Lola Young performed a surprise set on the Main Stage at Electric Picnic on Saturday, August 29, 2026. The unannounced appearance resolved scheduling questions following a festival line-up gap and coincided with fellow performer CMAT’s festival cancellation due to illness.
Festival Surprises and Line-Up Shifts at Stradbally
Wet weather did little to dampen spirits at the festival grounds, where festival organisers announced that Lola Young would take to the stage presented by 3, at 3.45pm on Saturday, August 29. The unexpected appearance answered the first of two pressing questions on site: who would fill the midafternoon gap in the Main Stage line-up that was announced earlier in the week.
The second question involved CMAT, the self-styled Dunboyne Diana, who watched the performance from the side of the stage. CMAT had been forced to cancel her Friday slot at the Rock en Seine festival, just outside Paris, because of gastroenteritis, leaving fans uncertain whether she would make it to Stradbally. Her presence on site watching Young’s hour-long performance offered a reassuring answer for Irish crowds after Young had teased Irish fans on Friday by sharing a photo of herself having landed in Dublin Airport captioned with a lips-sealed emoji.
A Raw Performance Driven by Recent Success
Young delivered an hour-long set featuring raw vocals and catchy riffs for the appreciative rain-soaked crowd. A tone-setting early treat was One Thing
, the tongue-in-cheek erotic pop song from the London neosoul star, whose tracksuit was emblazoned with I Heart Me
logos. Her tracklist included D£aler
, Post Sex Clarity
, and Spiders
, inviting listeners to acknowledge uncomfortable truths around addiction, sexual relations, and womanhood yet never dragging down the momentum of her set. Reviewers noted that while there is a temptation to categorise Young’s music as being like that of Kate Nash or Lily Allen with its feistiness and sometimes flippant lyricism, there is a degree to which it is more like that of Amy Winehouse or Adele, remaining all soul.
The set culminated in the crowning glory of the 25-year-old’s set: Messy
, aka the ADHD anthem
that Young released in 2024. It is the track that catapulted her to stardom via TikTok virality, and she delivered it with such immediacy and sincerity this afternoon that it was as if she were singing it for the first time, with live, stripped, instrumental, and sped-up versions of the song having been released after it topped the charts in the UK, Belgium, Croatia, Israel, Australia, and Ireland.
A Rapidly Ascending Career Trajectory
The festival appearance follows a music career that spans a decade. In January 2016, she won the under-16 category of the Open Mic UK singing competition and appeared on CBBC’s Got What It Takes?
She released her debut single 6 Feet Under
in October 2019, and released her EP Intro
that year, followed by another EP, Renaissance
, in April 2020. Throughout her career, Lola has performed on The Late Late Show with James Corden, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and The Graham Norton Show.
Her profile expanded significantly in November 2021 when her rendition of Giorgio Moroder and Philip Oakey’s Together in Electric Dreams
soundtracked the John Lewis Christmas ad. More recently, she subsequently supported Billie Eilish in Paris on two stops of her Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour after the singer’s invitation.
Recognition has followed the commercial success. Lola Young and her single Messy
were nominated for the 2026 Grammy Awards’ Best New Artist and Best Pop Solo Performance, with the latter winning. She also won the 2026 BRIT Award for British Breakthrough Artist. The festival appearance comes after the artist took a six-month mental-health break after collapsing on stage in New York last autumn, though songs that the Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello winner has already performed live hundreds of times retain a sense of urgency and emotion while sounding almost studio perfect.
