Dexter and the Moonrocks
Self-described "western space grunge" — heavy alt-rock riffs colliding with red-dirt country swagger, breaking out off the viral hit Sad in Carolina.
Hopscotch 2026 Lineup
Three days, a dozen venues, and a lineup built for discovery in downtown Raleigh.
About Hopscotch 2026
Hopscotch has been Raleigh's music-obsessive holiday since 2010: three September nights where downtown becomes a walkable festival, with one big outdoor stage at City Plaza and a dozen clubs, dive bars, and theaters running sets deep past midnight. The 2026 lineup is classic Hopscotch — 88 acts where the top of the bill is only half the story. Headliners bring the funk, pop, and alt-rock firepower, but the festival's soul is in the club shows: avant-garde legends, cumbia pioneers, screamo upstarts, and half the North Carolina underground sharing the same three blocks. If your favorite festival memory is stumbling into a life-changing set by a band you'd never heard of at 1 a.m., this is your weekend.
Expect indie rock, hip-hop, post-punk and funk across 88 acts.
The headliners
- Dexter and the Moonrocks — Self-described "western space grunge" — heavy alt-rock riffs colliding with red-dirt country swagger, breaking out off the viral hit Sad in Carolina.
- Cory Wong — The rhythm-guitar machine of Vulfpeck fame — relentlessly upbeat, impossibly tight funk with a horn-powered live band and a clinic's worth of right-hand technique.
- King Princess — Swaggering queer pop-rock auteur — torch-song vocals, glam guitar, and arena-sized hooks about messy love, '1950' still the calling card.
Up-and-comers to catch early
- Horsegirl — Young Chicago trio channeling '80s–'90s indie: deadpan harmonies over jangling, motorik guitar pop.
- Truth Club — Raleigh's own knotty indie rock; trembling, wiry guitars that snap from whisper to burst. Expect a packed hometown room.
- Jooselord — Raleigh's mosh-pit rap general: metal-adjacent, high-adrenaline hip-hop engineered for chaos in small clubs.
- Lady Kabela — Asheville producer of Southern-Gothic dark pop: industrial percussion and distorted textures with real menace.
- sunshower — North Carolina "skramz-gaze": cathartic screamo intensity washed in shoegaze texture.
- Nara's Room — Noisy Brooklyn pop-rock with clever sampling, trip-hop undercurrents, and Y2K production instincts.
Other acts worth planning around
- Mdou Moctar (solo) — The Sahara's most electrifying guitarist in a rare stripped-down set of hypnotic Tuareg desert blues.
- Los Mirlos — Legendary Peruvian cumbia amazónica band since 1973: hypnotic surf-guitar jungle grooves.
- The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis — Fugazi's rhythm section plus guitar wizard Anthony Pirog and saxophone titan James Brandon Lewis.
- Algernon Cadwallader — Beloved, long-dormant Philly emo pioneers back from the void: twinkling guitars and pure basement joy.
- Soul Glo — Philly's ferocious hardcore standard-bearers: blistering screamo velocity spliced with hip-hop.
- Kylesa — Savannah's sludge-psych institution returned: dual drummers, buzzsaw riffs, swirling psychedelia.
- NC in C presents Terry Riley's "In C" — A massed ensemble of North Carolina musicians performing the 1964 minimalist landmark. Only at Hopscotch.
Hopscotch 2026 lineup FAQ
When is Hopscotch 2026?
September 10–12, 2026 — Thursday through Saturday.
Where does Hopscotch take place?
Across downtown Raleigh, NC: an outdoor main stage at City Plaza plus a dozen-plus clubs and theaters, all within walking distance.
Who is headlining Hopscotch 2026?
Dexter and the Moonrocks, Cory Wong, and King Princess top the 88-act bill.
How many acts are playing Hopscotch 2026?
88 acts across three days, from main-stage headliners to late-night club shows.
When do Hopscotch set times come out?
Hopscotch typically publishes day and venue schedules closer to the festival. Save your acts on LineupScout now and they'll become a personal day-by-day schedule the moment times drop.
How do I figure out which of the 88 acts I'd actually like?
Tell the finder at the top of this page a few bands you love — it'll match you with the acts on this lineup you shouldn't miss, with reasons why.
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Going to Hopscotch 2026? Get tickets ↗
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Hopscotch full lineup
Momma
Dual-frontwoman indie rock that lovingly resurrects '90s alternative — big fuzzy hooks, deadpan cool, and twin guitar harmonies built for radio that no longer exists.
Liz Cooper
Hazy, hypnotic psych-folk turned scrappy indie rock — languid fingerpicking that boils over into loose-limbed guitar jams, Nashville cool with no Nashville gloss.
Leo Brooks Band
Grammy-winning Miami bassist for Pitbull and Lauryn Hill fronting his own band — country twang filtered through Caribbean roots and island-funk muscle.
Cory Wong
The rhythm-guitar machine of Vulfpeck fame — relentlessly upbeat, impossibly tight funk with a horn-powered live band and a clinic's worth of right-hand technique.
DUCKWRTH
Genre-fluid alt-rap showman blending funk, punk energy, and silky R&B into one of the most danceable live sets in hip-hop.
Thee Sinseers
East LA souldies revivalists — slow-burning, string-laden Chicano soul straight out of the lowrider-oldies tradition, dedicated to the slow dance.
Butcher Brown
Richmond's garage-jazz five-piece fusing '70s fusion, boom-bap, and P-funk into a loose, heavy groove — a rhythm section that could back anyone and chooses to lead.
King Princess
Swaggering queer pop-rock auteur — torch-song vocals, glam guitar, and arena-sized hooks about messy love, '1950' still the calling card.
Soccer Mommy
Diaristic indie rock that pairs '90s alt guitar crunch with unguarded, quietly devastating songwriting — Sophie Allison's ache in high fidelity.
WILLIS
Laid-back Alabama five-piece riding breezy, groove-forward indie rock — sun-baked guitars and easy falsetto hooks, Muscle Shoals-region ease in a new generation.
Annie DiRusso
Loud, cathartic fuzz-pop — diaristic verses that detonate into grunge-sized choruses built for shouting along, live-wire energy that made her a word-of-mouth favorite.
Algernon Cadwallader
Beloved and long-dormant Philly emo pioneers back from reunion — noodly twinkling guitars, yelped vocals, and pure basement-show joy that a whole generation of Midwest-emo revivalists learned from.
Chuck Strangers
Pro Era producer-turned-rapper — smoky, soulful East Coast beats under unhurried, writerly bars, in the lineage that runs from Dilla to Earl.
Dagmar Zuniga
Nicaraguan-American songwriter whose four-track tape songs drift like intercepted signals — intimate, hiss-wrapped folk experiments with an instant cult following.
Horsegirl
Young Chicago trio channeling '80s-'90s indie — deadpan harmonies over jangling, motorik guitar pop on Matador, teenage record-collector instincts fully formed.
ISTA
Brooklyn collective throwing a cosmic dance party — garage grit, fuzzed-out disco shimmer, and deep-groove psychedelia from a many-limbed live band.
Kylesa
Savannah sludge-psych institution — dual drummers, buzzsaw riffs, and swirling psychedelia, returned from a long hiatus with the heaviness intact.
Los Mirlos
Legendary Peruvian cumbia amazónica band since 1973 — hypnotic surf-guitar jungle grooves that invented a genre and still fill any floor offered.
Mdou Moctar (solo)
The Sahara's most electrifying guitarist in a rare stripped-down solo set — hypnotic Tuareg desert blues up close, no amplifier wall required.
Oddisee
Prolific DC rapper-producer whose warm, jazz-laced boom-bap and live band Good Compny make thinking-person's rap groove — craft over hype, always.
Okonski
Steve Okonski of Durand Jones & The Indications leads a dusty, late-night soul-jazz piano trio on Colemine Records — Guaraldi warmth after hours.
Otto Benson
Brooklyn artist once known as Memo Boy — surreal, quietly emotional experimental pop that turned vocal on his album Peanut.
Pearl & The Oysters
French-American duo making tropical space-age pop — retro-futurist synths, bossa rhythms, and candy-colored melodies, a lounge on a space station.
Ron Gallo
Wiry garage-punk provocateur — caustic wit, scuzzy riffs, and restless reinvention from record to record, never the same band twice.
Soul Glo
Philly's ferocious hardcore standard-bearers — blistering screamo velocity spliced with hip-hop and biting political fury, critical darlings for good reason.
The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis
Fugazi's rhythm section plus guitar wizard Anthony Pirog, joined by saxophone titan James Brandon Lewis — post-hardcore muscle meets free-jazz flight.
Arbor Labor Union
Atlanta's cosmic punk communalists — chugging, mantra-like southern psych-punk delivered with pastoral sincerity, like a tent revival for people who own Meat Puppets records.
AZUL
Argentinian-rooted North Carolina singer weaving jazz, soul, gospel, disco, and Latin folk into empowered, anything-can-happen live shows — a genuine one-of-one on any bill.
Babas
Ex-Kominas collaborators Sunny Ali and Karna Ray splicing punk's playful cynicism with country's earnest simplicity — deadpan cowpunk with real bite under the twang.
BALACLAVA
Beer-soaked NYC synth-punk — gain-cranked, neck-twisting party tunes with sugary earworm hooks buried deep in the scuzz, built for sweaty basement abandon.
BANGZZ
Riot-grrrl-lineage garage punk out of Durham — fast, funny, furious feminist anthems, loud and economical, that won over Kathleen Hanna herself.
BASIC
Guitarist Chris Forsyth's rhythm-forward trio — drum machines, samplers, and hypnotic guitars locking into boundary-less art-rock trance, Krautrock patience with a jammer's payoff.
bedrumor
Greensboro indie rock led by Lazuli Ortiz and Ryan Mole, fleshed out live by a rotating cast of collaborators — a homegrown fixture of North Carolina's DIY scene.
Black Milk
Detroit beat-scene heavyweight — Dilla-lineage production with hard-hitting drums, often backed live by his band Nat Turner for a hip-hop set that swings like a fusion gig.
Buck Swope
Instrument-swapping Durham noise-rock trio — driving rhythms, angular guitars, and hooks strung tight across the tension, in the proud lineage of amp-worshipping rhythm-section bands.
Choncy
Kitchen-sink punk split between Cincinnati and NYC — erratic, high-powered live shows that ransack every era of punk and hand the pieces back out of order.
Cor de Lux
Outer Banks post-punk dream-pop — politically charged atmospherics shot through with garage and progressive fury, coastal isolation turned up loud.
Cosmic Collective
A shape-shifting jazz ensemble whose rotating cast of star sidemen makes every set a one-off.
D. Sablu
"Elvis tunes on acid" — New Orleans drum-machine rock 'n' roll grown into a breakneck, electrified full band, Suicide's pulse with a Bourbon Street leer.
Dogo du Togo
Serge Massama Dogo brings Togo's underheard traditions to international stages — alagaa trance rhythms fused with contemporary African pop, guitar lines that shimmer and circle.
Dos Santos
Chicago Latinx quintet fusing cumbia, salsa, and psych-rock into sweaty, politically charged pan-American grooves — organ-driven and built for dancing.
Dowsers
Members of Magic Tuber Stringband, Fust, and Weirs playing slacker-rock folk — the British folk-rock tradition run through the NC DIY scene.
E'lon JD
Bass-forward progressive jazz and soul — virtuosic low end under soulful, socially minded songwriting, in the Thundercat school of lead-instrument bass.
Eugene Chadbourne
Legendary avant-garde banjo and guitar iconoclast — five decades of gleefully deranged country-jazz-noise improvisation, electric rake included.
FORAGER
Brooklyn trio of intricate guitars, melismatic vocals, and shapeshifting grooves — "buttery" and "complex" per NPR, jazz-school chops loosened into something warm and strange.
Frances Chang
Songwriter, producer, and filmmaker whose bedroom-born songs veer cinematic and strange — DIY punk roots refracted through digital experimentation, texture-first and quietly fearless.
goobhunter
Durham synthesist stitching field recordings, tape loops, and analog synths into meditative psychedelic sound collages — headphone music performed patiently in the open air.
Hiding Places
Tender, atmospheric indie rock built on a credo of close listening — hushed rhythmic interplay that quiets whole rooms, slowcore patience in the Duster lineage.
Jooselord
Raleigh's mosh-pit rap general — metal-adjacent, high-adrenaline hip-hop engineered for chaos in small rooms, and a local legend for it.
Kooley High
Raleigh's veteran hip-hop crew — warm, sample-driven North Carolina boom-bap with deep local roots and Little Brother lineage in the DNA.
Lady Kabela
Asheville trans femme producer of Southern-Gothic dark pop — industrial percussion, distorted textures, and cinematic intimacy, all self-produced and fearlessly personal.
Landowner
Hyper-precise, wiry minimal punk — clean nervous guitars and barked social commentary at maximum tension, like a blueprint drawn in a panic.
Laveda
Widescreen shoegaze — glistening walls of guitar, hushed boy-girl vocals, and melodies that cut through the haze, upstate New York dream-noise on the rise.
Long Relief
Raleigh DIY lifers channeling their hometown's Superchunk legacy — big-hearted, noisy, punk-tinged indie rock played with scene-elder generosity.
Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon
Charlotte's luxury-bar underground rapper — unbothered, punchline-dense raps over dusty loops, in the MAVI-and-MIKE school of unhurried excellence.
Lucille Klement
Johnson City indie pop-rock fronted by Maggie Woodall — classics-respecting songwriting built for the live room, Tennessee warmth included.
M.A.T.B. (fka Miranda and The Beat)
Formerly Miranda and The Beat — Farfisa-fueled garage-punk chaos with howled Telecaster leads and a freight-train rhythm section, sweat guaranteed.
MAKE
Chapel Hill's psychedelic doom trio — crushing, meditative post-metal that swells from drone to avalanche and back again.
Meltdown Rodeo
Durham supergroup of Loamlands, The Muslims, and Setting/Megafaun alumni — rowdy, poignant Americana rock in the queerest of ways, scene family on one stage.
Memorials
Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire) — hypnotic motorik art-rock with woodwinds, synths, and film-score strangeness, pedigree put to genuinely new use.
More Eaze
Prolific Austin experimentalist blurring ambient, emo, autotune, and pedal steel into tender, disorienting sound worlds — quietly one of the underground's busiest minds.
Motocrossed
Charlotte DIY ferals — country-tinged balladry that curdles without warning into feedback-worshiping noise, theremin and singing saw included, chaos as craft.
Nana Grizol
Elephant 6-adjacent Athens folk-punk — horn-flecked, big-hearted anthems of queer joy and radical tenderness, community sung into being.
Nara's Room
Noisy pop-rock led by Nara Avakian — clever sampling, trip-hop undercurrents, and Y2K production that feels futuristic and nostalgic at once.
NC in C presents Terry Riley's "In C"
A massed ensemble of North Carolina musicians performs Terry Riley's 1964 minimalist landmark In C — a one-off communal trance.
Organically Programmed
Athens project splicing '70s jazz fusion, disco, and library-music kitsch with psychedelic electronics — Elephant 6-affiliated and gleefully out of time.
Parlor Greens
Organ-trio supergroup (GA-20, True Loves, Scone Cash Players alumni) cooking greasy, vintage instrumental soul on Colemine — Meters worship done properly.
Patois Counselors
Charlotte's sprawling art-punk outfit — jittery synth-flecked post-punk with barked, absurdist vocals, in the proud lineage of The Fall.
Peach Candy Nut Boys
Boone psych-rockers raised on weird riffs and complex harmony — basement-born, self-recorded, and gleefully energetic live, mountain-town psych with real chops.
Pretty Baby
Charlotte indie rock born from a washed-up-rockstar alter ego, now a full band trading in quiet-loud catharsis — local mythology made loud.
Qur'an Shaheed
LA pianist, poet, and film composer blending jazz training with neo-classical and neo-soul improvisation — meditative, deeply personal, and quietly virtuosic.
Sautéed Grabba
Freshly minted Berklee quartet improvising at the seam of jazz harmony, live electronics, and modern dance rhythms — conservatory chops, dancefloor aims.
Setting
Durham trio (Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, Joe Westerlund) spinning shimmering acoustic-electronic drone — patient, radiant improvisation that rewards surrender.
Shagwüf
Fierce Virginia DIY power trio — psych-rock, '60s power pop, and fuzzed-out metal welded into something uncompromising and loud.
Sonny Miles
Winston-Salem progressive R&B — gospel, funk, and hip-hop bent slightly askew; featured on Barack Obama's 2019 year-end playlist, and still climbing.
Spacemoth
Maryam Qudus's tape-warped psych project — sci-fi synths and spring-loaded pop songs that wobble like old film, studio-scientist craft throughout.
Spoils
Cincinnati indie rock with violin in the frame — warm, Midwestern songs in the lineage of that dog. and The Spinanes.
STEEF
Swamp-born freak-rock entity — astonishing technical skill funneled into brain-scrambling psychedelic benders, Primus energy with bayou humidity.
sunshower
North Carolina skramz-gaze — cathartic screamo intensity washed in shoegaze texture, beauty and blast in one breath.
The Auxiliary
Russell Howard's art-rock quartet — vocoders, synth layers, and new-wave pop that feels beamed in from an alternate universe, played with total conviction.
The MerKaBa Brotherhood
Roman Norfleet and Brown Calvin's cosmic jazz duo on Mississippi Records — sax, Rhodes, and percussion shaped by mystic thought.
The Treasury
Richmond one-man EBM machine — '90s techno, post-punk, and synth-punk hammered into hard-hitting, road-tested live sets, sweat included.
Thomas Dollbaum
New Orleans songwriter of bruised, literary alt-country — gulf-coast grit and quiet devastation in the Berman lineage.
Truth Club
Raleigh's own knotty indie rock — trembling, wiry guitars and confessional intensity that snaps from whisper to burst, homegrown and critically adored.
Ultra Lights
Punchy Atlanta garage-pop — singalong nihilism, clingy guitar hooks, and a swaggering lean into Aussie trash rock, made for sweaty rooms.
wav.yliving
Raleigh rapper, producer, and designer Dom — laid-back lifestyle hip-hop where everything is curated for an immaculate, elevated vibe, scene-building included.
Weirs
Non-hierarchical NC collective where old-time stringband tradition dissolves into DIY noise and drone — anywhere from two to twelve players.