Festival Review: GALA 2026
Gala 2026 was a love affair of genre-bending, dance-essential electronic music, as crowds flocked to Peckham over the bank holiday heatwave.
Whether you’re drawn to breakbeat, house, or dubstep, Gala truly has it all. Last month, dance music lovers swarmed Peckham Rye Park in record-breaking heat to move, sweat, and release in the way only South London knows how. Now in its tenth year, the much-loved three-day festival did not disappoint.
Berlin-based Objekt brought his experimental techno to the space, with his signature mixing excellence enchanting the crowd. As the sun burned at its highest, George Daniel and Oscar Farell were spinning an endlessly evolving B2B; Farrell has had a swift come-up over the past couple of years and is signed to DH2, Dirty Hit’s electronic branch, run by Daniel himself. Their energetic session was more like a joint love affair between them and the crowd, certified as one of the highlights of the weekend.
Conducta played a joyous open-air set as the light began to fade, treating us to his new track ‘Low Can U Go’, as well as long-time favourites like ‘Handle With Care’ and ‘Be The 1’.
Peckham’s own Giggs’ headline set closed the night with his genre-shaping approach to road rap, but it was Mala and Sgt Pokes whose heavy, sticky dubstep sealed the deal. Their set in the airless Pleasure Dome was worth the insufferable heat and colliding bodies, as the audience left every scrap of energy stamped into the dried-out grass.
Dancefloor veteran Detroit In Effect kicked off day two with a verve that was enough to shake off any cobwebs left from the previous night, complete with their own runway and neon headband-clad vogueing. The crowd borrowed their stamina from X Club on the main stage, a moment for classic 90s techno with pockets of slicker drum & bass to shine.
Livwutang came from New York City to share her flavour of DIY dub with a swirl of dance-essential hip-hop, for an audience who met her with perhaps the loudest cheers of the weekend. As the second night of Gala drew to a close, Peach and Prosumer brought the house and drew in festivalgoers for a heat-locked groove, while over in the 1908 stage, Verraco’s signature mix of bass and Latin techno was bringing the house down.
As any event grows, it naturally diverts from whatever grassroots, neighbour-to-neighbour essence it begins with. Attracting more and more acclaim, bringing in larger and larger crowds, inevitably loses an element of homegrown, backgarden fun. So for a festival like Gala to maintain its heedless connectivity and commitment to stomach-dropping, lip-curling, nose-wrinkling electronic excellence truly puts it on the map.