The NZ art-pop auteur is brooding, minimal, and generation-defining, back on a headline stage where the whispered verses hit hardest.
Art popAlternative pop
Kilby Block Party 2026 Lineup
Three May days at the Utah State Fairpark: Lorde, The xx and Turnstile over one of the most tightly curated indie bills in the country.
Kilby Block Party 2026 has already wrapped, but you can still dig through the lineup and find the acts you would have loved.
Find the acts you'll love at Kilby Block Party
Name a few bands you love and we'll scout all 70 acts on the Kilby Block Party bill for the ones you shouldn't miss.
About Kilby Block Party 2026
Kilby Block Party grew out of Kilby Court, a 100-capacity garage venue in Salt Lake City, and has become one of the most tightly curated indie bills in the country. The 2026 edition ran three days at the Utah State Fairpark with 70 acts, headlined by Lorde, The xx and Turnstile.
The programming is the reason to pay attention. Rather than buying a broad festival bill, Kilby books like a record shop staff-picks shelf: reunion sets from American Football and Grandaddy sitting next to Feeble Little Horse, YHWH Nailgun and Hotline TNT, with Father John Misty, Japanese Breakfast, Modest Mouse, Lucy Dacus and Blood Orange filling the middle. Very little of it overlaps with the amphitheatre circuit.
It also books its own scene properly. Utah acts including The Moss, Ritt Momney, The Kilans and Pixie & the Partygrass Boys played alongside the touring names, which is not something most festivals of this size still bother to do.
Expect indie rock, alternative, indie pop and post-punk across 70 acts.
At a glance
- Dates
- –Friday to Sunday, three days
- Where
- Utah State Fairpark, Salt Lake City, UT
- Lineup
- 70 acts
- Website
- Official site
Kilby Block Party 2026 lineup: all 70 acts
Search it, filter by day, stage or genre.Browse all 70 acts
Search it, filter by day, stage or genre.
Whispered minimalism that somehow fills a festival field, with intimacy at headline scale and 'Intro' still raising arm hair.
Indie popDream pop
Hardcore's joyful crossover kings, with dreamy interludes, stage dives, total communion, and a crowd that moves as one.
Hardcore punkAlternative rock
Bedroom-recorded songs that curdle in beautiful ways, with pitch-shifted vocals, folk melodies, and lyrics that never explain themselves, from indie rock's most quietly influential songwriter of the past decade.
Indie rockLo-fi
One album in 1999 that quietly became the emo-revival blueprint, and a reunion that turned out to have real songs in it.
EmoMath rock
Minimalist LA synth-punk trio with icy grooves and motorik precision, like a security-camera feed of a party you're not cool enough to attend.
Post-punkSynth
Bad Luck Brigade
Hip-hop
Lili Trifilio's bright, fast guitar-pop about being twenty and miserable, though the songs are far sharper than that sounds, with 'Prom Queen' still a viral touchstone.
Indie popPop punk
A 2000s indie-pop lifer whose songs about very ordinary things have quietly outlasted most of the scene, with power-pop craft worn as casually as a thrift-store tee.
Indie rockPower pop
Sibling duo making fuzzy, playful alt-pop with internet-era intimacy, with lo-fi textures and hooks that sound DM'd directly to you.
Alt-pop
Dev Hynes's velvety art-R&B, with '80s soul textures, jazz chords, and quiet heartbreak from one of pop's most sought-after collaborators.
R&BSynth-pop
Nashville guitar-pop with a rasp and a big chorus, festival-ready without being calculated about it, 'Freakin' Out on the Interstate' still the calling card.
Indie rockFolk rock
Cork's melodica-toting indie romantics, Fontaines-adjacent and rising fast, with a windswept, literary streak all their own.
Indie rockIrish
Eight-piece London chamber-rock swells that are patient, communal, and overwhelming, with songs that gather like weather until the whole room is inside them.
Post-rockChamber
Belfast noise-dance with an industrial techno pulse under post-punk vocals, engineered to blur the line between gig and rave.
Noise-dancePost-punk
Shane Lavers's project: smeared, sample-strewn pop that keeps resisting a clean shape, beloved by the corner of indie that prizes texture over tidiness.
Alternative
The blog-era success story, now essentially Alec Ounsworth solo, and that distinctive warble is undimmed, with self-released indie history still touring on its own terms.
Indie rock
Dad Bod
Alternative
Chicago trio playing wide-open, echoing guitar songs with two voices trading off and a genuine sense of space: heartbreak surf-rock with room to breathe.
Indie rockPost-punk
Austin's instrument-swapping all-women punk-metal wrecking crew, where everyone plays everything and it all lands at full force.
PunkGarage rock
Michael Collins' revolving Los Angeles project, rebuilding sun-bleached 1970s AM pop with a rotating cast of guest vocalists out front.
Alternative
Deadpan spoken-word over wiry post-punk: Florence Shaw's found-text poetry is delivered motionless while the band churns behind her.
Post-punkArt rock
Ethan Regan
Alternative
Josh Tillman's lounge-lizard prophet act, with gorgeous orchestration, acid wit, and a crooner's delivery that sells every barbed line.
Indie folkChamber pop
Pittsburgh noise-pop that keeps interrupting itself, with sweet melodies shoved through a broken amp, engineered to fall apart beautifully.
Indie rockNoise pop
Fightmaster
Alternative
Florida indie rock built for festival fields, with 'August' euphoria, surging choruses, and a live energy that outruns the recordings.
Indie rock
Melbourne's deadpan folk harmonists: three voices, one wicked sense of humor, and close-harmony singing with a stand-up's timing.
FolkHarmony
Xenya Genovese's woozy, guitar-led bedroom pop, sung like she's half-asleep and completely certain: Manchester cool at a whisper.
Indie popBedroom pop
Absurdist synth-pop performance art that is bubbly, deranged and delightful, a show engineered to make a crowd grin and go 'what?' simultaneously.
Art-popElectronic
Indie
Gonk
Punk
Jason Lytle's fuzzy synth-and-guitar melancholy about obsolete machines and the people who loved them, with 'The Sophtware Slump' still quietly prophetic.
Indie rockSpace rock
Sixties-pop scaffolding with the reverb of a much later record, plus a clear, unhurried voice that makes a small room feel enormous.
Alternative
Paramore's singer in her solo work, trading the band's guitar punch for looser, stranger songs built around the same unmistakable voice.
Alt-rockIndie pop
Will Anderson's blown-out shoegaze with actual pop songs underneath all the fuzz, proof the revival has songwriting legs.
ShoegazeIndie rock
Digicore prodigy turned noise-pop auteur, abrasive and gorgeous at once, with walls of distortion hiding devastating melody.
HyperpopShoegaze
Michelle Zauner writes about joy and grief with the same precision, over arrangements that keep getting more ambitious (gong hits and all).
Indie popDream pop
Jill Whit
Alternative
Post-punk-inflected alt-rock with a genuine 2005 dance-punk streak, and much heavier live than on record, with new-core energy and real nostalgic craft.
Alternative rockPop punk
Loose-limbed, Dylan-shaped American songwriting, delivered like he has all the time in the world, with road-dog albums that keep quietly stacking up.
Indie folkSinger-songwriter
A novelist's eye for the specific detail, delivered in the warmest voice in the boygenius orbit, with 'Night Shift' still the slow-burn masterclass.
Indie rockSinger-songwriter
Maryland songwriter with a light touch and unusually sharp lyrics about being observed online, plus bedroom pop with a producer's ear.
Bedroom popSinger-songwriter
Maximalist internet-native synth-pop, with a live show built to match the density of the records, and lore, visuals, and hooks in equal supply.
Synth-popHyperpop
Melody Prochet's French psych-pop, layered and slightly disorienting in the best way, with kaleidoscope production around featherweight melodies.
Psychedelic popDream pop
Isaac Brock's jittery, seasick guitar songs about the highway and the void, three decades of them, still unmistakable from the first yelp.
Indie rockAlternative rock
Miami group trading in loose, sun-warmed bedroom guitar pop, with jangle and bilingual charm played at a permanent afternoon tempo.
Alternative
Nadezhda
Alternative
Galway four-piece dealing in gauzy, low-slung shoegaze with a persistent undertow of dread: Irish gloom in slow motion.
ShoegazeIndie rock
Perth duo: punchy, sunburnt indie rock in the great Australian garage tradition, mates-first energy and hooks to match.
Indie rock
A drag queen and environmental organizer whose sets are equal parts performance, choir, and outdoor-access advocacy: camp with a cause.
PerformancePop
Pixie & the Partygrass Boys
Bay Area darkwave with a slick, sinister R&B undertow, goth music you can actually move to, horror-movie romance included.
DarkwavePost-punk
Left a YouTube career behind to make genuinely ambitious, orchestral experimental rap about death and dissolution, one of the internet's great reinventions.
Experimental hip hopArt pop
Rachael Jenkins
Singer/songwriter
Jack Rutter's Salt Lake bedroom project, which went unexpectedly viral and then made the interesting record anyway, with the cover paying for the experiments.
Indie popBedroom pop
New York hardcore built around a banjo run through a wall of distortion, genuinely unlike anything else and heavier than it has any right to be.
Hardcore punkNoise rock
Norwegian duo's icy avant-pop: classical strings meet club unease, beauty kept deliberately off-balance, fashion-week cool with conservatory bones.
ElectronicArt pop
Lindsey Jordan's guitar playing is the real draw: clean, unhurried lines under lyrics about wanting more than you got.
Indie rock
Oklahoma synth-funk duo with velvet grooves, zero pretension, and chillwave warmth with actual pocket, made for golden-hour sway.
Indie funk-pop
Starr 67
Alternative
The Kilans
Alternative
Theatrical London five-piece who arrived fully formed, with corsetry, harpsichord flourishes, and songs big enough to justify both, 'Nothing Matters' the proof.
Baroque popArt rock
Provo-formed indie rock with a tropical lilt, and one of the Utah scene's genuine breakout stories, with breezy hooks and island warmth.
Indie rockPsychedelic rock
Nate Amos writing straightforwardly beautiful songs after years of deliberately difficult ones, the other half of Water From Your Eyes, unmasked.
Indie rockBedroom pop
Montreal soft-pop with a late-'70s AM-radio warmth and Jane Penny's unhurried delivery on top, with soft-focus songs that have sneaky staying power.
Indie popSoft rock
Wilbere
Alternative
Jack Tatum's reverb-soaked '80s indie-pop has aged much better than the chillwave label it arrived with, and 'Shadow' is still shimmering.
Dream popIndie pop
Louisville trio pairing deadpan vocals with wiry, off-kilter guitar figures, with dream-logic songwriting kept taut rather than hazy.
Alternative
NYC's most confrontational new band, spasmodic percussion-punk that levels rooms in twenty-minute bursts, and nothing else sounds like it.
Noise rockExperimental
The headliners
Lorde · The NZ art-pop auteur is brooding, minimal, and generation-defining, back on a headline stage where the whispered verses hit hardest. Three albums in three distinct modes, all built on carrying enormous weight with very few notes.
Turnstile · Hardcore's joyful crossover kings, with dreamy interludes, stage dives, total communion, and a crowd that moves as one. Baltimore hardcore that stopped being only hardcore; one of the most physical live sets going.
The xx · Whispered minimalism that somehow fills a festival field, with intimacy at headline scale and 'Intro' still raising arm hair. Whispered duets over almost nothing at all, a band defined by what they leave out.
Up-and-comers to catch early
Feeble Little Horse · Pittsburgh noise-pop that keeps interrupting itself: sweet melodies shoved through a broken amp.
YHWH Nailgun · New York experimental noise built on percussion that never settles, abrasive and genuinely thrilling.
Hotline TNT · Blown-out shoegaze with actual pop songs underneath all the fuzz.This is Lorelei · Nate Amos writing straightforwardly beautiful songs after years of deliberately difficult ones.
Die Spitz · Austin four-piece who swap instruments mid-set and play garage-punk like it might fall apart.
Freak Slug · Woozy Manchester bedroom pop, sung like she's half-asleep and completely certain.
The Moss · Provo-formed indie rock with a tropical lilt, one of the Utah scene's genuine breakout stories.
Other acts worth planning around
American Football · The 1999 album became the emo-revival blueprint, and the reunion turned out to have real songs in it.
Grandaddy · Jason Lytle's fuzzy melancholy about obsolete machines and the people who loved them.
Father John Misty · The lounge-lizard persona hasn't slipped in a decade, and the arrangements keep improving.
Show Me the Body · New York hardcore built around a banjo run through a wall of distortion.
Magdalena Bay · Maximalist internet-native synth-pop with a live show as dense as the records.
Kilby Block Party 2026 lineup FAQ
Who headlined Kilby Block Party 2026?
Lorde, The xx and Turnstile, across a 70-act bill.
When and where was Kilby Block Party 2026?
May 15–17, 2026, at the Utah State Fairpark in Salt Lake City.
What kind of festival is Kilby Block Party?
An indie festival that grew out of Kilby Court, a 100-capacity all-ages garage venue in Salt Lake City. The booking leans indie rock, shoegaze, emo and experimental pop, and it consistently books more adventurously than its size would suggest.
How many acts played Kilby Block Party 2026?
70, including reunion sets from American Football and Grandaddy and a substantial contingent of Utah artists.
When is Kilby Block Party 2027?
Kilby Block Party is expected back in May 2027; the festival has not announced the 2027 dates yet. The 2026 lineup stays on this page until it does.
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