Sonic Temple 2026

For four days in May, Columbus turned Historic Crew Stadium into the loudest ZIP code in America. Sonic Temple Art & Music Festival came back bigger than it had ever been — Danny Wimmer Presents blew the event out to five full stages for the first time in its history and stacked more than 140 bands across the weekend of May 14–17, 2026. Four generation-spanning headliners anchored it: My Chemical Romance on Thursday, Shinedown on Friday, Bring Me the Horizon on Saturday, and Tool closing it all down on Sunday night, in front of a reported crowd of roughly 184,000.

The depth of the bill was the real flex. Emo and post-hardcore royalty (Pierce the Veil, All Time Low, Coheed and Cambria, Motionless in White, Black Veil Brides) shared the weekend with modern metalcore firepower (Lorna Shore, Architects, The Amity Affliction, Slaughter to Prevail) and a murderers’ row of extreme and legacy metal (Behemoth, Kreator, Carcass, Sepultura, Amon Amarth, Megadeth). Add reunions and one-offs — Anberlin with Stephen Christian, a Snot reunion, Body Count, Flyleaf and DragonForce marking anniversaries — and nearly every corner of heavy music was represented on a single site.

Beyond the riffs, Sonic Temple leaned into the “Art & Music” half of its name and the logistics of a stadium-scale weekend: an all-ages, rain-or-shine event just north of downtown Columbus, easily reached off I-71, with a full ladder of experiences and on-site comforts built to make a marathon four-day headbang survivable. It was a festival built to be lived in, not just attended — and 184,000 people answered the call. Scan the full day-by-day lineup below.