City-sprawling music fest takes over 21 Bay Area venues |
San Francisco has a wealth of music festivals but none quite like Noise Pop Festival. As opposed to a weekender at a park, the city-sprawling festival happens over the course of two weeks, taking over 21 venues across the Bay Area with a mix of trending indie acts and nostalgic scene stalwarts. SFGATE staff were traversing the venues, soaking up the best of what the festival had to offer. Here are our favorite shows.
Vs Self performs at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Feb. 12, 2026, during Noise Pop Festival.
Vs Self started Noise Pop off with a bang. The band, which hails from the Inland Empire, combines the noodling guitar lines of Midwest emo with harsh screamo vocals. It’s a fusion that’s made Vs Self minorly TikTok famous and taken the band to Coachella.
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On Feb. 12, Vs Self played Great American Music Hall. Like any other Bay Area screamo show, the audience skewed young and scene-y. Fans two-stepped across a wide pit on the venue’s floor, occasionally knocking off one another. The ones who weren’t wearing black probably would have fit right in at a 100 gecs show. The crowd got especially rowdy when the riff for “Mourn” kicked in. A few pit demons threw back their heads and screamed along with the shouted sections. — Timothy Karoff, SFGATE culture reporter
New Jazz Underground performs at SFJazz during Noise Pop Festival 2026.
It was only the second night of the Noise Pop Festival, and I was pretty sure I’d seen the most talented musician I would see all week. In the small Joe Henderson Lab room at SFJazz, New Jazz Underground played a set of blisteringly hot tunes, propelled by the acrobatic musicianship of bassist Sebastian Rios. His fingertips moved like spiders crawling across a web, oscillating between rapid fire plucks and groovy emotive melodies. The standout moment was a solo that he announced as his take on the Delta blues, a soulful excursion that captured the spirit of Mississippi. — Dan Gentile, SFGATE senior culture editor
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Sandwiched on a sold-out bill between Prize Horse and headliner Glitterer at Swedish American Hall on Feb. 21 was a Wisconsin songwriter named Graham Hunt. Alongside his three-piece band — featuring a member of Disq, a fellow Badger State rock band — Hunt appeared with a gumdrop-shaped beanie over his shaggy mane and proceeded to plaster the hall with hooks and melodies that lingered in memory throughout the rest of Noise Pop. Hear the ballad “Emergency Contact” and how he designed the chorus to envelop ears with warm, catchy charm like a wool cap on a frigid day in dairyland. — Silas Valentino, SFGATE travel editor
Rogér Fakhr performs at his first American show during Noise Pop Festival at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on March 1, 2026.
“I’m not sure I’ll perform these songs ever again,” Rogér Fakhr says, gazing into the distance from the porch of his Richmond home. It’s about to rain, and dark clouds curdle in the sky overhead.
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