Weathering the Storm: Mutations Festival 2026

If there’s any city that knows how to pull off a multi-venue festival, it’s Brighton. The Great Escape may remain the city’s ultimate multi-venue extravaganza, but since its comparatively humble beginnings in 2015, Mutations has steadily harnessed a reputation for being one of the most vibrant autumnal musical outings available.

Smaller, scrappier and with an ear firmly trained on what’s coming next, it has become a reliable showcase for the strange, noisy and soon-to-be-much-bigger. This year, however, getting from A to B presented something of a challenge.

Brighton is hardly renowned for its forgiving weather at the tail-end of October, but even by the standards of the English seaside, this was ridiculous. Storm Austen had battered the country on Friday before Storm Boelo arrived hot on its heels over the weekend, bringing torrential rain and winds powerful enough to make walking along the seafront feel like an extreme sport. The former had already left its mark on the city in dramatic fashion, with a substantial section of Brighton’s skeletal West Pier collapsing into the Channel on Friday morning.

Mutations wasn’t entirely spared either. Flooding at Green Door Store forced the acts scheduled there to be relocated to Alphabet, adding another last-minute mutation to a festival already built around darting between ten of Brighton’s grassroots venues.

Pictured: Plantoid

Our Saturday began at Chalk with local four-piece Plantoid. Drawing a sizeable early crowd, the Brighton band provided an appropriately hazy introduction to proceedings, wrapping the room in great washes of distorted guitar. There are shades of My Bloody Valentine in the sheer density of their sound, but Plantoid are slippery enough to avoid sitting comfortably in any one lane, moving between dreamy passages and heavier, knottier bursts without losing the crowd along the way.

From there, we made the questionable decision to leave the relative sanctuary of Chalk and head east along the seafront. With the wind doing its best to send pedestrians into the Channel, we eventually reached Patterns to catch Rotterdam's mighty Iguana Death Cult.

If the weather outside felt chaotic, the Dutch five-piece were hardly interested in providing respite. Playing the ninth and final date of a nine-show UK run, they attacked Patterns with the sort of tightly wound energy that only comes from a band who have spent the previous week doing essentially nothing but playing together. Jagged guitars, garage-rock swagger and an insistent rhythmic pulse collided in a set that felt permanently on the verge of flying apart without ever actually doing so. Patterns was packed, sweaty and gloriously removed from the biblical scenes unfolding a few metres away on the promenade.

By this point, discretion seemed the better part of valour. We fought our way back through the wind to Chalk and decided that, for the remainder of the evening, we weren't moving.

The weather provided one reason. The rapidly filling venue provided another. With Mike D due to headline later that evening, leaving again carried the very real possibility of returning to find ourselves stranded outside. Given that this was set to be the first Brighton appearance from a Beastie Boys member since the group rolled into the Brighton Centre alongside Run-DMC in May 1987, it didn't seem worth the gamble.

Pictured: Dove Ellis

Thankfully, staying put meant catching Dove Ellis. The Irish singer-songwriter's set proved a hypnotic change of pace. Where much of the afternoon had been built around volume and velocity, Ellis commanded the room through atmosphere, allowing songs from his debut album 'Blizzard' to slowly unfurl around a crowd that seemed increasingly willing to surrender to them. There was something particularly impressive about his composure given that, just two nights earlier, he'd been onstage at Newcastle's Utilita Arena performing as one of the twelve artists shortlisted for the 2026 Mercury Prize. He didn't take home the prize, but his presence on the shortlist, and the confidence with which he held a room like Chalk, suggested an artist whose trajectory is pointing firmly upwards. One to watch feels almost redundant at this point; plenty of people clearly already are.

Then came Mike D. Nearly four decades after that 1987 Brighton Centre show, Michael Diamond's return to the city arrived in a rather different form. This time he was flanked by 5D, the five-piece backing band that includes his sons Skyler and Davis Diamond alongside Will Graefe, Eddie Ruscha and Milo Ruscha. It's a fittingly familial configuration for this latest chapter of Diamond's career: his recently released debut solo album 'Thank You' itself grew out of making music with his sons after a long period in which, following the death of Adam Yauch, he struggled to see a route back into making music at all.

There was inevitably nostalgia in the room, but the appeal of Mike D 5D is that the project isn't solely dependent on it. 'Thank You' is a restless, glitchy collision of hip-hop, punk, electronics and drum'n'bass that sounds less like an attempt to resurrect the Beastie Boys than an artist figuring out what making music at 60 should actually feel like. That sense of curiosity translates naturally to the stage.

Pictured above: Mike D

Still, it was impossible to ignore the history gathered inside Chalk. By the time Diamond appeared, the audience was packed in like sardines in a can, shoulder-to-shoulder across the floor and spanning generations: Beastie Boys old heads who had been there since 'Licensed to Ill' rubbing alongside people born years after the group's commercial peak, but for whom that music has lost remarkably little of its impact.

Perhaps that was the most fitting way for Mutations to end. Outside, Brighton was still being battered by the remnants of a weekend's worth of storms. Inside, one of hip-hop's most recognisable figures was beginning another chapter surrounded by a band containing the next generation of his own family, in a venue that had spent the day showcasing artists still writing the opening pages of theirs.

After a day of shoegaze, garage rock, intimate songwriting and hip-hop history (and more than a little time spent being physically assaulted by the English Channel) it made for a triumphant, blustery conclusion to a festival that continues to understand the value of placing established names and emerging talent under the same wristband.

Pictured below: Hammok

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