Rock’s back on the Seine! Five days of storms, mud and mayhem prove Rock En Seine is finally living up to its own name…

Words & photos by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelixhc) | Sep 02, 2026

---

Fashionably late feels fitting for the final roll call of festival season in the south of Paris. We’re back for a second year running for the bank holiday weekend bonanza, once again trading a weekend at Reading & Leeds, or the mighty send-off from All Points East, for a rendition of the city of wine and cheese’s own festival. Walking along the Seine into the site, one question kept nagging: will this year’s edition live up to the legendary status?

Short answer: yes. Though if you’ve read Amped before, you’ll know we were rocking up to the function for a handful of days that were truly going to live up to the hype for us.

After a summer spent boiling in the sun, our luck turned for the bank holiday weekend, with an array of blundering storms and lightning strikes rolling in over the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud. The dust bowls of past editions were gone, replaced by mud reminiscent of a not-too-distant Download Festival. But a downpour was never going to dampen the spirits of festival goers here, and it resoundingly didn’t.

But enough about the weather, let’s get into the festival itself. Like many a festival in recent years, Rock En Seine has looked like it’s going through something of an identity crisis, not dissimilar to Reading & Leeds. Not this year, though: the crew behind the scenes managed to pull in some epic names that truly live up to the “Rock” in “Rock En Seine.” Without further ado then, let’s get stuck into what went down this year.

Friday

Biffy ClyroScène – BoursoBank

What better way to kick off the party on the Seine than with Biffy Clyro? A bit of a strange one on paper this far from home, if we’re honest. Their sound doesn’t always translate on record for an audience that didn’t grow up shouting along to “Mountains” or “Bubbles,” and going in there was a fair chance the Scots would get swallowed whole by a day this stacked. Instead, this was one of the day’s happiest surprises: Simon Neil struts about like he owns the place, and songs that can feel a bit overworked in the studio suddenly land like a punch to the chest played loud and live. It’s not a set that’s converting anyone who wasn’t already on board, but a proper good hour from a band that clearly know exactly what they’re doing on a stage.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Grande Scène

Now onto one of the big dogs we’d been absolutely buzzing for. Not your traditional alt artist, sure, but judging by the mayhem breaking out in the crowd, there was no way we weren’t talking about Nick Cave. This was Cave’s first time back at the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud since 2022, and four years away hadn’t dulled a thing. Still out on the road behind 2024’s Wild God, and looking like a man who hasn’t had a night off all summer (Munich, Bonn, a run through Croatia, Germany, Romania and Norway, then straight into Paris), Cave worked the crowd like a preacher who’s never once lost his faith in the sermon, swinging between full-throttle rock theatre and something far more tender. The setlist was a proper treat too: “Get Ready for Love” into “From Her to Eternity” to open, before Cave told the crowd “Train Long-Suffering” was getting played for the last time ever, right there on that stage. There was even a stumble worth loving him more for, a false start on “Red Right Hand” after fluffing the lyrics, just laughed off and taken from the top. Newer cuts sat easily alongside heavyweights like “Into My Arms” (played solo on piano) and that “Red Right Hand” redo, and the energy never once dipped. Whatever criticism gets levelled at Cave for repeating a formula, watching the Bad Seeds work at full tilt makes a pretty compelling case that nobody else is doing it quite like this.

Photos: Rock En Seine

Saturday

AFI – Scène BoursoBank

Kicking off Saturday, we braved the mud and bog land into the heaviest, busiest day of the festival (for us, anyway), with AFI opening proceedings. Third time we’d caught this lot in as many weeks, so we were properly curious how a return to French soil would go down. Crowd piled in slowly, and AFI’s set felt a touch lacklustre, though honestly the crowd probably had more to do with that than the band: rain drowned much of the performance, the sun only occasionally bothering to show up, and a wet, distracted field was never going to give a band like this the reaction it deserves. Davey Havok did what Davey Havok does, all leaping and knee-slides and demanding the crowd meet him halfway, and elsewhere on site people were calling it one of the most dynamic sets of the day. From where we stood, though, we couldn’t help wondering whether the compact, claustrophobic intensity AFI trade in would’ve hit harder indoors, or at least somewhere with a bit less sky above it.

Landmvrks – Grande Scène

Now this was a proper homecoming. LANDMVRKS are Marseille born and bred, and it showed the second they walked out: this was a band playing to a crowd that felt like an extension of their own, chants going up in French before Florent Salfati had even opened his mouth. They tore into “Creature” to open, and from there the whole set was one long excuse for the crowd to lose it, big singable choruses crashing straight into breakdowns built for exactly this. And then there was the pyro. Genuinely the only pyro we saw all weekend, headliners included, which feels like it should be illegal for a mid-afternoon slot but we’re not complaining. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the mud turned the crowd into the muddiest wall of death we’ve ever had the pleasure of nearly getting taken out by, two sides of the field sprinting at each other through actual swamp. Their metalcore has always leaned hard into that push and pull between chorus and chaos, and that’s exactly what makes them work in a field this size.

High Vis – Scène AXS

We’ll be honest, the walk over almost had us worried. LANDMVRKS were still going off at the opposite end of the site as we cut across for High Vis, and there’s always that nagging thought: will anyone actually follow us all the way over here? Turns out we needn’t have panicked. By the time the band ambled on, quiet and unassuming, that slow-build opening doing absolutely nothing to suggest what was coming, the crowd had already made the trek in numbers. Give it a few minutes and the whole thing flips: the hillside becomes a sea of bodies, crowdsurfers sailing over the top as the sun dips behind them. Songs like “Trauma Bonds” and “Mind’s a Lie” hit with the same intensity as bak home, proof that you don’t need a shared first language for a room to feel every word. This is UK hardcore with real melody running through it, more baggy and melodic punk than straight-up heavy, and somehow it lands just as hard with a French crowd who’ve never had the accent explained to them. Not a band that should travel this well. And yet, here we are.

Amyl and the SniffersGrande Scène

Classic Amyl. What else can you expect? Amy Taylor spent the best part of an hour treating the stage like it personally owed her money, all snarl, sweat and constant motion, hair teased into a proper 70s rock and roll mane, somewhere between Cherie Currie and Dolly Parton on a bender, that made her look like she’d wandered straight off an old Runaways poster and onto the Grande Scène. This was their first time back at Rock En Seine since 2023, and if anything they’ve only got more generous with it: less a gig than an open invitation to lose your mind for an hour, and the crowd took her up on it in numbers. Pub rock filtered through pure punk aggression, delivered by a frontwoman who never once looks like she’s coasting, not even for a second.

Turnstile – Scène BoursoBank

Turnstile playing a stage this size in 2026 feels increasingly like a scheduling error. This is a band who’ve just picked up a Grammy for “Birds,” the very song they opened with, chirping bird sample and all, before the ground genuinely seemed to shake, and the size of the crowd trying to cram in around Scène BoursoBank made it obvious they’ve outgrown stages like this. No exaggeration: exiting the photo pit, we were engulfed in a sea of mud and bodies. From there it barely let up, “Dull,” “Blackout” and “Look Out For Me” all detonating in turn, the mud turning the whole field into one giant, joyfully violent mess, before “T.L.C.” closed things out and sent everyone off half-deaf and fully converted. Baltimore’s finest didn’t just play a set, they confirmed exactly why they’re one of the biggest hardcore exports going right now. Whoever’s booking the stages next year needs to have a word with themselves.

Deftones – Grande Scène

To be treated to Deftones twice in one summer, let alone inside a fortnight, is nothing short of a pinch-me moment. Yes, the setlist looked awfully familiar if you caught them at All Points East too (go read our review here), but honestly, when the Deftones crew have crafted a belter of a setlist this good, who cares if it pops off every single night. Insane doesn’t cover it. Chino Moreno doesn’t do much in the way of stage banter these days, by all accounts he’s kept it minimal on this whole run, but he doesn’t need to when the songs are doing this much talking for him. They opened with “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” currently enjoying a second life thanks to TikTok along with “Sextape” and “Cherry Waves,” both of which also turned up in the set, and from there it was a tour through thirty years of a band that still sound like nobody’s caught up to them: newer cuts from Private Music like “infinite source” and “locked club” sitting comfortably next to “Around the Fur” and “Change (In the House of Flies).” We weren’t the only ones clocking a slightly murky low end either, more than one outlet covering the show flagged the mix as less than pristine and the set as a touch short for a headliner. None of that mattered once “My Own Summer (Shove It)” landed and the entire field turned into one enormous singalong, new fans and old fans and everyone stood ankle-deep in mud all agreeing on the same thing at the same time. That’s a headline set that’ll go down in Rock En Seine history.

Sunday

Interpol – Grande Scène

Interpol rolled in on the back of new record This Mirror Weighs A Ton, and honestly, reaction on site was properly split down the middle. It started strong: matching black suits, a martial run through the title track, “Evil” and “C’mere” landing exactly where they should. Then somewhere in the middle it just… deflated. The sound wasn’t doing them any favours, the band never quite locked in together (word is the new drummer was playing it a bit too safe all night), and the whole thing drifted into something closer to background music than the tense, coiled post-punk Interpol built their name on. Even Paul Banks referring to the record as “my” new album, rather than the band’s, raised an eyebrow or two in the crowd. He’s still got the presence to hold a field this size, don’t get us wrong. This just wasn’t the show where everything clicked into place.

The Cure – Grande Scène

Seven years is a long wait, and with The Cure’s last Rock En Seine outing back in 2019 famously taking a while to find its feet, there was a lot riding on this one. Turns out the wait was worth it. Tickets vanished within hours, and Robert Smith clearly felt the occasion too, opening with “Alone” and just letting that long, aching instrumental intro breathe before he even wandered out to say hello, looking genuinely moved by the whole thing. From there it was equal parts mass singalong (“In Between Days,” “Friday I’m In Love”) and pure gorgeous misery (“Pictures Of You,” the fittingly named “The Last Day Of Summer”), all held together by a voice that somehow hasn’t lost an ounce of the fragility it had back in 1979. Solid rather than spectacular, if we’re honest: the setlist played it a bit safe, and Reeves Gabrels got a little carried away with himself on guitar more than once. None of that mattered the second 40,000 people started clapping along to “A Forest” in the mud, still one of the great communal moments a festival can throw at you. Seven years well worth the wait.

Photo: Rock En Seine