AFI staging their UK festival comeback. There is too much worth seeing, which is the best kind of problem for a festival to have.
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Deftones headline
And then Deftones. Their second ascent caught us all off guard: Crystal Palace in 2025, the O2 in January this year, now their biggest UK headline show yet. So many shows yet still their audience is growing. A band whose peak White Pony era predates much of today’s audience is suddenly operating at arena-and-beyond scale, helped by a younger generation rediscovering their catalogue through TikTok. Their production is correspondingly gigantic, a wall of screens so vast that installing one in your living room would be… actually kind of amazing. Chino Morino and his crew play tracks from across their career, with “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “7 Words” carrying a blast radius all the way back to Bethnal Green tube station.
But Deftones are almost beside the point. The real achievement is that Outbreak can put a band this enormous at the top of its bill without making everyone else feel like support. That is Outbreak’s special trick: it has borrowed the infrastructure of the corporate festival without borrowing its taste. At a time when alternative music is increasingly sliced into marketable micro-genres, a Manchester festival has occupied London’s biggest festival playground and made 50,000 people feel like they’re still in on the secret.