5 Acts to Catch at Pitchfork Music Festival London 2026

Our pick of the shows to catch during Pitchfork' East London takeover from 2-8 November.

Pitchfork Music Festival London returns for its sixth edition this November, bringing another eclectic mix of established names, cult favourites and rising artists to venues across the city, with much of the action centred on East London. With a week’s worth of shows to choose from, here are five acts you might want to keep an eye out for.

Jacob Alon - 4th November, Hackney Empire

“Stark, honest, brave. One of the most beautiful debut albums I’ve heard in years. They’re fast becoming the voice of a generation.” So said The Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins as he handed Scottish singer-songwriter Jacob Alon the Popular Music Award at the Sky Arts Awards just last week.

It’s lofty praise, but Alon’s rise over the past year gives Hawkins plenty to work with. Their debut album, 'In Limerence', was produced by Dan Carey, whose recent credits include Fontaines D.C., Kneecap and Geese, and pairs sparse, often delicate arrangements with songwriting of startling emotional candour. Since its release, Alon has picked up the BRITs Critics’ Choice award and now the Sky Arts gong, building a reputation as one of the most distinctive new voices to emerge from Britain’s singer-songwriter scene. Their set at Hackney Empire offers the chance to see what all the fuss is about in a setting particularly well suited to songs that reward silence and close attention.

Bassvictim - 6th November, Troxy

Bassvictim owe their name to a night outside Peckham Audio, where Ike Clateman had stepped out of the south London club to give his ears a break from the noise. It was there that he bumped into fellow Goldsmiths student Maria Manow, whom he'd first met on a trip to Berlin a few months earlier. By the end of 2022, the pair had formed Bassvictim.

Unpredictable, erratic and intense, the duo have since channelled that same relationship with noise into their self-described "basspunk", culminating in last year's debut album Forever. The record crashes together distorted electronics, enormous bass and Manow's shape-shifting vocals with the kind of deliberate messiness that makes Bassvictim difficult to pin down and even harder to ignore. Pitchfork itself gave 'Forever' a 7.5 and later named it among its 50 best albums of 2025. If their recorded output thrives on the feeling that it might come apart at any moment, the prospect of seeing what happens when they headline the Troxy on 6 November makes them one of the festival's more enticing wild cards.

Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - 7th November, Dalston All-Dayer

Over the past 12 years, Perth's Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have amassed a cult following for a live show every bit as unhinged as their name. Having previously torn through festival stages at the likes of Green Man and Wide Awake, the Aussies arrive at Pitchfork with a well-earned reputation for turning crowds into chaos.

Expect some of the most intense mosh pits of the festival, although "pit" almost feels too organised a word for what happens when the band get going. There doesn't seem to be any obvious point at which they start or end. Instead, the crowd becomes a constant stormy tide, bodies crashing against one another as the band's self-described "energetic mess of colour and tone" rings out from the stage. Psychedelic Porn Crumpets are loud, frenetic and occasionally ridiculous, but that's precisely the point. This is less a set to stand back and admire than one to get swallowed up by.

Thaiboy Digital - 7th November, Village Underground

Thaiboy Digital’s name does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. The Thai rapper and producer makes intensely digital, ethereal music that exists somewhere between cloud rap, trance and euphoric club music, pairing it with Y2K-inspired visuals that look like rap videos beamed in from an alternate version of the early 2000s. Think Thaiboy cruising around Bangkok in sports cars illuminated like disco balls, wads of cash in hand, playing with the gaudy excess of turn-of-the-millennium hip-hop as much as embracing it.

Born in Thailand and raised partly in Sweden, Thaiboy was a founding member of the cult Drain Gang collective alongside Bladee, Ecco2k and Whitearmor before returning to Thailand and eventually settling in Bangkok. His latest album, 'Paradise', pushes his sound further towards the dancefloor, drawing on Eurotrance, early-2010s EDM and Thai 3Cha while retaining the weightless quality that has long characterised his music. Expect his Village Underground headline show to be hot, sweaty and ethereally uplifting, the sort of club performance where the distinction between rapper, DJ and internet-age pop star starts to dissolve.

Noname - 7th November, Heaven

Ten years after 'Telefone' first introduced the world to Noname, the Chicago rapper is bringing her celebrated debut mixtape to London for a special anniversary performance. Released as a free download in 2016, 'Telefone' established Fatimah Warner as a singular voice in hip-hop, pairing warm, jazz-inflected production with a conversational flow that can make even her sharpest observations on race, death, love and American life feel deceptively light on their feet.

A decade on, songs like 'Diddy Bop', 'Yesterday' and 'Casket Pretty' have lost little of their potency, while Noname has only become more outspoken in the years since, both through her music and her activism. There is something fitting about returning to the record that started it all, particularly when its breezy instrumentation so often disguises the weight of what is being said. Her 7 November show, now taking place at Heaven, offers the rare chance to hear 'Telefone' in full and to see how a record built around memory and reflection has aged after ten turbulent years.

For tickets, head to pitchforkmusicfestival.co.uk

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