All Things Go
DC
September 25-27
by Eric Xiao
All Things Go didn’t set out to become a movement. Its identity crystallized in 2018, when
Maggie Rogers helped curate an all-female lineup for what was then a small DC blog’s festival,
named years earlier after a Sufjan Stevens song. The pitch was simple: women were
underrepresented across festival lineups, not just at the top. That day sold out its room at Union
Market, an early-career Billie Eilish down the bill. Eight years later that same instinct still drives
the booking, and it returns to Merriweather Post Pavilion September 25–27 for its first full
three-day DC run.
The 2026 bill rewards close attention. Mitski opens Friday, back as a headliner since 2022,
performing with the deliberate, choreographed staging she’s known for. Ethel Cain follows with
the slow-burning, Southern-gothic atmosphere of Preacher’s Daughter; below them, Slayyyter
and Ninajirachi bring the maximalist hyperpop of the moment. Saturday is “The Hayley Williams
Show,” a solo retrospective and her ATG debut, building toward material from Ego Death at a
Bachelorette Party. Sunday turns rockier, with Wolf Alice and Father John Misty, before Brandi
Carlile’s first appearance here and a closing set from Lola Young, returning to the festival after
stepping away last year to focus on her health.
The crowd is half the story. All Things Go has built one of the most genuinely queer, women-
and nonbinary-centered audiences in American festivals, with the singing loud and the dressing
louder. The founders have described a recent edition selling out in thirty minutes, 40,000 left on
the waitlist, someone calling it Coachella for people on antidepressants. It is the rare festival
where the audience photographs as well as the stage.
That is what makes this edition worth covering up close: not only who is booked, but a festival
that grew a stance into five straight sellouts and made its crowd the main event.
