After two days of punk, noise, darkwave, psychedelic rock and whatever hypnotic, Anatolian-fueled fever dream Mohama Saz summoned, Levitation Festival decided to get heavier.
Austin's best festival returned Sept. 10-13 for another four-day exercise in sensory overload, spreading its psychedelic tentacles across Austin with shows at the Far Out Lounge, Stubb’s, Mohawk, Empire, Hotel Vegas, Elysium and the 13th Floor.
Founded in 2008 as Austin Psych Fest, the festival has long since outgrown any reasonable definition of "psychedelic," with its interpretation of psychedelia seeming to be more of a guiding principle than genre.
REZN, Monolord + Kylesa @ Mohawk
With Austin still under a heat advisory, Chicago quartet REZN ushered in the festival's Saturday-night doom pilgrimage at Mohawk. The band's massive low end moved at a glacial crawl, but nothing about it was static. Saxophone, synths and washes of psychedelic guitar drifted through the distortion before the set dissolved into eerie, spacious ambiance before another wall of fuzz. Their 40-minute performance was an appropriately sweaty and hypnotic opening to a bill that would only get doomier.
Turning the outdoor stage into a pressure chamber, Swedish doom trio Monolord didn't need much theatrics, as volume became the spectacle. Enormous guitar tones and grotesquely fuzzed-out bass seemed to rattle every bolt in the venue, with bassist Mika Häkki looming over the stage, throwing himself into riffs while drummer Esben Willems hammered underneath. Songs like "Empress Rising" and "Rust" crept at a lumbering crawl, while newer cuts like "Iodine," "You Bastard" and "Oozing Wound" proved the band can still make riffs sound impossibly huge and catchy.
Playing their first Austin show in more than a decade, Savannah, Georgia, sludge veterans Kylesa sounded remarkably vicious for a band that spent nearly eight years on hiatus. Joined by NYC punk rocker John John Jesse on bass and metal journeyman Roy Mayorga on drums, the riffs of Laura Pleasants and Phillip Cope twisted between sludge, hardcore and sprawling psych-rock, inspiring one of the night's heaviest pits as the band tore through material spanning their entire career. By the time the percussion-heavy “Scapegoat” arrived near the end, Kylesa had turned the venue into a humid mess of bodies. Their 65-minute, 15-song set ultimately wrapped with “Running Red,” putting an appropriately punishing end to Mohawk's heaviest bill of the weekend.
Between bands, Marshall's Jimi Hendrix activation turned Mohawk into a small psychedelic shrine to the unholy marriage of fuzz, feedback and loud-ass amplifiers. Celebrating 60 years since Hendrix first plugged into a Marshall amp, the activation filled the venue with cosmic artwork, vintage-minded gear, records, live screen printing and practical fuzz worship. A Waterloo Records pop-up and Hendrix listening room offered refuge between sets, while themed cocktails and Marshall’s gorgeous Hendrix anniversary gear helped keep the spirit of psychedelia alive even when nobody was onstage.
Man or Astro-man? + Angine de Poitrine @ Stubb's Amphitheater
Alabama surf-rock astronauts Man or Astro-man? hit the stage for their second gig of the festival — after headlining a sweaty bill with Spanish psychedelic rockers Mohama Saz on Friday — turning their opening slot at Stubb's Amphitheater into a wonderfully stupid piece of intergalactic performance art.
Giant mock iPhone screens dominated the stage, displaying “livestreams” from the band’s fictional Astrogram and Spacebook accounts while the group encouraged the audience to pull out their phones and document everything, mocking the social media machinery surrounding live music.
They also joked about technology destroying the planet and framed their appearance alongside Angine de Poitrine as the signing of an “intergalactic peace treaty” between two supposedly rival extraterrestrial bands.
Despite possible sound issues, the band brought their familiar collision of Dick Dale guitar twang, garage-punk velocity and B-movie science-fiction theatrics to the all-ages crowd with the same ridiculous vigor they had back in the '90s.
Following the second-best band in the galaxy was Quebecois duo Angine de Poitrine, whose sold-out Stubb's performance was one of the most anticipated of the four-day festival. Emerged in their now-signature black-and-white polka dots and weird alien masks, the joke became immediately secondary once Khn and Klek began jamming out with microtonal riffs, odd meters, math rock, funk and psychedelic repetition without ever losing physical momentum.
The crowd was truly all ages, with children and senior citizens alike, adorned with matching polka dots and gold pyramids, enthusiastically playing along with the mythology of a band that quickly rose to fame after a live performance on KEXP earlier this year.
By the time the extraterrestrial rockers reached “Sherpa,” the viral track that helped introduce the group to the mainstream, Stubb’s had become a giant microtonal dance party. Most impressive was how thoroughly Angine de Poitrine survived the transition from internet curiosity to festival headliner.
Strip away the masks, their gibberish alien language, polka dots and out-of-this-world mythology, and you still find a ferociously precise, killer two-piece underneath it all. At a festival built around psychedelic weirdness, the band somehow made everyone else seem pretty normal until the Red River Cultural District became surrounded by overly enthusiastic college football fans.
Flobama + Takuya Nakamura @ 29th Street Ballroom
Capping off a night of ringing ears, Austin producer Flobama set the scene for what Tokyo-born, NYC-residing producer Takuya Nakamura offered with a late-night detour into jazz, dub and electronic experimentation. Surrounded by electronics, Nakamura treated his trumpet less like a traditional lead instrument and more like a piece of hardware. Warm, wandering notes skipped across skeletal beats, deep bass and layers of positive echo. Nakamura constantly manipulated jungle rhythms, dropped samples and stepped back to dance along with a sold-out 29th Street Ballroom.
Earth Tongue, Elder, The Well, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, Messa, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Primitive Ring + Sleep @ The Far Out Lounge
By Sunday, the fourth day of kaleidoscopic delirium for attendees, Levitation decided subtlety was overrated, as the festival's final afternoon belonged almost exclusively to the riff. The Far Out became a sun-baked heavy-psych marathon with New Zealand duo Earth Tongue traveling across the world to deliver slabs of blown-out fuzz akin to the primitive wallop of early Black Sabbath filtered through grimy garage rock. Catchy and vaguely occult, their sound is built for a setting like Levitation. The duo's latest album, Dungeon Vision, was tracked live to tape with Ty Segall specifically to preserve the band's raw live energy.
Following the eerie harmonies of Earth Tongue, Berlin-based Elder took Sunday's heaviness into more expansive territory. Rather than bludgeoning the crowd with straightforward doom metal, the Massachusetts-born band treated the Far Out like a launchpad for long-form psychedelic exploration. Frontman Nick DiSalvo's guitar licks gradually dissolved into winding harmonies, prog-rock detours, and enormous instrumental crescendos. Leaning on newer material, songs breathed and mutated on stage, opening with "Sigil to Ruin" before moving through "Capture/Release," "Through Zero," Liminality," and "Dream State Return" before closing with "Halycon," which the band elongated with an extended outro.
As things moved back to the Far Out's Janis Stage, Boston-by-way-of-Austin stoner Zak Peters took to the stage to point out the plants gracing Levitation's stages, hung by his organization Play to the Plants, before taking a defiant bong rip and trashing state politicians Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott.
Austin power trio The Well returned to their hometown after touring the U.S. in support of their recently released sixth album ...and Flames Ran Like Living Animals, out via Spaceflight Records. Bringing a distinctly homegrown strain of doom to the festival's final stretch, the trio sounded like they belonged. Ian Graham, Lisa Alley and Jason Sullivan leaned into the murky intersection of doom, heavy psych and proto-metal that has defined the band since 2012.
Graham and Alley's vocal harmonies drifted through riffs that felt less played than dragged through the Texas dirt. Their roughly half-hour set fit naturally into Sunday's increasingly heavy descent, moving through new and old cuts like "Season of the Flame," "Act II," "New Hallelujah for the Damned, "Mother Leeds," Love Cult (Xmas)" and the closing "Mortal Bones."
While Levitation devoted much of the day to internationally established riff worshippers, The Well offered a local version: sinister, psychedelic and satisfyingly filthy, a reminder that Austin doesn’t need to import all of its heavy weirdness.
One of the evening's more anticipated bands, Australian rockers Psychedelic Porn Crumpets made perfect sense for Levitation.
The band attacked their set with frenzy, ripping through future classics like "Found God in a Tomato," "Cornflake," "Cubensis Lenses," and "Hymn for a Droid" as psych-rock riffs shapeshifted into garage rock, prog and outright chaos. The Melbourne band even slipped in a tease of Sleep's "Dopesmoker," an appropriate foreshadowing considering what awaited everyone later that night.
Making things even sweeter, the folks behind Levitation partnered with Austin favorite Amy's Ice Creams to create a limited-time flavor for the fest: Psychedelic Corn Trumpets, a sweet corn ice cream swirled with toasted cornbread and blackberry jam inspired by the dudes down under.
While much of Sunday's lineup at the Far Out revolved around enormous fuzz riffs, Italian quartet Messa made doom metal feel elegant. Vocalist Sara Bianchin's soaring vocals floated above Albert Piccolo's guitar rather than fighting against it.
The foursome's set constantly shifted from crushing doom into psychedelic rock and smoky, jazz-inflected passages that created much-needed breathing room between the day's louder assaults. The 30-minute set focused heavily on their 2025 album The Spin, with "Fire on the Roof," "At Races," "The Dress," and"Reveal," before capping off with Close standout "Rubedo."
Starting nearly 30 minutes early and conflicting with Messa's final song, English doom merchants Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats arrived sounding like someone unearthed a stack of cursed retro vinyl and cranked them through a wall of amps.
Kevin Starrs and company built everything around huge, repetitive, trance-inducing riffs that trudged forward while Starrs' eerie, almost detached vocals floated above. Songs like "Mt. Abraxas," "Waiting for Blood" and "Death’s Door" established the mood early, while "Pusher Man" and "Melody Lane" pushed the band deeper into the sleazy crossroads of Sabbath worship, garage rock and late-’60s psychedelia.
It was the ideal bridge into Sleep’s closing main stage set, with Uncle Acid supplying the murder, paranoia and hallucinogenic menace before the stoner doom OGs buried the remains beneath an avalanche of riffs.
But before Sleep hit the stage, LA three-piece Primitive Ring became the final left turn before the Far Out's headlining monolith. Against a day full of vintage amps and psychedelic guitar heroics, the trio sounded uglier and more mechanical. Their 25-minute blast of proto-metal and garage fuzz hit like a runaway truck, with Charles Moothart peeling off filthy riffs while Bert Hoover and Jon Modaff kept the whole thing moving forward. One album in, we can only hope that this project featuring members of Frankie & the Witch Fingers, Fuzz and Hooveriii, among other projects, is here to stay.
Foundational stoner doom trio Sleep closed out the festival's final show at the Far Out with a lineup that would have seemed unimaginable a few years earlier. While founding frontman Al Cisneros remained planted at the center, legendary hardcore guitarist Bubba Dupree stood beside him instead of longtime guitarist Matt Pike. Behind them was heavy-handed Melvins drummer Dale Crover, whose unfettered, brutal swing gave the band's famous plodding a different pulse.
Sans Pike, many questions loomed ahead of the festival. Sleep's latest record, Hempispheres, has not boded well with fans, which could be why the band declined our interview request at the festival, perhaps due to the obvious questions that we would have regarding the whereabouts of the band's former shirtless riffmaster.
Regardless, the band sounded mostly intact for a band experiencing a catastrophic malfunction. Crover banged on his kit monstrously, and the crowd yelled his name so many times that the former Nirvana drummer told them to give his bandmates some love. Dupree, however, had the unenviable task of filling Pike's enormous shoes.
While the songs from Hempispheres sounded ready for takeoff, staples like "Holy Mountain" and "Dragonaut" lacked the seismic guitar presence that usually sends the band into orbit. Then, as the set ended, Al Cisneros pointedly told the crowd, “We give our love to Matt.” Whatever that means.
Gus Baldwin & the Sketch + Iguana Death Cult @ 13th Floor
Closing out Levitation, Austin punk rocker Gus Baldwin & the Sketch provided a suitably scrappy late-night comedown. The band crammed their garage punk ethos into the close quarters of the 13th Floor, tearing through an 18-song set that favored speed, distortion and loose-limbed energy. Baldwin carried himself like the ringleader of a particularly unruly house show, while the Sketch turned the songs’ power-pop hooks into something loud and gnarly.
After Baldwin and company ended their set, Peters appeared on stage to give one last defiant bong rip and trash the state's draconian drug laws before Dutch act Iguana Death Cult fired up their amps around 1 a.m.
By that point, four days of Levitation should have left everyone exhausted, but the Rotterdam band played like nobody had told them the weekend was ending. Jagged guitars, restless percussion and Jeroen Reek’s manic vocals kept things perpetually on the verge of flying apart.
It was a sweaty, frantic final burst of punk rock chaos before Austin finally had to go home. For four days, Austin became a maze of riffs, feedback, synthesizers, sweat and questionable decisions about whether there was enough energy left for one more show. There usually wasn't. We went anyway.
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