After sixteen glorious years of bringing the finest in experimental, progressive, alternative, and forward-thinking music to Fernhill Farm in Somerset, ArcTanGent says goodbye to the patch of land on which they have built this weird little community, looking ahead to a new location for next year. Over the four editions of ATG that I have attended, it’s safe to say that I feel quite attached to this particular 160-acre plot. While the layout shifts a little each year, it’s kept fundamentally the same, meaning that I stroll across it with a certain confidence in my navigation that I seldom feel elsewhere. So I was sad to wave goodbye to Fernhill from the car window, the morning after the final notes of Julie Christmas x Cult of Luna and Master Boot Record and had faded. But it’s difficult to imagine a better send off for the site than the 2026 edition, and we will be posting coverage of the final ATG at Fernhill a day at a time.
Wednesday at ATG started out as a small, warm-up show for the main event, but every year it gets closer to a full festival day. This year we get two of the smaller stages running alternately throughout the day. While previously it has felt like an odds-and-sods kind of day (in the best way), for 2026 it feels more closely curated to provide a somewhat logically structured line-up. Anyone who attended ATG 2025 will notice that, as is now traditional, many of the bands scheduled for today—such as Lost in Kyiv, Papangu, and Dimscûa—are returning triumphant having played one of the main days last year, often on larger stages.
It’s a glorious summer’s day and the grass is scorched to dust. I arrive on-site with time to catch Lost in Kyiv from Paris, France, who provide a suitably epic and serious start to the festival. It feels busy and bustling already. This four-piece unfold warped and roiling synthesiser soundscapes which undulate like a strange blanket underneath the guitar riffs, and allow space for catchy beats and spoken-word samples to shine. There is an almost kraut-rock-esque drive to those rhythms, motoring along with insistence but complexity. The crowd is surging in sympathy, the band is brimming with energy yet straight-faced. I love it when post-rock is allowed to become post-metal, like we get here, so those crescendos can really peak, delivering that emotional pay off. Still blinking away the sunlight from inside this gloomy tent, we’re washed over by big bludgeoning riff-waves, which eventually recoil, waning like the tide. For their final song, Lost in Kyiv launches a gorgeous, rippling hammer-on/pull-off riff out over the ever-shifting changing sonic waters beneath, in a set finale power move – and it’s the first of many deeply-emotive experiences I’m treated to at this edition.
The heaviest peaks of Lost in Kyiv’s set pave the way somewhat for Dimscûa, from Berkshire, UK. Wasting no time, these guys lay into their brooding post-metal, with a special kind of intensity that validates the frequent Amenra comparisons made with this band. When layers of deep distortion are allowed to keep increasing and building, you know that they might be unleashed as a ferocious black-metal onslaught or to burst into a woe-laden groove. If Lost in Kyiv began my festival by injecting hope and optimism into a sonic rendition of life’s pains, Dimscûa steal those feelings from me in the most joyously bleak manner: the tension of their music is never quite relieved.
Unrelieved, that is, until I hear many voices singing gleefully along to Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ from across the field and I remember the significance of the song, which is not just for vibes. Svalbard, surely the most beloved post-hardcore band from Bristol if not the whole UK, have been counting down to their final show. And this is it, right now.
“Isn’t it great to be alive on a Wednesday afternoon at ATG?” chimes frontwoman Serena. If things get sad later on, she’s definitely happy right now. And yes—standing under the canvas pavilions of the Yohkai stage, beer in hand, friendly faces all around, awaiting the first chords of a fine band—life is pretty great. And it gets even better. Having had our palettes cleansed by Europe, they’re soon to be tantalised by a selection of tracks from across Svalbard’s four albums, including regular staples like ‘Faking It’ and ‘Open Wound’, as well as older/ rarer tracks like ‘Greyscale’ and ‘For the Sake of the Breed’.
Svalbard don’t do sub-par shows and this last one feels like a real party. I think this is the eighth or ninth time I’ve seen them and every single time they’ve delivered their carefully-crafted songs with a hefty sound and a maximum, mosh-inducing energy. But, more than that, the songs arrive as a punch to the face with their direct address of modern’s life’s harshest topics (sexual assault, depression, misogyny), yet wrapped in the velvet of Serena’s unwaveringly chipper, warm and sincere address while not singing. Things get more emotional as she gives shout outs to those who have helped them along the way, giving love to Church Road records, ATG itself, and her band and crew, in particular. Svalbard love a good moshpit and it does not cease today, dust swirling in the air seemingly even after the final notes of ‘Eternal Spirits’ fade.
If there’s one image that will stay with me from this final show, it’s that of Serena briefly resting her face on the neck of her guitar during ‘Open Wound’, with a look mixing a hint of melancholy, a note of disbelief, and a whole lot of joy, all at once. The countdown reaches its end at long last, and it does feel final this time.
So long, Svalbard, and thanks for all the fish. Do not doubt that we’ve all got our ears on your other projects.
Things will only get proggier from here on in. If you have a strange, lingering memory of a rubber chicken from ATG 2025, chances are you also saw Papangu, one of my personal highlights. Surely amongst the maddest and best bands in the Brazilian underground, Papangu are a phenomenal live band. As a sextet, they fill the entire PX3 stage with an array of instruments including racks of synthesisers and a strange percussion assortment, and all members singing at some stage. Their motley attire matches their melange of genres, projecting six slightly different vibes that are all floral shirt, baseball caps, barista beanie, and Top Gun aviators. It’s impossible to predict what comes next at a Papangu show as jaunty rhythms from Brazilian tradition morph into stoner grooves which become black metal ferocity which become crooning synth ballads which become layered King Crimson riffs ad infinitum. Papangu love to mix genres, but—depsite the weirdness—not really in a jarring, Mr Bungle kind of way; more like a polyglot telling a nuanced story using code switching. Papangu synthesise genres and fire them out of the party cannon into something new.
And they have something for just about everyone, even if you didn’t know you needed it. Two songs in and we’ve had triangle solos, metal breakdowns, flamenco dancing, the trading of noodling solos in odd time signatures, and a costume break to don a rubber chicken mask. The chicken thing, by the way, stems from a track—highly popular from last year’s set—involving a call and response section, where our percussionist/guitarist responds to the band using a bizarre array of “instruments” including a triangle, a whistle, a squeaky dog toy and, yes, a rubber chicken. While it’s ludicrously fun to watch, it has the added bonus of still sounding like good music. If this doesn’t keep the crowd on its toes, rarely a song goes by where we’re not asked to sing along, or to clap to syncopated rhythms. No mean feat!
Bathed in purple light, waves of crowd surfers are grabbed from the barrier as Papangu’s third song combines jerky rhythms, jazzy guitar solos, and keyboards like traffic rushing by. Vocalists call and respond, now, from either extreme of the stage, trading fast, choppy semi-rapped verses. Just as a delicate piano interlude strikes a serious tone, it’s broken up again with the dry squeak of a chicken and the sinuous, unwinding groove of a bass solo, looking ahead to Primus’s madcap bass antics on the next day.
Cardiacs make for a good segue from all this madness, providing a triumphant ATG debut for this most cult and tragedy-stricken of UK bands. And folks have been waiting for this one for a long time. As an octet, clad in black to honor their fallen singer Tim Smith, Cardiacs physically fill the stage as they swell our hearts emotionally. It might sound cheesy but this set feels less like a rock concert and more like a church service, and not just because they have a classic album entitled Sing to God (1996). We get a couple from that record, alongside selections from LSD (2025) and On Land and in Sea (1989). There is a sense of awe from the crowd, lifted by Mike Vennart’s soaring voice, and made choral by Sharron, Chloe, and the various other musicians. Like Papangu, genre becomes meaningless here, with style subservient to the laws of good songwriting and artistic exploration.
Cardiacs seem built for ATG, with its forward-thinking ethos woven into their DNA – so much so, you could give them an annual residency. So transfixed are we at watching Cardiacs—so grand and soaring their sound—that one wonders if they might not have been better placed as headliners at the top slot.
No shade on Sikth, you understand, who are graced with the honour of closing the day. Both bands are local, UK heroes, with Cardiacs forming in Kingston at the end of the 1970s and Sikth forming in Watford in 1999. Now Sikth are a band I know pretty well, recalling blurry highlights from a drunken Midlands show in my university years, and the endless rotation of ‘Pull my Finger’ on MTV a few years previously. They’ve recently returned to live shows with their original classic line-up, completing a day of special musical occasions.
Sikth, with their juddering, eccentric prog metal, are an acquired taste, let’s face it. And a lot of that is down to the vocals. We have both Mikee Goodman and Justin Hill on stage this evening, whipping up the crowd in alternation, and trading the clean, rapped, growling, and spoken vocals that constitute their eclectic sound. It’s no surprise that Goodman is a voice actor for games, as he often switches between different characters in his songs. If those voices can be frankly a little annoying on record, they seem a little milder performed live, more organic.
Goodman pauses about three quarters of his way through the set to deliver a vitriolic, Anti-music-industry rant, and taking aim at what he sees as a landscape of generic, uninspired metal bands, noting that ATG is the antidote to all this: a sentiment that others will return to over the weekend.
“Who’d like a new album?” he asks at one stage and it’s clear that many of us would, the band having released only a single EP since 2017. Getting excited about a new album from a band who hasn’t released one in years is to be expected. “Who wants a remix of The Trees Are Dead & Dried Out?” he also asks, receiving similar levels of excitement, and I feel it also says something about an ATG crowd that we get equally excited about that kind of announcement.
At one stage Goodman jokingly invites the crowd to perform the long and bizarre poetic introduction to ‘When Will the Forest Speak…?’ along with him, which surely ranks amongst the most unlikely Crowd participation requests available. Some fans do give it a shot, to be fair. Closing with ‘Pussyfoot’, which showcases their talent for creating highly technical yet strangely catchy music, Sikth certainly have that headliner vibe, providing a punchy ending to an already ram-packed first day.
