One can only imagine Team Love must have given themselves the afternoon off when they realised that this year they could claim to be running Somerset’s biggest festival. The obvious usual holder of the crown is having a fallow year, so we went along to Love Saves The Day on Sunday to experience the huge variety of dance music 2026 has to offer. Following a couple of years ranging from stifling humidity to biblical downpours, it’s almost like the weather saw the error of its ways and became a co-conspirator, gifting the year’s biggest party a full weekend of blazing sunshine.
I’m not sure if we arrived at just the wrong moment or if it was simply poor crowd control, but we were stuck in a queue for a while before getting through. Once inside though, things opened up quickly. Rizzle Kicks were trading on familiarity, and while their set was reworked (frontman Jordan Stephens mentioned it was the first time they’d performed it) that didn’t mean that it felt like anything other than pure 2010s joy, especially for those of us in the crowd who actually remember the first time around (shout out to my now-bad back for having also carried me to their Reading 2011 set!). It mostly relied on beefed up arrangements of their old classics, so Mama Do The Hump and Down With The Trumpets were obvious highlights, and the band clearly knew how these tunes would go down to a field full of people high on what I’ll choose to believe was mainly nostalgia. There might be artists on the lineup with hits that they wrote in the last decade, but none of the cheers those got came close to Rizzle Kicks playing well-trodden pop bangers from long forgotten summers.
From there, I went to witness Arthi bringing some fun to the Centre Stage – this huge wooden structure that looks neon, glitchy, and towers above the rest of the site. Her four-to-the-floor beats kept the energy high for a crowd that seemed ready to dance all day, and the setting matched it perfectly as the sun hit the stage’s spire.
A different pressure came through the system-focused stages. Dubkasm x Gorgon Sound on Firmly Rooted felt much closer to the dub end of the bass music continuum, like a sound system set at a yard party in the best way possible. The one thing that never shifted was the sheer low end coming off the system, and for a couple of tracks the addition of live sax lifted things entirely, giving a burst of energy against the otherwise heavy bassline pressure.
In between those heavier pockets, movement across the site kept things fast and varied. Yung Singh’s set felt like it was comprised mainly of propulsive, kick heavy tunes, and buoyed up a crowd that surely by this point in the day would normally have tired. That acceleration continued into {IVY} B2B Mandidextrous in The Big Top, with breaks, basslines, and gurn-inducing jump-up smashing the audience at speeds up to 200bpm.
Kahn & Neek + Sgt Pokes on Teachings In Dub stood out as a clear peak. They brought scene knowledge and massive bassweight to Ashton Court, moving through dubstep, grime, UK bass and 140, all anchored by the Firmly Rooted soundsystem pushing out serious low end. Kahn & Neek have been legends in the world of dubstep since the early days, and this felt like that history fully transmitted to the hungry Love Saves crowd.
That peak was matched, in a different way, by 4AM Kru on the Love Saves Stage. They started with a projected cartoon intro of their arrival before exploding into amen breaks, live brass, and full crowd movement that felt almost designed to spite the heat of the afternoon. With a huge crowd sang along to every note of the hectic basslines, the energy in that set was massive.
As the day eased towards its end, Sir Spyro’s set, featuring Jayahadadream and Killa P, stayed more 140-focussed, but Jayahadadream’s presence as a female MC on a stage like that stood out clearly and deserved mention, with her incisive lyricism and energetic but crystal clear delivery cutting cleanly through the final tunes I heard on the Firmly Rooted soundsystem. Girls Don’t Sync soundtracked a final walk through the festival site, and there was a sense of relief and relaxation as things cooled slightly, whether from shade returning to the site or simply the natural shift as the day wound down (especially for the rapidly diminishing over-30 contingent who had managed to hang on that long).
The festival’s broad remit became clear in that last drift across Ashton Court. Everything coexisted in the same space, from deep dark dubstep, to pop nostalgia, to fast-paced club energy. Once you’ve been forced out of your comfort zone by constantly clashing unfamiliar sounds, it becomes easier to just sit in the grass and accept that if the music is good, the exact genre doesn’t really matter.
//Words: Maik Keefe// Photography: Jessie Meyers, Luca Rosewell, Elliot Hingston//