My Chemical Romance
The theatrical heart of a whole generation's record collection, back at full strength and playing like the reunion is the point.
Sonic Temple 2026 Lineup
Sonic Temple 2026 has already wrapped — but you can still dig through the lineup and find the acts you would have loved.
Four days of rock and metal on five stages at Columbus's Historic Crew Stadium — Tool, My Chemical Romance and Shinedown over a bill that ran deep into death metal and metalcore.
About Sonic Temple 2026
Sonic Temple took over Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus for four days in May, running 145 acts across five stages. My Chemical Romance opened Thursday, Shinedown took Friday, Bring Me the Horizon had Saturday, and Tool closed it out on Sunday.
What makes Sonic Temple worth a whole weekend rather than a headliner ticket is the stage split. The Temple and Cathedral stages carried the arena-rock and emo-reunion bill — All Time Low, Coheed and Cambria, The Used, Rise Against, Breaking Benjamin, an L.S. Dunes set and a Flyleaf reunion with Lacey Sturm. Meanwhile the Altar Stage ran an almost entirely separate extreme-metal festival: Behemoth, Cradle of Filth, Napalm Death, Dying Fetus, Cattle Decapitation, Suffocation and Fleshgod Apocalypse, all on the same ticket.
The Citadel and Sanctuary stages were where the current generation lived — Slaughter to Prevail, Whitechapel, 200 Stab Wounds and Carnifex on one, Dayseeker, Holding Absence, Magnolia Park and Catch Your Breath on the other. It is one of the few bills in the US where a deathcore fan and someone who came for the 2005 emo revival both get a full weekend.
Expect metal, hard rock, post-hardcore and rock across 145 acts.
The headliners
- My Chemical Romance — The theatrical heart of a whole generation's record collection, back at full strength and playing like the reunion is the point.
- Shinedown — Brent Smith's enormous voice fronting two decades of rock-radio anthems, delivered with genuine showmanship rather than autopilot — 'Simple Man' cover included.
- Bring Me the Horizon — Started in deathcore, ended up somewhere between arena rock and hyperpop, and made the whole restless journey sound deliberate — Sheffield's biggest metal export in a generation.
- Tool — Odd time signatures, twenty-minute arcs and a visual show they'd rather you watched than filmed — the most uncompromising band at this scale.
Up-and-comers to catch early
- 200 Stab Wounds — Cleveland's contribution to the death-metal revival — filthy, mid-paced, built entirely around the riff.
- Dayseeker — Rory Rodriguez's falsetto turned a metalcore band into something closer to devastating synth-pop with guitars.
- Holding Absence — Welsh post-hardcore aiming squarely at catharsis — soaring, sincere, allergic to irony.
- Catch Your Breath — Texas metalcore with a big melodic centre; the kind of band that grows a stage size every cycle.
- Bodysnatcher — Florida beatdown-deathcore with a genuinely nasty low end and nothing resembling a melody.
- Magnolia Park — Orlando pop-punk pulling freely from hip-hop and hyperpop, refusing to pick a lane.
Other acts worth planning around
- Tool — Closed the festival — odd time signatures, twenty-minute arcs, and a strict no-phones visual show.
- My Chemical Romance — Opened Thursday, one of three Danny Wimmer festivals they headlined in 2026.
- Behemoth — Blackened death metal staged like liturgy, and the anchor of an unusually serious Altar Stage.
- Napalm Death — The band that essentially invented grindcore, still politically ferocious four decades on.
- L.S. Dunes — The supergroup that turned out to be a real band — Thursday, Circa Survive, Coheed and MCR members writing new material.
- Flyleaf with Lacey Sturm — A reunion set with the original vocalist, billed as such on the poster.
- Coheed and Cambria — Decades of sci-fi concept records in Claudio Sanchez's unmistakable upper register.
The lineup by day
Thursday May 14 through Sunday May 17, with all five stages running each day.
- Thursday, May 14: My Chemical Romance, Pierce the Veil, All Time Low, Coheed and Cambria, L.S. Dunes, Hawthorne Heights + 30 more
- Friday, May 15: Shinedown, Staind, Halestorm, Stone Temple Pilots, Daughtry, Hinder + 31 more
- Saturday, May 16: Bring Me the Horizon, Good Charlotte, Motionless in White, Black Veil Brides, The Plot in You, Palaye Royale + 30 more
- Sunday, May 17: Tool, Godsmack, Lamb of God, Black Label Society, Avatar, P.O.D. + 30 more
Sonic Temple 2026 lineup FAQ
Who headlined Sonic Temple 2026?
My Chemical Romance headlined Thursday, Shinedown Friday, Bring Me the Horizon Saturday, and Tool closed the festival on Sunday.
When and where was Sonic Temple 2026?
May 14–17, 2026, at Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio.
How many bands played Sonic Temple 2026?
145 acts across five stages — Temple, Cathedral, Citadel, Sanctuary and Altar.
Is Sonic Temple a metal festival or a rock festival?
Both, and they are deliberately kept somewhat separate. The Temple and Cathedral stages leaned hard rock, emo and post-hardcore; the Altar Stage ran death metal, black metal and grindcore almost as its own event.
Is Sonic Temple related to Louder Than Life and Welcome to Rockville?
Yes — all three are Danny Wimmer Presents festivals, which is why the headliners and much of the undercard rotate between them across a single year.
More festival lineups
Lollapalooza lineup →Hopscotch lineup →The Fest lineup →Rebellion lineup →III Points lineup →Lost Lands lineup →Louder Than Life lineup →All Points East lineup →Aftershock lineup →End of the Road lineup →ARC lineup →Warped Tour Orlando lineup →Austin City Limits lineup →Reading & Leeds lineup →EDC Orlando lineup →Bourbon & Beyond lineup →Riot Fest lineup →Outside Lands lineup →Green Man lineup →HARD Summer lineup →Osheaga lineup →Bass Canyon lineup →Hulaween lineup →Honcho Campout lineup →Portola lineup →Furnace Fest lineup →Shaky Knees lineup →Sick New World Texas lineup →Hinterland lineup →All Things Go DMV lineup →Raleigh Wide Open lineup →Oceans Calling lineup →Darker Waves lineup →Bumbershoot lineup →Ohana lineup →Sea.Hear.Now lineup →Iron Blossom lineup →All Things Go NYC lineup →
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Sonic Temple full lineup
Pierce the Veil
San Diego post-hardcore with a Latin-inflected guitar streak and a knack for the melodramatic bridge — brothers-led drama played at full tilt.
All Time Low
Baltimore pop-punk lifers who aged into the role gracefully — still funny, still fast, still writing the chorus first, two full decades past the basement shows.
Coheed and Cambria
A sci-fi concept saga stretched across decades of records, sung in Claudio Sanchez's unmistakable upper register — prog ambition delivered with arena-rock directness.
L.S. Dunes
A supergroup that turned out to be a real band — members of Thursday, Circa Survive, Coheed and My Chemical Romance writing genuinely new material.
Hawthorne Heights
Ohio emo survivors whose mid-2000s records are still the reference point for the whole scream-over-the-chorus template — played now with veterans' gratitude.
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Jacksonville post-hardcore whose one inescapable single has kept the whole catalogue in rotation for two decades — 'Face Down' still hits its mark.
Breaking Benjamin
Pennsylvania's reliably heavy melodic rock — brooding verses, enormous choruses, and a catalogue that never chased a trend because the formula never stopped working.
Rise Against
Chicago melodic hardcore with the politics front and centre and no dip in intensity across twenty-five years — conviction as a career.
The Used
Bert McCracken's scream-to-croon whiplash defined a corner of early-2000s post-hardcore and still detonates live — the chaos aged into craft.
Flyleaf with Lacey Sturm
Mid-2000s alternative metal defined by Lacey Sturm's voice — fragile and full-throated, often inside the same line, with 'All Around Me' still the payoff.
Fozzy
Chris Jericho's rock band, long past the novelty stage and into a genuinely solid hard-rock catalogue — wrestling charisma applied to riffs.
Egypt Central
Slaughter to Prevail
Alex Terrible's subterranean roar over deathcore built for maximum physical impact — a genuine spectacle live, masks and all.
Whitechapel
Knoxville deathcore that grew genuinely melodic without losing any of the weight underneath — Phil Bozeman's range now the band's superpower.
200 Stab Wounds
Cleveland's contribution to the new-school death-metal revival — filthy, mid-paced, and built entirely around the riff, with the kind of grooves that turn a pit violent in seconds.
Attila
Party-deathcore built for the pit — Chris Fronzak's bark, gleefully profane anthems, and absolutely no interest in anyone's approval.
Bodysnatcher
Florida beatdown-deathcore with a genuinely nasty low end and nothing resembling a melody — pit music, engineered by specialists.
Carnifex
San Diego deathcore with a black-metal chill running through it — bleak, fast, and unrelentingly grim, veterans of the genre's heaviest trenches.
Disembodied Tyrant
Windwaker
Dayseeker
Rory Rodriguez's falsetto turned a metalcore band into something closer to devastating synth-pop with guitars — grief-heavy songwriting that broke the scene's mold.
Magnolia Park
Orlando pop-punk that pulls freely from hip-hop and hyperpop and refuses to pick a lane — genre loyalty traded for pure momentum.
Catch Your Breath
Texas metalcore with a big melodic centre — the kind of band that grows a stage size every touring cycle.
Holding Absence
Welsh post-hardcore aiming squarely at catharsis — soaring, sincere, and allergic to irony, choruses built for wet eyes at the barrier.
Wind Walkers
Nerv
The Pretty Wild
Behemoth
Polish blackened death metal staged like liturgy — corpse paint, fire, and riffs with genuine architectural heft, led by Nergal's decades-long war on the sacred.
Cradle of Filth
Dani Filth's shriek over gothic-horror symphonic metal — Suffolk's most theatrical export, gloriously unbothered by taste for three decades.
Dying Fetus
Maryland death metal built on impossible riffs and a groove that sneaks up under all the brutality — three-piece precision at full slam.
Cattle Decapitation
Misanthropic eco-horror deathgrind, with Travis Ryan's clean-shriek hybrid doing something no other vocalist quite manages — apocalyptic themes played at extinction speed.
Napalm Death
The band that essentially invented grindcore, still politically ferocious and still capable of a song shorter than this sentence — Birmingham's loudest export.
Fleshgod Apocalypse
Italian death metal with a full orchestral apparatus and an operatic streak played completely straight — tuxedos, corpse paint, and blastbeats in formalwear.
Suffocation
New York death metal originators, and the band most responsible for the breakdown as a technical device rather than a gimmick.
Nekrogoblikon
Melodic death metal about goblins, performed with a technical seriousness that makes the joke land harder — dancing goblin mascot included.
Shinedown
Brent Smith's enormous voice fronting two decades of rock-radio anthems, delivered with genuine showmanship rather than autopilot — 'Simple Man' cover included.
Staind
Halestorm
Lzzy Hale's Grammy-winning powerhouse — the loudest voice in modern hard rock, delivered nightly with full-throttle sincerity.
Stone Temple Pilots
Grunge-era hitmakers with a glam streak their peers were too earnest to attempt — 'Plush' through 'Interstate Love Song', hooks for days.
Daughtry
Hinder
Buckcherry
Sublime
Sun-bleached ska-punk-dub hybrid, now carried by Bradley Nowell's son with the songs left intact — '40oz. to Freedom' forever.
Chevelle
Yellowcard
Violin-powered pop-punk — 'Ocean Avenue' at the actual ocean, and the violin still carries the hooks.
New Found Glory
The pop-punk band other pop-punk bands cite — three decades of unreasonably durable hooks and a work ethic to match.
Everclear
'Santa Monica' and Art Alexakis's survivor's-eye alt-rock — hard-luck autobiography set to some of the '90s' stickiest guitar hooks.
Lit
'My Own Worst Enemy' — one perfect song and a very good time, delivered by SoCal pros who know exactly why you came.
Simple Plan
Story of the Year
Atreyu
OC metalcore originators — 'Lip Gloss and Black' nostalgia with new-era polish, from a band that helped write the genre's melodic playbook in the first place.
blessthefall
Clean-and-scream metalcore from the Rise Records boom, played with more muscle than nostalgia — Phoenix scene veterans who kept the choruses enormous.
The Word Alive
Woe, Is Me
Left On Red
As You Were
Lorna Shore
Kublai Khan TX
Texas hardcore at its most punishing — mosh calls with a message, and a low end that treats subtlety as a character flaw.
Paleface Swiss
Swiss beatdown with a genuinely unsettling vocal performance sitting on top of the chug — Europe's heaviest recent export.
Chelsea Grin
Utah deathcore that keeps finding new floors beneath the floor — a decade-plus of low-tuned punishment that only got nastier with time.
Brand of Sacrifice
Signs of the Swarm
Jiluka
Not Enough Space
Zakk Sabbath
Zakk Wylde playing Sabbath songs with reverence and absurd volume — a tribute act with a guitar hero attached, pinch harmonics included.
Sevendust
Lajon Witherspoon's soul-trained voice over grinding alt-metal — the reason they outlasted the scene, and the warmest crowd in heavy music.
Static-X
Dope
Powerman 5000
Mushroomhead
Soil
Flaw
Bring Me the Horizon
Started in deathcore, ended up somewhere between arena rock and hyperpop, and made the whole restless journey sound deliberate — Sheffield's biggest metal export in a generation.
Good Charlotte
Motionless in White
Horror-movie theatrics welded to industrial-tinged metalcore — corpse paint, synths, and choruses built for an arena singalong, Halloween as a year-round genre.
Black Veil Brides
Warpaint-and-leather anthems — the black parade's glammer cousins, stadium-goth choruses delivered with total conviction, eyeliner-era devotion still marching.
The Plot in You
Moody, bass-heavy alt-metal that trades breakdowns for slow-building dread and falsetto — 'FEEL NOTHING' the crossover moment.
Palaye Royale
Amira Elfeky
Marilyn Manson
Bush
Alter Bridge
Coal Chamber
Spooky-kid nu-metal with detuned bounce and a goth streak the genre mostly abandoned — 'Loco'-era heaviness back from the grave.
Pop Evil
All That Remains
The Story So Far
Modern pop-punk standard-bearers — gruff, fast, and beloved, Walnut Creek's chip-on-shoulder anthems in full stride, pits and singalongs in equal measure.
Mayday Parade
Warped Tour survivors trading in the specific ache of a song you loved at sixteen — 'Miserable at Best' still empties the tear ducts.
Motion City Soundtrack
Moog-powered anxiety anthems — 'Commit This to Memory' remains scripture, and 'Everything Is Alright' remains a group confession.
The Wonder Years
Pop-punk that grew up in public — suburban specifics rendered with novelistic detail, Dan Campbell narrating adulthood in real time.
State Champs
Citizen
Knuckle Puck
Allt
Architects
The Amity Affliction
August Burns Red
The Ghost Inside
A band whose survival story is inseparable from the music's insistence on pushing forward — melodic hardcore as literal testament.
Make Them Suffer
Alpha Wolf
Novelists
Body Count
Sepultura
Kreator
Carcass
Biohazard
Snot
Gideon
Alabama metalcore turned mean — melodic roots swapped for something nu-metal-adjacent, and the heaviness pays for the trade.
Butcher Babies
Tool
Odd time signatures, twenty-minute arcs and a visual show they'd rather you watched than filmed — the most uncompromising band at this scale.
Godsmack
Lamb of God
Black Label Society
Zakk Wylde's biker-metal brotherhood — pinch harmonics for days, Sabbath-weight riffs, and guitar solos treated as main events.
Avatar
P.O.D.
'Alive' and 'Youth of the Nation' — San Diego's nu-metal survivors, positivity intact through every scene cycle.
Saliva
Megadeth
Mustaine's farewell campaign — thrash's most venomous catalog, one last ride through 'Peace Sells' and four decades of grudges.
Public Enemy
Chuck D's baritone over air-raid production — protest music that has never needed updating, with Flavor Flav as eternal hype engine.
Amon Amarth
Suicidal Tendencies
Venice crossover legends — 'Institutionalized' and a pit that never ages, Cyco Mike still leading the charge.
In Flames
Demon Hunter
Electric Callboy
We Came As Romans
Melodic metalcore that leans hard on the clean-sung hook, carrying a decade-plus of hard-won catharsis — brotherhood themes made literal.
Polaris
Senses Fail
New Jersey post-hardcore that got angrier and more political as it aged, not softer — Buddy Nielsen leading with total candor.
Thrown
Swedish hardcore channelling panic-attack lyricism into riffs that feel physically claustrophobic — short songs, total impact.
Thornhill
Conquer Divide
Dance Gavin Dance
Swancore's funk-flecked flagship — technicolor riffs and dual-vocal whiplash, a prolific catalog that never stopped mutating.
Chiodos
Craig Owens's theatrical post-hardcore, reunited — MySpace-era drama with real stakes, piano flourishes and that unmistakable swooping vocal intact.
Thrice
Post-hardcore's elder statesmen — heavy, literate, endlessly evolving, and never once coasting on the back catalog.
Bloodywood
Anberlin with Stephen Christian
From First to Last
Mid-2000s screamo whose most famous alumnus left to become a dubstep producer — 'Dear Diary' drama that still hits the scene's pleasure centers.
Drop Dead, Gorgeous
A Skylit Drive
Dethklok
Metalocalypse's cartoon death-metal band, real and devastating live — Brendon Small's shred played against the animation at brutal volume.
DragonForce
Apocalyptica
Classically trained Finnish cellists who started by covering Metallica and never stopped headbanging — symphonic metal where the strings genuinely shred.
DevilDriver
Alestorm
Wind Rose
SpiritWorld
