By Jase Walker
Graspop 2026 was hot, very very fucking hot. To the point where even with a blackout tent I was forced to wake up at 7am every morning due to the insane heat inside my tent and the fact that my foot touching the sides felt like it was burning.
But for all that heat and constant application of sunscreen, drinking phenomenal amounts of water and trying to avoid direct sun, I had probably the best large scale festival experience I’ve ever had.
Graspop ranks amongst the largest in Europe alongside its cohorts of Download, Hellfest, Copenhell, Rock Am Ring/Im Park, and lies just over the Dutch/Belgian border in the sleepy little village of Dessel. Which even with me having to get a train over to Utrecht from Amsterdam, took less time getting to and from the festival than my trips to Download from Manchester. So where do I even start with everything that Graspop got right? It’s a pretty lengthy list but I guess I’ll start with the parking journey and go from there.
Driving and parking
The road signs for the parking at Graspop appear quite far out and regularly direct you towards the colour coded parking spots, as we were arriving on the Wednesday we were bound for ‘Paars (purple)’ parking. I do admit I thought the route was a little convoluted but the thing that surprised me was how little traffic gridlock we had getting in and out of the festival.
I’ve had no small amount of experience with the traffic around large scale festivals and the fact that we were able to get parked up with next to no traffic jams and then leave within minutes and back onto the motorway was genuinely a massive positive shock.
Camping
The way Graspop does things is a bit interesting to me as similar to Jera On Air (and I suspect other European festivals), there are fundamentally separate wristbands for camping and the festival access and the access to the campsites is checked and monitored at the gates. While this does segregate the camps and our friends over in Inferno couldn’t come hang with us at the Boneyard camp, it works super well in getting people onto the site and pitched up before going to the arena entrance to get their actual festival wristbands.
There’s a much more orderly way of how the camps work with segments being taped off to force people to fill up areas first and I was told that each segment was gradually filled by staff dictating the steady fill. This did make things a little awkward if you wanted to spot a bit for someone coming later as I did but Graspop also offers ‘friends pitch’ reservations which I don’t entirely agree with but probably makes it a ton easier.
Main Arena
So the first thing that really struck me upon walking onto the site is the, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucking massive ‘tent’ stages.
I’m very used to very clear big changes in stage sizes at larger festivals, especially when you get to ‘third/fourth’ stages that clearly have massively reduced production and generally seem like the runts in comparison with the premier ‘first/second’ stages but for Graspop? Absolutely not the case.
The Metal Dome, Marquee, and Jupiler stages all have their own fantastic production and focus, each being treated with a specific vibe and felt like the bands that were put on those stages weren’t being treated like an afterthought.
Marquee was gigantic, had a central ‘lane’ that bands often used to jump off stage to walk down the middle of the crowd and had large screens either side of the stage to add to the feeling of this still being a premier stage.
Jupiler still had a camera crane on its front of house, plenty of pyro, a screen on the other side of the grounds where the food court was and bleachers facing the stage too.
Metal Dome was a real special one for me, this could easily be considered the fifth stage when looking at the lineup but this was easily my favourite stage. The roof was covered in lighting going all the way overhead towards the back of the room and large screens covered the walls and the experience of Leprous, TesseracT and Carpenter Brut was made to feel incredibly epic with the visuals covering the entire room.
As for the main North/South stages, the setup allows for the biggest acts to ping-pong on the same viewpoint the entire day and none of the production was sacrificed for this either. Even Bad Omens with their staggering overhead lightshow was propped up for the entire day prior to their show. Three absolutely gigantic screens across the stages meant that many people who just wanted to grab a spot there didn’t really have to move themselves around unless they really wanted the visual element.
And as for the overall layout, it never felt like I was going on a journey when switching stages either, how they’ve managed to pack this all in together like this and somehow avoid sound overlap (barring the odd sound check) is incredible.
I did find the ventilation a bit lacking in Metal Dome and Marquee during the day but I can’t imagine figuring out how to keep such a large tent with so many people in it at least reasonably cool is an easy thing to fix. The result was these two stages feeling like an oven during the peak hours so I found it difficult to stick around in them for too long.
Lastly, the amount of trash on the floor is generally very little outside of the final headliners on the main two stages. The grounds are kept super clear by the staff and a huge amount of bins so there’s little reason to leave it on the floor and in addition to this, the cup deposit scheme which is ever present in European festivals ensures that discarded cups and bottles aren’t strewn all over the place.
Food and drink
To preface this, this is all paid for via a token that’s attached to your wristband and via a currency called ‘Skullies’. While I don’t quite agree with this because to me it feels a lot like cost obfuscation, I can’t deny that it definitely speeds things up a lot because it reduces reliance on other payment systems beyond the top-up points and you can even just use the app and if you live in Netherlands/Belgium, use the iDeal/Wero payment system to quickly add some Skullies on.
The price of food and drink is always going to be steep, it’s a festival after all so it shouldn’t really shock anyone but the selection? Absolutely top notch. I do miss my Yorkshire puddings and the like but getting a Kapsalon and munching on that with a pint on a hot day is pretty bloody good and I fully recommend it. Huge selection of stuff overall but heavily featuring the usual deep fried Belgian/Dutch delights of the snack bar, fries and kibbeling.
The drinks selection was pretty solid too with a mix of various soft drinks (including an electrolyte drink), non-alcoholic cocktails, and of course Belgian beers. Unlike whatever the hell Slam Dunk was doing this year, I rarely stood in a queue longer than ten minutes for a beer, top stuff. Every bar is a well oiled machine with dedicated service staff and pourers, walk up, grab your beer, off you go, nice and easy.
Facilities
One of the biggest things that stood out to me overall was when the weather turned up to super intense heat, Graspop retrofitted a ton of extra drinking water points to several major stations which brought the queues down for them immensely as people were filling up multiple bottles or covering their hats in water constantly in a battle to try and keep cool.
The toilets were absolutely fantastic to use. I’ve mentioned these sort of toilet blocks before at Jera On Air because rather than being your typical shithouse portaloo that becomes a hot house of baked excrement after one day, they’re actual flushing cubicles that are comfortable to use and not suffocate from the smell.
Not only that but they were extremely well taken care of, I’d never seen one that didn’t have a constant stock of toilet roll to use and blockages were swiftly taken care of.
I think after having witnessed the lows of Leeds Festival’s septic tank toilet blocks and Download Festival’s devastated arena portaloos on Sunday anything would be a step up but being able to relieve yourself and not consider putting Vicks rub under your nose so you don’t barf from the smell is great.
The showers similarly were fantastic, rarely had queues (for the men’s at least), generally very clean, well maintained and always warm although an ice cold shower would have been lovely. Thanks to the weather I didn’t even need a towel, which was also pretty great considering I forgot the bloody thing.
One minor criticism I have is that I wish the supermarket was a bit more centrally located. Having it at the arse end of the campsite put me off the walk over there and I’d have probably used it more if it was situated near where the medical tent and vendors were.
Overall
Graspop has given me a reason to reassess what I think makes a large festival experience actually good.
The bar has been raised massively and seeing what can be achieved with some elements just having a bit more thought and attention in the planning. I don’t think the heat helped some of the downsides but given how Graspop reacted to it literally as the festival was happening is something I rarely see.
I was kind of hoping that Graspop would drop a headliner on the final day similar to Rock Am Ring/Im Park’s epic drop of Blink-182 with full visuals but I suppose they’ll be keeping their cards guarded until it’s the right moment anyway.
Next year I’m going all in though, fancy pants camping and VIP? Yep, sign me up.
Graspop 2027, let’s have it.
