MANCHESTER, Tennessee — Bonnaroo’s 24th festival closes Sunday night with Noah Kahan headlining the What Stage, the final headliner slot at the end of a four-day run that pulled an estimated 80,000 fans back to the 700-acre Bonnaroo Farm an hour southeast of Nashville. Skrillex opened Thursday, The Strokes had Friday, Rüfüs Du Sol owned Saturday, and Kahan closes The Farm — the festival’s first-ever Sunday-headliner slot for a folk-influenced songwriter.
Kahan, the Vermont singer-songwriter behind 2022’s quadruple-platinum Stick Season, took the headliner slot Sunday afternoon with what tour-side sources described as a 95-minute set built around the rebuilt Stick Season setlist and four new songs from his unfinished third album, due in early 2027. He is the first artist whose primary genre is folk to close The Farm since the festival’s 2002 launch — a piece of programming the Live Nation-owned festival has been pushing internally as proof of the lineup’s evolution.
The rest of Sunday’s bill is its own kind of statement. Kesha is on the What Stage two slots before Kahan. Role Model, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Clipse, Modest Mouse, Daily Bread and Mariah the Scientist round out the closing-day What and Which Stages, with Big Gigantic, Turnover, Spacey Jane and LSZEE rotating across the satellite stages until dawn. The closing day’s 11-act top half is, by Live Nation’s own count, the most diverse set of genres ever assigned to a single Bonnaroo day.
Bonnaroo’s 2026 attendance numbers are not yet public, but tour-side estimates put paid attendance for the full weekend at roughly 80,000 — below the festival’s 2018 peak of 85,000, above the 65,000 that came out for the 2023 mud-soaked rebuild after a cancelled 2021. Single-day passes returned this year for the first time since 2007. Manchester, the small Coffee County town the festival shares its name with, has reported a record run of room nights through the four days, with overflow accommodation stretching into Murfreesboro and Tullahoma.
The weekend’s biggest non-musical story was, predictably, weather. A Saturday-afternoon thunderstorm cell pushed by the same front that ended Rosie O’Donnell’s prison visit early rolled across Coffee County around 4 p.m. local. Production paused both What Stage sound checks for 35 minutes. Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Sunday slot has been moved up 25 minutes as a buffer for a forecast secondary cell. The festival’s lightning protocol, which dates to a 2007 fatal strike, ran its first full pre-headliner check of the weekend.
According to Jambase’s full livestream schedule, Kahan’s headline set is the only Sunday slot Bonnaroo has cleared for global broadcast through Hulu’s official festival channel and YouTube’s Live Music vertical. Streamers can also watch the Kesha set, the Tedeschi Trucks Band set and three Which Stage rotations in the same window. The full broadcast clears at 1:30 a.m. Central, after Kahan’s expected encore.
The cultural shape of Bonnaroo 2026 has been read, locally, as the festival recommitting to indoor-American songwriting after a decade of EDM-driven lineups. Nashville.com’s lineup-day analysis noted that for the first time since 2014 a majority of the closing-Sunday headliner block is built around acoustic instrumentation rather than electronic. Kesha is the prominent exception. So is Skrillex on Thursday. The middle of the run leans, deliberately, into rooms full of guitars.
Bonnaroo is one of two major US festivals to clear its 2026 weekend without a cancellation or major scaling-down — the other being Coachella, which closed two months ago. Lollapalooza is in Chicago at the end of July. Outside Lands follows in San Francisco in August. The 2026 US festival calendar, which had its highest-volume year in a decade, has built its first all-cleared summer since 2019 around a smaller average headcount per festival but a steadier mid-card. Bonnaroo’s Sunday is the practical summary of that strategy.
Live Nation’s preliminary 2027 dates were posted at the festival entrance on Friday: Bonnaroo 2027 is locked to June 10 through June 13. Barnburner’s wrap from the weekend reported that on-site re-up sales for the 2027 weekend cleared 18,000 by the end of Saturday — a number Live Nation has not previously disclosed for any festival year. The walk-up gate for Sunday is, as of mid-afternoon, sold out. Kahan goes on at 9:40 p.m. Central. The rain, depending on the cell speed, may make it before he does.
