Ten years after a shoestring-budget warehouse party in Dogpatch quietly slipped into Bay Area folklore, Freak Nest is crawling back out of the rafters — and this time, it’s bringing more than forty bands with it. The independently-funded festival returns for its 10th anniversary on Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23, 2026 at PUBLICWORKS in San Francisco, and the initial lineup reads like a love letter to everything the corporate festival circuit has forgotten how to book.

Headlining the announcement are Colorado-born livetronica trio SunSquabi, Oakland’s dream-pop staple Sugar Candy Mountain, R&B experimentalist Shaheri, The Helltones, and long-running Bay Area indie darlings The Orange Peels. Rounding out the first wave: The Blank Tapes, Inspector Gadje, Gaucho, Justin Waves, Belle and Chain, dustcollector, Mother Goat, Michael Musika, Indianna Hale, Chasing Hues, Soundhoose, The Shimmering, Leave The Housewives, PuZL, and The Jimmy Touzel Bluegrass Explosion. And yes — there are more names still to come.

Tickets are on sale now.

Get a taste of what SunSquabi will be bringing to PUBLICWORKS: https://www.youtube.com/@SunSquabi

Across two days and three stages, Freak Nest 2026 is pitching itself as a genre buffet in the best possible way — Balkan brass rubbing shoulders with deep house, bluegrass sharing a night with psych rock, hip hop bleeding into New Orleans second line. Add live painting, projections, art installations, roaming performers and food, and you’ve got less of a “festival” and more of an old-school warehouse blowout that happens to have a real production budget behind it.

That DIY DNA traces straight back to 2016, when co-founder Taylor Lissandrello threw the first Freak Nest at his warehouse, The Cave, in the Bayview Industrial Grey Area. The event ran from noon to midnight with a non-stop performance model — including “marching” bands that played through the crowd during set breaks — and quickly became the proof of concept the founders needed.

“I got tired of watching the corporate takeover in the music and arts community and wanted to do something about it,” says co-founder Matthias Wesner. “So we called all of our favorite bands from the Bay Area and beyond to put together something different.”

“We have been putting our heads together to bring back this festival rooted in musical and artistic inclusiveness and diversity,” Lissandrello adds, “and we are grateful for the way it has come together.”

Translation: the freaks built the nest ten years ago, the freaks are back, and if you’ve been mourning the death of the Bay Area’s weird, sweaty, community-first music scene — this is your reminder that it never actually left. It just needed a decade to catch its breath.

Freak Nest 2026 goes down August 22 + 23 at PUBLICWORKS, San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now — grab a two-day pass before the rest of the lineup drops and prices climb.