Deleste Festival

Deleste Festival is coming back to Valencia next May, and it’s not tiptoeing in quietly — it’s kicking the gates off the Jardines de Viveros and swaggering straight into the city’s bloodstream. On the 22nd and 23rd of May 2026, the festival once known for its refined, boutique cool is gearing up for what looks suspiciously like a full-blown psychedelic street riot disguised as a cultural event. And the moment the lineup dropped, the air in Valencia shifted — like the collective twitch of a city that knows it’s about to have a very loud, very colourful weekend.

At the centre of this year’s hurricane is the return of Primal Scream, celebrating the 25th anniversary of XTRMNTR — one of the most politically radioactive, blood-pumping records to ever detonate inside the indie universe. Their history with Valencia goes way back: they’ve scorched stages here before, but this feels different. This feels like the band coming back to reclaim territory, to shake the Viveros trees until the parrots fall out and the ground vibrates under “Shoot Speed Kill Light.” For long-time Deleste fans, it’s the kind of booking that sends you stumbling back through memories of earlier editions — those late-night deliriums at Espai Rambleta, the years when the festival felt like a secret whispered between friends, the intimate shows where you found yourself five metres from a band you thought you’d only ever see in dreams or documentaries.

Deleste has always been the oddball of Valencia’s festival season — the one that curates rather than accumulates, the one that doesn’t need a thousand acts because the ten it picks can melt your face off one by one. This year is no exception. Apparat will bring the kind of electronic melancholy that feels like discovering an abandoned chapel inside your own chest. Kerala Dust will drag the night into a humid, neon-lit trance that smells like diesel, incense and bad decisions. Holy Fuck — still one of the best band names ever committed to posters — promise a set that will probably short-circuit half the power grid. Los Invaders will stir the local chaos, and Billy Nomates will do what she does best: stand alone, defiant, and louder than entire cities.

What Deleste does brilliantly — and keeps doing, year after year — is fuse the international with the hyperlocal, the cutting-edge with the “were you even alive when this song came out?” nostalgia. You get music, gastronomy, art, and those drifting festival conversations that feel profound at the time but usually end with someone spilling vermouth on their shoes. And you get it all inside one of Valencia’s most beautiful open-air spaces, where palm leaves, warm nights and feedback blend into something that feels like a communal hallucination.

More artists are still to be revealed, but even now the message is clear: Deleste 2026 is shaping up to be one of its strongest editions yet. It’s the festival you go to when you want the whole sensory package — not just concerts, but atmosphere, attitude, and the delicious danger of losing track of time entirely.

If Valencia needed a soundtrack to kick summer into motion, Deleste just handed it a double-barrelled one. And with Primal Scream back in town to finish what they started years ago, you can expect the Jardines de Viveros to shake like they’ve got a heartbeat of their own.

For more information: Deleste Festival