Boardmasters 2026: ten acts that caught our attention on the Cornish coast

Newquay’s long-running festival saw thousands flock to the Cornish coast for five days of music, swimming and surfing. Despite its reputation as a rite of passage for GCSE leavers, Boardmasters draws music fans of all ages and backgrounds, with a varied and exciting line-up. Among the wealth of talent on display were these ten class acts that particularly caught my attention.

Military Wives Choir

In a wholesome Sunday lunchtime moment, the local Military Wives Choir filled the Clifftop with their moving harmonies. From St Mawgan, just north of Newquay, the singers took on a range of classic covers, from ambitious ballads such as Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ to feel-good anthems like ‘Walking on Sunshine’. The choir embodied community spirit and togetherness, leaving very few dry eyes in the tent.

Luvcat

Coming from a city with such a high standard of musical output to uphold may be daunting for some, but Liverpool’s Sophie Morgan Howarth is completely unfazed. Under her stage name Luvcat, Howarth put on a spellbinding show at the Mordros stage, blending darkly cinematic storylines with gothic glamour and twisted fantasies. Recent single ‘Vampire at the Beach’ went down a treat, with ‘Dinner @ Brasserie Zédel’ from last year’s bloodthirsty debut album Vicious Delicious bringing the set to a haunting close.

Girls Don’t Sync

Girls Don’t Sync were given a challenging slot in every sense. Their late-night Sunday set meant they not only had to keep the crowd motivated on the final night of the festival, but also compete for their attention with headliners Kasabian. The four-piece DJ collective rose to the challenge, bounding around behind the decks on the Unleashed stage with effortless confidence. By the end of the set, the tent was packed wall-to-wall as they expertly fused jungle beats with classic ’90s house samples. If the crowd was worn out after days of camping and dancing, it was impossible to tell: the atmosphere was as lively as if it were the first night of the festival.

Rose Gray

Her mix of Madonna’s classic track ‘Music’ declares that “music makes the people come together”, and Rose Gray proved the point when she summoned the early afternoon crowd to the main stage on Friday. One of dance music’s most exciting rising names, she brought an abundance of city glamour to the Cornish fields. Sultry urban anthems ‘Just Be Bodies’ and ‘Club To Your Arms’ were backed by visuals of brutalist architecture, road trips and dancing through the streets of London. The heat was turned up for ‘Wet & Wild’, with Gray calling out to the crowd, ‘Is anyone feeling a bit wet?’, before running wild around the stage, lying on her back and kicking her legs to the beat. She closed her set with her signature stunt, hurling her tiara into the crowd and launching into ‘April’.

Joy Crookes

Grey clouds began to loom overhead on Sunday afternoon, but Joy Crookes was the perfect remedy. She teased eagerly awaiting fans with a delayed entrance before bursting onto the main stage in front of a bright yellow backdrop. The sunny atmosphere was immediately revived by her soulful tunes: reggae-influenced ‘Trouble’ brought funky tropical vibes, while ‘Feet Don’t Fail Me Now’ got everyone two-stepping to the rhythm. As her breakout single ‘When You Were Mine’ suggests, Crookes is very much a city girl, and taking to rural Cornwall came with some unforeseen offstage challenges. She charmed the crowd with the traumatic tale of her visit to the beach: “I saw a jellyfish, and I didn’t want my band to pee on me, so that was the end of that.”

Nia Archives

Nia Archives, aka Dehaney Hunt, proved exceptionally popular with Boardmasters’ young music fans. It seemed as though the whole festival had rushed to the barricades, hoping to get as close as possible to the action. The self-described “emotional junglist” put on an explosive set, transforming the main stage into a warehouse rave and jumping down into the pit to become part of it. The set reached a huge climax with the final number, Nia’s reimagining of Barbatuques’ ‘Baianá’. The crowd completely lost themselves in the music as Nia showed off her own dance moves on stage, looking on proudly at the scene she had created.

Brooke Combe

Keep the faith! Brooke Combe is the Scottish singer-songwriter bringing northern soul to a new generation: “There’s a gazillion indie bands; everyone wants a bit of something different.” With buttery vocals and a jazzy five-piece backing band, it was impossible not to get some smooth footwork going to her Motown-inspired tunes. Her cover of Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’ showcased her impressive vocal range, her voice easily reaching the back of the Mordros tent despite a background hum of D&B from the neighbouring stage. The band left the stage for ‘Price to Pay’, leaving just Combe and her guitarist to perform a gorgeous stripped-back version. She also teased a forthcoming album and a few new tracks, telling the crowd: “You’ve got to have confidence in yourself, and I’m very confident about this album.”

Lambrini Girls

The Mordros tent was the place to be for guitar music fans on Friday, with LOUD WOMEN Fest alumni Lambrini Girls arriving on stage at full force. A trans flag emblazoned with the words ‘TRANS LIVES MATTER’ was a powerful symbol of the band’s longstanding commitment to trans rights. Mosh pits opened almost immediately as vocalist and guitarist Phoebe Lunny powered through the politically charged setlist. Closing with a formidable run of ‘No Homo’, ‘Cuntology 101’ and ‘Big Dick Energy’, Lambrini Girls left the crowd gasping for breath.

Lucy Spraggan

Fresh from featuring in our recent Tramlines coverage, Lucy Spraggan’s career path is a wonderful, if slightly ironic, story of personal growth. She shot to public attention in 2012 after auditioning for The X Factor with original song ‘Last Night’, a wordplay-loaded track encapsulating the crippling feeling of hangxiety. More than a decade later, she’s a proud advocate for sobriety.

The Buxton-raised singer-songwriter has a salt-of-the-earth energy that is impossible not to love. Taking to The View stage on Sunday evening, she performed a stellar set of wholesome, folksy tunes against a backdrop of the sun setting over Watergate Bay. Songs were interspersed with hilarious anecdotes from her career, including the story of a Dutch fan whose misheard lyrics inspired her to change her album track ‘Loaded Gun’ to ‘Lonely Goats’.

Lily Allen

To call Lily Allen’s Saturday headline slot merely a festival set would be an injustice; her performance was a one-woman show fittingly worthy of the West End. Previously featured on LOUD WOMEN’s Rock n Roll Queens show, Allen has spent much of the past year touring her smash-hit comeback album West End Girl around theatres and arenas, and the show felt just as at home in the middle of a field in Cornwall.

The top-to-bottom performance of West End Girl featured envy-inducing costume changes, theatrical set design and a whole host of outrageous props. The autofictional album draws on the breakdown of Allen’s marriage to David Harbour and explores betrayal, boundaries and the complexities of an open relationship. Oscillating between mournful breakup ballads like ‘Let You W/In’ and savage diss tracks airing dirty laundry – and secret sex toys – like ‘4chan Stan’, Allen’s hour-long show kept the crowd enthralled throughout.