Festival Review: Portola Festival Returns for Fifth Year with Dog Blood, Swedish House Mafia, Zara Larsson
Portola Festival 2026
Featuring: Dog Blood, Robyn, Swedish House Mafia, Zara Larsson, Four Tet, Tiesto, ADÉLA
Pier 80
San Francisco, CA
September 26-27, 2026
Review and Photos by Jared Stossel
For the fifth year in a row, Portola Music Festival returned to San Francisco’s Pier 80 for a two-day romp filled with one of the year’s most eclectic lineups. While not the same size as the mega festivals that make up today’s landscape, the dance-infused festival has a great deal to offer, and it’s often easier to navigate than some of the more massive events out there today. The lineup leans heavily into dance and electronic music, but it peppers in pop, hip-hop, and R&B throughout its two-day lineup. Artists range from big room house staples (Swedish House Mafia) to music legends (Mike D 5D) to the downright weird (Horsegiirl).
Friday’s lineup featured a wide array of artists across the Pier, with sets on the Pier Stage from numerous eclectic pop acts like Gelli Haha, Tove Lo and Robyn that drew some of the biggest crowds of the weekend. The main event of the evening was the return of Dog Blood, a collaboration between producers Boys Noize and Skrillex that has been inactive since 2019. This marked the band’s first show back in seven years, and their first ever in the Bay Area. Underneath brooding green lights, the two legendary producers DJed a bass-pounding set for well over an hour. Elsewhere on the grounds, electronic band Soulwax and Fatboy Slim closed down the Crane Stage as the winds kicked up, the former bringing with them a truly impressive array of synthesizers and drum sets. At electronic festivals, it’s the norm to just see a DJ plug a USB stick into a DJ deck, mix and repeat, so it can be refreshing to see someone bring a full stage's worth of gear to create the sounds from scratch. The Ship Stage brought a broad range of performances, including MGNA CRRTA (whom I can only describe as if Millionaires had formed in 2012), Beastie Boys’ member Mike D and his project Mike D 5D, the sultry Six Sex, and a high-energy DJ set from Melanie C (Sporty Spice) of the Spice Girls.
Saturday’s lineup kept the momentum going, with ADÉLA drawing one of the largest crowds of the weekend. Fans lined up against the stage adorned with bright pink wigs to match the up-and-coming pop singer’s locks, as she sang and danced her way through her debut album PRIMA. Acts with dance and disco influence reared their heads throughout the day, with performances from Parcels and Mind Enterprises. The biggest acts on Sunday included a highly theatrical performance from pop star Zara Larsson and an outstanding DJ set from none other than Swedish House Mafia, the big room house collective made up of Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, Steve Angello. Thirteen years ago, the group performed seven sold-out shows at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic as part of their “farwell” tour. As we know by this point, farewell tours don’t mean farewell - they mean “we need a break and we’ll come back later”. Since returning in 2022, sets like their Sunday headlining performance have been the standard for festivals like this, bringing house anthems and minimalistic stage aesthetics to roaring life. They haven’t missed a step.
If all of that wasn’t enough, there’s the Warehouse, a massive indoor stage that housed one of the largest continuous crowds of the weekend, thousands of ravers packed in to dance, sweat, and hear sets from their favorite DJs. Acts like Prospa and Max Styler took to the stage on Saturday, while Tiësto, Four Tet, and Underscores brought the house down on Sunday well into the evening. The Warehouse was a fun stage because it was so reminiscent of the venues that built this scene in the first place: grimy underground warehouses where fans of this music gathered together when no one else really cared, all in pursuit of the next great beat, the next bass drop, the next moment that would make you feel bigger than yourself. To see what this genre has turned into since the 1990s is beyond words; it’s become so much bigger than we could have ever imagined. Five years in, Portola continues to bring out some of the best that the genre has to offer. It’s a great opportunity to see some of the genre’s oldest and newest acts, and without a desert climate. Just make sure you bring a jacket.
