RISING runs across the city from 27 May to 8 June with a program of stirring, playful and luminescent music.
“Blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire,” writes Maggie Nelson in her prose poem Bluets. Blue is also the theme of Melbourne’s early-winter festival, RISING, and Nelson’s description of the colour can be transposed to this annual offering of music, art, dance and performance.
Over the last handful of years, RISING has achieved something that eludes many other multidisciplinary festivals. The program typically includes more than 100 events, spanning live music, theatre, club parties, installations, exhibitions and contemporary dance performances, and yet it all conveys a distinctive sense of place.
This is particularly true of the music program, which features big name internationals and esoteric locals, as well as curious sound installations and participatory events.
RISING: 2026
- Wednesday 27 May to Monday 8 June
- Various CBD venues
- Program here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
Even if you only attend one RISING event, perhaps a ticketed live music performance at The Forum or Melbourne Town Hall, or the free Pasifika block party at Fed Square, you’ll still feel the suffusion of the festival’s royal blue. The electric energy. The crisp satisfaction of living in a city that hosts major-scale festivals that dare to make adventurous programming decisions.
This year’s RISING runs from Wednesday 27 May to Monday 8 June, and the program contains generous helpings of imagination, entertainment, and community-oriented provocation. It’s the materialisation of something where otherwise there would have been nothing. An ecstatic accident to keep us warm and engaged as the cold settles in.
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RISING’s festival within a festival, Day Tripper, returns to Melbourne Town Hall and Max Watt’s on 6 June, led by poet and MC Kae Tempest, punk rocker turned folky online surrealist Elias B Rønnenfelt, alt-hip hop slam poet Saul Williams, Dunedin sound progenitors The Bats, roots reggae OGs The Congos, and seasoned Naarm hardcore band Straightjacket Nation.
Day Tripper is now in its third year, and with each instalment, RISING’s music curator Hayley Percy has made clear that the goal is to create an experience defined as much by discovery and strange juxtaposition as by big-name performers.
“We’re very lucky in Melbourne to have an audience that is so receptive,” Percy told Triple R during the first Day Tripper, which attracted a crowd of two-and-a-half thousand. “I feel like if this was in Sydney, we would’ve sold like 300 tickets. But Melbourne really turns up for the weirdness.”
RISING’s 2026 music program also includes multilingual Palestinian rapper and songwriter Saint Levant, whose headline show at Melbourne Town Hall was an instant sell-out. It’s Saint Levant’s first trip to Australia, and the former GQ Man of the Year will be performing songs from his debut album, Deira, an album dedicated to Saint Levant’s family-owned hotel in Gaza, which was destroyed by Israeli bombs in January 2024.
Several of the buzziest names in contemporary indie rock will be coming out for RISING. North Carolinian shoegaze meets alt-country crew Wednesday will be playing songs from their critically adored 2025 album, Bleeds, over two nights at Max Watt’s, with support from locals Alien Nosejob and Season 2.
Cate Le Bon wrote about heartbreak in an unsparing yet deeply tender manner on her 2025 album, Michelangelo Dying. We expect there’ll be a few tears shed at her Melbourne Town Hall performance on 3 June. In the live setting, Le Bon is known for adding a fleshy thrust to the woozy abstraction of her recorded material.
South London post-punk surrealists Dry Cleaning are heading back for their biggest Melbourne headline show to date, performing at The Forum on 30 May. After two albums of driving rhythms, angular guitars and whimsical, amusing lyricism, the band’s new album, Secret Love, features greater emphasis on vocal melody, thematic melancholy and tension-building arrangements.
Dub maestro Adrian Sherwood has produced bassy, reverb- and delay-drenched remixes for the likes of Panda Bear, Spoon, Depeche Mode, Lee Scratch Perry, Leftfield and Asian Dub Foundation. Sherwood is bringing his live dub show to Max Watt’s on 5 June. He’ll be sending his many studio effects devices through a full-size mixing desk to create real-time dub mixes out the original multitracks.
Fela Kuti’s youngest son Seun Kuti is headed to Hamer Hall on 5 June, backed by his dad’s old band, Egypt 80, with support from the Naarm-based Public Opinion Afro Orchestra. Seun is keeping his late father’s searingly political Afrobeat legacy alive. He made headlines for his speech at last year’s Glastonbury, where he told the crowd that in order to free Palestine, Congo and Sudan, it will first be essential to free Europe.
“Free Europe from right-wing extremism, from fascism, from racism. Free Europe from imperialism,” he said. “When you do this job – as soon as you do this job – Gaza will be free. Congo will be free. Sudan will be free.”
90s rap star Lil’ Kim will be in town for a celebration of her two landmark LPs, Hard Core and The Notorious K.I.M.. Fellow Brooklynite Yasiin Bey will return for his third consecutive RISING, teaming up with Rhodes pianist Brian Jackson for a tribute to the late spoken word iconoclast Gil Scott-Heron.
Canadian musician Robert Alfons’ electro-goth project TR/ST will perform at Hamer Hall on 4 June. The show will centre on Performance, TR/ST’s album from 2024, a record of dark, industrial bass lines, synth hooks and trance melodies. It’s TR/ST’s first trip to Australia.
RISING has been turning the Town Hall into a late night rave space over the last couple of years, and this year they’re delegating party duties to British techno producer and songwriter Daniel Avery. Avery will be performing a show centred on his latest album, the shoegaze-influenced Tremors, backed by a full live ensemble.
The blue light of RISING extends beyond ticketed music, dance and theatrical performances. The free program includes Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, a work composed for organ, flute, clarinet, percussion, strings and sine waves that will respond to the unique architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s the Australian premiere of Voiceless Mass, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022, making Chacon the first Native American composer to win the prize.
There are dozens more events on this year’s RISING program, and not a dud among them. It’s a festival that encourages you to get your house, your comfort zone, your winter funk, and your preconceptions about what you like and don’t like; and to get into theatres, clubs, and public squares with strangers and friends to collaborate on the fabrication of an ecstatic accident.
Find more information about RISING’s 2026 music program here.
Beat is a proud media partner of RISING.
