Sziget 2026

[thetime]

32 minutes ago, bunnyv said:

I mean, I absolutely love Gorillaz,but are they wow…

 

Im finding majority of festivals quite samey with headlinersnext summer with  Gorillaz, The Cure and Nick Cave. 

 

So will be difficult to get the wow factor next summer. 

[Daniel Ferreira]

Hadn't the Festival been rejected by the City Council? I'm a little lost

[bunnyv]

4 minutes ago, thetime said:

 

Im finding majority of festivals quite samey with headlinersnext summer with  Gorillaz, The Cure and Nick Cave. 

 

So will be difficult to get the wow factor next summer. 

Yeah that’s what I mean. They’re hardly wow.

[thetime]

3 minutes ago, bunnyv said:

Yeah that’s what I mean. They’re hardly wow.

 

Been a long time since Sziget had the wow booking, going by that I suppose.

 

Perhaps Prince. 

 

Although going by the new owners comments, about lineups. Why would someone go and see an act in Hungary, if you can see them in other countries. 

 

 

Edited November 3, 2025 by thetime

[Matt86]

My guess for headliners are

 

Macklemore or Dua Lipa (of course lol)

Gorillaz

Marshmello

Twenty One Pilots

Sabrina Carpenter

 

But I still hope that there's a couple headliners material that didn't came out yet. Like Arctic Monkeys or The Killers, stuff like that... 🙏

 

[mathuska]

41 minutes ago, thetime said:

 

Been a long time since Sziget had the wow booking, going by that I suppose.

 

Perhaps Prince. 

 

Although going by the new owners comments, about lineups. Why would someone go and see an act in Hungary, if you can see them in other countries. 

 

 

For me they were wow headliners:

2022:arctic monkeys, dua lipa, justin bieber

2023:billie eilish, imagine dragons 

2024:fred again.. skrillex

2025:chappell roan

[thetime]

21 minutes ago, mathuska said:

For me they were wow headliners:

2022:arctic monkeys, dua lipa, justin bieber

2023:billie eilish, imagine dragons 

2024:fred again.. skrillex

2025:chappell roan

 

I think it was more the 'wow' not playing anywhere else or very few other places.

 

They all did the circuit that year. 

[#1SzigetFan]

Don't know why we're expecting more rock music at Sziget. The last year with Gerendai at the helm was 2017 and there was plenty of EDM. Their "rock" day back then was Kasabian + Biffy Clyro which was kinda cool but didn't sell well. And the rest of the poster had lots of EDM acts.

[activean]

Dua Lipa would be logical booking for Sziget, 2022 turnout was great, she is huge localy as well, we know she likes Sziget and now would be the right time for her to come and help festival a bit, she guarantees you near sold out night. 

[Mondo-kun]

1 hour ago, #1SzigetFan said:

Don't know why we're expecting more rock music at Sziget. The last year with Gerendai at the helm was 2017 and there was plenty of EDM. Their "rock" day back then was Kasabian + Biffy Clyro which was kinda cool but didn't sell well. And the rest of the poster had lots of EDM acts.

Still undercard was guitar-heavy. 
Billy Talent, Kensington, The Vaccines, Courteeners, Bad Religion, The Pretty Reckless, Breaking Benjamin, Interpol, Nothing But Thieves...
And this is without mentioning arguable ones, like Glass Animals or alt-J. 

[thetime]

2 minutes ago, Mondo-kun said:

Still undercard was guitar-heavy. 
Billy Talent, Kensington, The Vaccines, Courteeners, Bad Religion, The Pretty Reckless, Breaking Benjamin, Interpol, Nothing But Thieves...
And this is without mentioning arguable ones, like Glass Animals or alt-J. 

 

Would be ticket suicide having a 'rock' line up. 

[Mondo-kun]

18 minutes ago, thetime said:

 

Would be ticket suicide having a 'rock' line up. 

Exactly, that's why even "rock" headliners will be pop-oriented. 

[Yelo, the Parmiggiana]

3 hours ago, thetime said:

 

Been a long time since Sziget had the wow booking, going by that I suppose.

 

Perhaps Prince. 

 

Although going by the new owners comments, about lineups. Why would someone go and see an act in Hungary, if you can see them in other countries. 

 

 

I'd argue that Robbie Williams and Rihanna were "wow" in their own peculiar way for the respective editions. Maybe Ed Sheeran, too? I was on a festival hiatus, so I couldn't really recall if he was a common headliner back then

 

1 hour ago, #1SzigetFan said:

Don't know why we're expecting more rock music at Sziget. The last year with Gerendai at the helm was 2017 and there was plenty of EDM. Their "rock" day back then was Kasabian + Biffy Clyro which was kinda cool but didn't sell well. And the rest of the poster had lots of EDM acts.

Yeah, this is my whole concern.

Like, Gerendai picked up the festival by saying two things: 

1) The festival, as it is, is not profitable

2) he gave it away because he felt that he lost touch with the music scene

 

I'm assuming that reducing the festival by one day will not be for the sake of a greater lineup, rather to be in line with a sustainable business case and that the names will be a lot of safe picks for Sziget (as in: recurring, affordable names with a low tendency to forfait). 

 

I may consider some more guitars for the small names, but IMO if they will have availability they will for sure go for Florence - Macklemore - Dua Lipa - Gorillaz - EDM name

I am really confident with this, also given the current circuit this year.

 

 

[mathuska]

Linkin park would be a wow booking

[kristofm]

Gerendai is officially buying the Sziget brand today.

 

Full article from Index:
 

Károly Gerendai: A campaign of character assassination has been launched against me just because I wanted to save Sziget

 

After, on October 29, 2025, the two largest factions — Fidesz and the Tisza Party — both abstained in the vote of the Budapest General Assembly, and as a result the Sziget Festival would not have taken place next year, Magyar Péter, chairman of the Tisza Party, seeing the angry reactions of his voters, messaged Gerendai Károly during the night asking to meet the next morning. There, fresh that same morning, they reached agreement on the amendments that would allow the Tisza Party to support the proposal it had previously abstained from. However, after the joint photo taken to mark the meeting, a smear campaign began against Gerendai Károly that, according to the festival’s founder, amounts to character assassination.

“Now it seems the proposal will gain a majority in the Budapest General Assembly that will allow us not only to hold Sziget next year under the current public-space permit, but also to plan for the long term,” Gerendai Károly told Index. According to his plans, he will sign the agreement later today to take over — or more precisely, to take back — Sziget Zrt. from its current American owner.

As is known, after years of billion-forint losses the CEO of Sziget Zrt., owned by the American KKR private equity fund, initiated termination of the agreement between the city and Sziget, because they decided to withdraw from the Central European market and to stop organizing the Sziget Festival — similar to the previously closed VOLT and Balaton Sound events.

Ticket sales can begin
The assembly agreement that is expected to secure Sziget’s future emerged after Magyar Péter, the Tisza Party chairman, initiated a meeting with Gerendai Károly, and they agreed on two points to modify the proposal to be put before the assembly: Sziget Zrt. will repay the concession it received from the city over three years instead of seven, and every Hungarian student — not only those from Budapest — will receive the student discount.

With this in mind, Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest, said that we can begin organizing the festival and selling tickets, since it is now only a legal-technical question for the related decisions to be formalized,

Gerendai told our paper. A long-term agreement is necessary to give them a chance both to attract investors and to have “some perspective at all on how the event’s business model can be restored,” because it is not possible to make the company profitable in a single year — the losses of recent years have been much larger. “You need at least a two- to three-year horizon, because without that no one will take the risk.”

The situation changed overnight
According to Gerendai, the situation that developed in the Budapest General Assembly was “interesting” because everyone, in words, emphasized how important it is that Sziget continues, yet when it came time to press the button the two big factions abstained. That evening it therefore looked like Sziget would cease to exist, and likely because of the public outrage “Magyar Péter even that night initiated with me a meeting for the next morning, where we eventually managed to agree on the two points that they would then be able to vote for.”

“I don’t know what happened in those few hours that turned an abstention at the assembly — and thus the rejection of the proposal — into an agreement by the next morning. I can only imagine that, seeing the angry voter reactions appearing in the press and flooding their social media, they realized

this would stick to the Tisza too, which could hurt their popularity among young people. The mayor even put it bluntly: they are the ones who killed Sziget.

Of course it wasn’t only them — Fidesz also abstained, which was also needed for the proposal to fail — but it seems Magyar Péter identified and reacted to the situation sooner. The party chairman immediately announced the agreement on his social media with a joint photo, which at the time was not to my detriment, because the morning press was full of reports that Sziget would be shut down, so I was even glad that they were confirming as soon as possible: the Tisza Party had changed its mind and would now support the festival’s survival,” said Gerendai, who believes the avalanche started after that.

Utterly absurd
“The government media piled on me the next day, claiming I had stood behind Magyar Péter, that I am the major financial backer behind the scenes, and that the whole Sziget rescue was only being done so I could siphon off state billions.

They grotesquely twisted it to say I summoned Magyar Péter to me and ordered him to immediately change his position,

because with the ‘I Love Hungary Club’ behind me I supposedly have such lobbying power that I can do this with ease. The point of the I Love Hungary Club is precisely to invite all political sides to its programs in a balanced way, and fortunately everyone comes. It’s the club where not only Magyar Péter, but also significant government figures from Antal Rogán and Gergely Gulyás to Sándor Pintér, or from János Lázár to Balázs Orbán and Márton Nagy have appeared, and even Árpád Habony or Gábor Kubatov did not turn down our invitation,” emphasized Gerendai Károly.

So on that basis, am I now supposed to be the one directing politicians — in other words, do I actually run the government? The most absurd claim was the part about “stealing public funds,” which I could no longer decide whether to cry or laugh about, because it would sound like a joke in a cabaret that the NER propaganda papers accuse me of embezzling public funds.

I suppose no one’s “clarity” is disturbed by the fact that Sziget received not a single forint of support in the past eight years, whereas earlier in my time support was one, at most two percent of the event’s budget, while today at festivals in Hungary that figure is around 40 percent. I was always particularly proud that we could operate our events successfully on a market basis, although there were some less successful years, and because of that

I even earned the nickname “break-even,”

but now, after severe, billion-forint losses, I am trying to take over and save Sziget, so it really upsets me that in the end I’m being painted as the chief conspirator and the great crook. Just because there’s a campaign and they can’t process that I was willing to talk to Magyar Péter — whose faction the previous evening, together with the Fidesz members, had just voted to kill the rescue of the festival.”

Simple character assassination
“Moreover, after the decision the Tisza even issued a statement accusing me of trying, together with Gergely Karácsony, to defraud the city, and that they would not assist in the festival’s ‘billion-forint suspicious dealings,’ and then the next day I was presented by the government media as one of their behind-the-scenes men and financial supporters. I really cannot fathom these twists,” said Gerendai Károly, who described his emotional state after the vote as follows:

After the assembly vote I went home quite downcast, but I was telling my wife that however much I regret that they blocked my attempt to save Sziget, one positive thing for me was that because the Tisza and Fidesz together killed Sziget, it became crystal clear to the whole country and the world that I am aligned with neither Fidesz nor the Tisza.

[sandorbeni]

44 minutes ago, kristofm said:

every Hungarian student — not only those from Budapest — will receive the student discount.

It's so funny that there was such a big argument about this in the assembly, while it's been a thing for at least a decade

[#1SzigetFan]

According to this article from Telex, Budapest Park will be the first partner to join Gerendai in his attempt to save Sziget.

 

They were partners of Sziget when he was the owner the last time too. They used to organize some kind of "Sziget afterparties". I remember that Budapest Park had Slaves + Crystal Fighters + Foals in 2016 the next day after Sziget, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if they will do that again, especially that now Sziget will be only 5 days.

[CCester]

I hope this is the sign of a better communication in the future: https://www.facebook.com/SzigetFestival/posts/pfbid02ShcUwFPwfPY9xasWanfvHgAMVt6CeRsEBCHuFtxXquFcJrwuyQYvMKg8uFz3kcAZl

 

What caught me off guard is that in the live interview with Telex they told that the (now) previous owner discontinued the foreign organisations which where there to advertise Sziget to the local youth. Saw a totally unrelated video last year about the Hungarian guy in France, whose job was exactly this and said he was sent away. But I thought he was just replaced. 

[Mondo-kun]

Full festival passes pre-sale starts on November 7th, 12PM CEST. Don't know if it's available for anyone or only for those who pre-registered. 
Prices starting at the same level as this year's edition (€279 IIRC).

[kristofm]

12 minutes ago, #1SzigetFan said:

According to this article from Telex, Budapest Park will be the first partner to join Gerendai in his attempt to save Sziget.

 

They were partners of Sziget when he was the owner the last time too. They used to organize some kind of "Sziget afterparties". I remember that Budapest Park had Slaves + Crystal Fighters + Foals in 2016 the next day after Sziget, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if they will do that again, especially that now Sziget will be only 5 days.

This is beautiful.

 

“I don’t want Sziget to be confined to an age-specific box. Of course, young people will continue to be an important target group for us, but we also want to reach out to former visitors. Our goal is to organize a festival that everyone can love — something truly unique on an international level, infused with new energy.”

 

+ "super-early bird prices will be about the same as last year."

 

Great news.

[thetime]

Interesting that its from Tuesday-Saturday.

[iamdebrii]

The world is healing. Great news.

[#1SzigetFan]

28 minutes ago, kristofm said:

+ "super-early bird prices will be about the same as last year."

 

Well, cutting a whole day off will make them a little bit more expensive, though!

[thetime]

24 minutes ago, #1SzigetFan said:

 

Well, cutting a whole day off will make them a little bit more expensive, though!

 

I think the festival being on and the positive vibes, people won't worry about getting less for the money. Still a very good deal, 50 euros a day. Especially overseas visitors. What I have noticed, is flights from London gone up already. 

 

Hopefully it will give the festival lineup look less thin. 

 

Edited November 4, 2025 by thetime

[CCester]