Shortened sets be damned, Levitation 2026 finished strong. Saturday’s post-punk showcase at the Far Out Lounge connected Peter Hook’s trailblazing bass to Automatic’s contemporary synthesized doom, while viral Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine proved at a sold-out Stubb’s show that their microtone experimentation is the real deal. From Elder’s prog evolution to Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats’ third time Levitating, Sunday’s closing Far Out lineup pushed the boundaries of what our psychedelic festival can offer. Here are the highlights from days three and four.
Peter Hook & the Light Bring Joy Division to Life – and UK Rain to Austin
It’s not a Levitation fest without a rain delay. Taking the Far Out Lounge stage 52 minutes late on Saturday, Peter Hook quipped, “This is what happens when you book one band from Manchester and one band from Sheffield. It pisses down all the time in both fucking places.”
With that nod to his old pals Cabaret Voltaire, also on the bill, and a set dedication to the late great Ian Curtis, the Mancunian took us to the motherland – circa ’79, not ’83.
Some may have hoped for more than one jubilant “Ceremony,” but Hook’s focus on his first band gifted fans a peek at an unattainable Joy Division live show; New Order continues to tour without their founding bassist anyway. Through early rockers “No Love Lost” and “Warsaw” into bobbing electro number “Isolation” and Unknown Pleasures highlight “Shadowplay,” his iconic playing – bright, high, driving – remained the focal point of the set, though Hook’s son Jack Bates, also wielding the four-string, took the lead on fan favorites “Disorder” and “She’s Lost Control” so his dad could focus his efforts on a surprisingly sufficient Curtis impression.
Like Morrissey and Marr’s competing road shows, Hook’s spinoff act intimates an ego, but his hired guns in the Light do the job. David Potts nailed Bernard Sumner’s minimalist-yet-room-filling guitar, and Paul Kehoe’s metallic drums in “She’s Lost Control” sent as many shivers as Stephen Morris’ ghostly recording. Half a century later, nothing sounds like Joy Division. We’re lucky at least one member still wants to play it for us. – Carys Anderson
Automatic Treds Confidently
The second her feet hit the stage, Izzy Glaudini was summoning atmospheric digital tones at her keyboard. Warped, revving notes welcomed bassist Halle Saxon and touring drummer Troy Woodhall, where the trio promptly broke into “Calling It” with stoic ease. Delays dogged the lineup following the afternoon’s rain, trimming minutes off everyone’s set times – Automatic didn’t waste a second.
Woodhall deftly stepped into original drummer Lola Dompé’s shoes, effectively capturing their combination of live rock drumming and pad-cued percussion tucked into a compact kit with an exceptionally high hi-hat that cast a moon-like shadow in the band’s visual projections.
Simple statements “no war” and “no genocide” flashed on the screen throughout the set, amid appropriately psychedlic, vintage-inspired video collage. Glaudini emphasized the message by introducing “m9,” as “an anti-war song, ’cause fuck all that bullshit.” A sense of impending doom permeates 2025’s Is It Now?, but the singer offered no additional political context.
With a concentrated yet blasé air, Glaudini beckoned metal-on-metal sparks and cartoon science-fiction harpsichord from her keyboard, while nimbly moving between her grounded, self-assured lower vocal register and higher, keening head voice on thrumming, rueful “Black Box” and wistful Excess track “Turn Away.” Closing the truncated set, Saxon joined Glaudini on a keyboard of her own, playing the sonorous bass riff from “Mercury” alongside Glaudini’s siren-like warbles. Reverberations rippled throughout the crowd as the two left the stage, and even after Woodhall’s exit, their minimalistic, clever melodies lingered until the lights came up. – Caroline Drew
Kylesa Returns With Psychedelic Sludge
“Austin, it’s been so long,” acknowledged Laura Pleasants. Thirty minutes into Kylesa’s hourlong Mohawk sundering late Saturday night – right after Longhorns football disgorged tens of thousands of fans into the live music district Downtown – the guitarist for the Savannah, Georgia, sludge metal mongers read everyone’s mind. At the millennium, she and co-bandleader Phillip Cope debuted the band blocks away at the original gateway to Sixth and Red River, Emo’s. Playing younger sibs to a fearsome stable of Relapse Records GOATS – High on Fire, Baroness, Mastodon, the latter of whom headlined Levitation last year – Kylesa amped a different tact. Tapping their Southern roots via a neo-jam aesthetic, the quartet surfed marauding psych. Hitting a wall in 2016, they soft-returned in 2024 but only made it back here now – sonically intact and psychically revitalized. New rhythm duo Roy Mayorga on bass and John John Jesse doing the work of the group’s periodic double-drummer configuration propelled the onslaught. Pleasants sang inches from her mic, intoning sirenic moans still too rare in modern man metal, while Cope barked into his and tamed eruptive guitar lines. The fullish house tripped right along, as fervent as the band and feeding ’em fan accelerant. Like Steppenwolf for another century, the locomotive push-and-pull of Kylesa surged an electric current. Final tap-out, percussive cascade “Scapegoat,” washed Mohawk clean on a red-letter Friday Night Lights evening once removed. – Raoul Hernandez
Angine de Poitrine Is More Than a Schtick
So what do you do if you base your vision around microtones – unusual musical intervals smaller than a semitone – and you want to get people’s attention? If you’re Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine, you create allegedly alien personas out of distended papier mâché features, a black-and-white polka-dotted aesthetic, and nonsensical vocoder-enhanced “speech.” Earning a viral video from a KEXP session made the pair famous enough to not only earn headline status at Levitation, but sell out Stubb’s to do it. Facing a crowd they had no need to win over, AdP proved to be a real band. Anyone with the internet knows the drill by now: Guitarist/bassist Khn builds a lattice of riffs through a looping station, while drummer Klek kicks the tunes into high gear with energy and clock-like time. Despite being limited by the structure, the duo extracted a different textures out of their approach, from deliberate monochrome (opener “Angor”) and West Asian tonalities (“Tamebsz”) to funky mathematics (“Fabienk”) and ear-catching riff rock (closer “Sherpa,” the song that started it all). The bizarre homemade presentation, math/prog rock, uncommon time signatures, rubbery microtones, and songs titled with original gibberish should make anyone not a serious nerd run the other way. Yet the audience was full of geeks, jocks, chicks, and bros, many of whom wore black and white polka dots and golden pyramids in solidarity with their apparent heroes. The gimmick is weirdly undeniable, but what makes Angine de Poitrine and this set remarkable is that they can cut it where it matters most: the stage. – Michael Toland
Elder Updates Prog for the 21st Century
In a way, Elder’s evolution follows that of Levitation. The latter began as a psychedelic festival, but now minimizes its original inspiration, at least outwardly. Originally from Massachusetts and now based in Berlin, Elder’s roots were planted in late Nineties/early Aughts stoner doom soil. But the quintet quickly evolved into a full-on progressive rock act, with barely a trace of its origins evident. But just as Levitation has reoriented into a 21st century proposition, so has Elder, absorbing inspiration far beyond prog’s Seventies heyday to become a modern avatar. “Sigil to Ruin,” the opener of both the band’s latest album Through Zero and its Levitation debut, bears this out with soaring vocal lines, contrasting but interconnected guitar parts, and an uncommon time signature. But the song emphasizes sweep, texture, and melody over virtuosity or complexity for its own sake. (It would still resonate with your Yes-loving uncle.) As the set continued, blending post-hardcore guitar clashes, emo vocals, and sequenced synth pulses with classic rock riffs and multi-part mini-suites helped keep the specter of nostalgia at bay. When leader Nick DiSalvo announced the final number a mere four tunes in, that commenced the Big Prog Epic. But shimmering guitar lines that could have been sampled from a mid-Eighties British psych album, atmospheric synth pads, and DiSalvo’s clean but cutting vocals pushed the double-digit length of “Halcyon” away from tedious toward enthralling. Elder’s Levitation set proved progressive rock can still scintillate for both old heads and new ears. – Michael Toland
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats Bring the Headbanging
Why Sleep when you can drop a tab of Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats? Third time Levitating, the witchy UK coven can now comfortably claim itself a favored nation of Austin. In 2016, when an inclement weather event drove this local legacy festival off dream location Carson Creek Ranch, Kevin Starrs and crew evacuated to Empire Garage and melted it utilizing Sabbath-worthy doom rock. Returning to Stubb’s in 2023, their 90 minutes in the swamp yielded “one crypt kicker after another.” Starting 25 minutes early on Sunday at Far Out Lounge, the now-quintet squeezed out 69 stormy minutes leading up to the final headliner of Levitation 2026. “We are Uncle Acid and we’re here to ruin your night,” teased the mostly Scottish frontman in launching “Death’s Door” off 2012 sophomore breakout Blood Lust, a crime scene for the Sixties dream as soundtracked by electric English noir. Dark, dank, dirge-y – titularly acidic – they brought headbanging to bear at an event hardwired for metal in a festival town where too few follow suit. A Priest grind here, some wall-o’-Maiden there fed into a “lovely little pop number” that finally prompted a riff-happy mosh climaxed by an Iommi axe solo. Seventh studio album Shapes of Midnight due this week, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats converted countless newcomers to their cult and reminded at least one local-gig trifecta vet of Starrs’ homegrown ties – Roky Erickson among them – that promise his inevitable return to our scene of the crime. – Raoul Hernandez
