July 2024. Biden was president. Gas was cheaper. Theaters had just dropped “Deadpool & Wolverine”. It wasn’t the best of times, but what we wouldn’t give to go back to that year’s Nice, A Fest.
It was the fourth iteration of Nice, and it felt like the festival was exploding. Davis Square metamorphosed into one big music bonanza, with wall-to-wall indoor shows and audiences packed into a flashy outdoor stage area, showcasing a full lineup of artists, including Boston champions, Vundabar. Truly, it was festival sorcery.
When 2025 came around, we received an update from the festival organizers: “we realized the best way to come back bigger, better, and NICER is to take a little breather”. The festival went on hiatus for 2025. We wondered, with eager anticipation, how the festival might level up in 2026.
Was it going to be an exorbitant 3D visual system? Hollywood headliners? A wild Red Bull-sponsored rollercoaster? No, it wasn’t any of that. Instead, the outdoor stage was discontinued and the event shrank from four to three full days of music. Maybe the festival was feeling the same financial pressures as the rest of the economy. 2026 was never going to be an excessive “Great Gatsby”-style blowout.
Yet the spirit of local music remains undefeated. Nice still has its sparkle with an impressive schedule featuring more than 80 artists, a kickoff event, after-parties, a Small Mart vendor market, DJ sets, visual art by Digital Awareness and a new additional stage at the Dragon’s Lair (next to Dragon’s Pizza).
Along with Nice venue veterans Crystal Ballroom and The Rockwell, the festival breaks new ground at the local pizzeria. And why host a stage at a pizzeria if you’re not going to make it a 90’s Pizza Hut paradise? Stage co-producers Junk Drawer and Super Party Bros team up to amplify the pizza parlor experience with vintage surprises, including arcade cabinet fun like four-player “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Grab a slice (we recommend the Pickleback Pie), catch the lineup and kick Krang back into Dimension X.
Highlighted headliners
The Indie rounds up the top acts we’re excited about, with contributions from David Jubinksy, Christian Uva and Michael Gutierrez.
Krill
Gather ‘round, children, and let me tell you about the wily and woolly ways of the “Indie Sleaze” era, which wasn’t all that sleazy, unless you were a rich kid who could afford coke.
Pabst Blue Ribbon was king. There didn’t exist a festival that Sailor Jerry’s Spiced Rum didn’t want to co-sponsor. Bands punned on the names of celebrities with social handles like @krilliamhmacy, or doubled-up letters like MMOSS or PPALMM, or substituted numbers for letters like S4lem. It was a simpler time.
Nice digs deep into the bag of indie chestnuts to spotlight Krill, a band that had a lot to do with establishing what indie rock sounded like in Boston in that era, until the band departed for NYC, or Chicago, or somewhere, and broke up, or changed their name to Knot, or reformed as Krill, or never broke up in the first place.
If you swim in the waters of the Boston underground, you’ve been influenced by this band, even if you don’t know it, because Krill is just in the air, or water, or both. (MG)
Black Beach
Art rockers Black Beach are in the running with Perennial for the “Most Aesthetically Coherent Album Art” competition. I sense a New Wave cinema influence. Their music is a heavy, medium tempo, guitar-driven stew that’s big on mood and ambiance. Loudspeaker vocals add to the effect. (MG)
Twen
Twen returns to the fest, last seen in 2022? The psych rock duo of Jane Fitzsimmons and Ian Jones just released a Japanese version of the lead single “Tapdance in Limbo” off their latest album “Fate Euphoric.” Much like Spinal Tap’s “Sex Farm,” the Twen song is fated to be a massive hit in Japan. Fitzsimmons’ vocals and Jones’ guitar stretch out like a lost highway beneath blue skies, whatever the language. Prayers up for Mick Shrimpton, the Spinal Tap drummer who exploded onstage in Tokyo. (MG)
Mallcops
Dear Mallcops,
The whole city is rooting for you.
Sincerely,
-Somerville
Good things come in pairs. Two years since the last Nice. Two years since Mallcops won Indie Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards. The local musicians behind Mallcops – Jimmy & Joey Del Ponte, Dan and Tyler – capture the sound of Somerville: indie, witty and earnest. The band is excited to premiere their new EP “35mm Memories” at their hometown festival.
With the EP, Mallcops is reflecting back. Joey (the senior Del Ponte brother) notes,
“‘35mm Memories’ is inspired by snapshots of nostalgia from our childhoods. We were tapping into memories of running around backyards, going to Blockbuster, and playing under streetlights… There’s a sense of longing for these simpler times and a desire to return to the analog age.”
It’s about to be the summer of Mallcops and Somerville gets first dibs. (DJ)
Coral Moons
An uptempo pop ensemble with sweet melodies and propulsive songwriting. Lead vocalist Carly Kraft delivers tender vocals with a quiet touch of brass. Their latest EP “Calling Me Insane” won’t slow down for anything – it’s full of ideas, and is always excitedly reaching for the next one. Let’s rewind, though, to the song “Davis Square” from 2025’s “summer of u.” How perfect is that for Nice?
“so I took the red line
up to Davis Square
where you said that you would be there
but you never showed
it’s always been our place to go.”
What’s the place in the place, though? It’s Mike’s Food & Spirits, right? Their drink menu has become really unhinged in the best way lately. (MG)
The best of the rest
Friday
Dead Gowns
Portland’s Geneviève Beaudoin delivers a raw and spellbinding brand of folk rock that can wax comical about life’s bugbears or drive you to the emotional edge. She collaborates with top notch musicians to build the Dead Gowns sound, floating aloft the astral planes of cosmic Americana. There’s a delicate interplay of pedal steel and Beaudoin’s vocals on a recent live version of “Wet Dog” that is out of this world. (MG)
Landowner
Post punk agitpoppers Landowner arrive straight from the knife’s edge of the Tofu Curtain to gawk at you in 4/4 time. Their recent album “Assumption” is another strong addition to their discography, which melds “desert blues” style attack with a stutterstep version of dance rock. Lead vocalist Dan Shaw writes lyrical screeds that don’t doubletalk what’s on the end of every fork. (MG)
Mal Devisa
The indie experimentalist out of Amherst, Mal Devisa, pushes her sound in a lot of different directions. Her voice, though, is usually the chief instrument and lead conductor that determines whether a sound trends rock, soul, ambient or folk. When she’s not singing, she might be blowing a saxophone, like she does on the 17-minute noise-and-jazz jam “Heated Floors,” the title track from the debut EP by her latest collab project, Heated Floors. (MG)
Sad13
Sadie Dupuis’s (Speedy Ortiz) solo project Sad13 returns with a full-length album every five years or so. We’ve got “Slugger” (2016), “Haunted Painting” (2020), and the latest “1331,” dropping this month on Exploding In Sound Records. That output splits the difference between the return rates of “annual” cicadas and “periodical” cicadas, the latter of which emerge every 13 to 17 years. Neither species of cicada made Rolling Stone’s “50 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list, whereas Dupuis did, so that should also be taken into account. (MG)
Autumn Astronauts
If you had to use any band’s music to power a spacecraft, I’d choose Autumn Astronauts’ tunes. Their pop punk is straight rocket fuel. It’s kinetic, punchy, loud and crunchy. The lo-fi Boston trio put out its second EP, “The Season The Profession,” last August, and then pretty much disappeared. But now they’ve come back from the dark side of the moon to make their Nice debut. Sound the trumpets! Dance around as they rock out to keep yourself from getting too sad if you listen too closely to their lyrics. (CU)
Evan Greer
No one writes protest songs anymore?
Fox News tried to warn you about this one… By day she leads the fight against AI and Big Tech surveillance via Fight for the Future (a grass roots non-profit). By night she helps fuel a coalition of activists through songs of justice and liberation. Or if you ask Republican Congresswoman and failed South Carolina gubernatorial candidate, Nancy Mace, she’s just a, “mentally ill man in a dress.”
The First Amendment, freedom of expression, and the right to privacy is nice. Greer recognizes an urgency for hope now more than ever. Says Greer,
“Everyone knows the world is on fire and everything is terrible and we can’t afford to live here and ICE is kidnapping and murdering our neighbors. People want to know that there is something they can do about it”.
Want to join the fight? Catch Evan Greer’s set. She’ll put a tune in your head and a song in your heart. (DJ)
Perennial
There’s art rockers and then there’s art history rockers. Perennial are the latter. They love to shout out movements and trends from the history of art with explosive two-minute bursts of three-piece fury. Their latest release is called “Modernism.” The garage rockers also dress up like they should be handing out copies of Le Monde in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” which only adds to their allure. (MG)
Pinklids
Remember when we used to have a thing called Boston Calling? If you’re old enough to remember the last one in 2025, then you’re old enough to remember Pinklids throwing down on the Orange Stage. The post punk outfit will hit the stage at Nice on the heels of new album “Electrician’s Fever Dream.” Objectively, a great album title. Look for uptempo rock attack, guitar fills firing off like roman candles, and the explosive vocals of Amber Lawson steering the ship. (MG)
Rick Rude
Dover’s Rick Rude can belt out colossal formations of power rock, Granite State-style. The guitar work is a combination of confident attack and whimsy. On their latest full-length album, “Laverne,” the vocal duties get traded among three bandmembers, Ben Troy, Jordan Holtz, and Chris Kennedy, which keeps the musical terrain as varied as the topography of the White Mountains. Note to novice hikers: check the weather report, dress in layers and take your trash with you. (MG)
Scrivener
When does a band become an orchestra? Indie folkers Scrivener rolled deep on their latest album “Nuclear Winter in Our Hometowns,” adding banjos, saxophones, trumpets, cellos, violins, and backup vocalists into the mix. You can expect at least some of that to make its way into the live version, as evidenced by their Somerville Porchfest performance, which featured a bite-sized orchestral strings section. This is a band that sounds better every time I hear them. (MG)
Saturday
Dot Dev
What’s the opposite of going solo?
Acts like Beyoncé or Justin Timberlake make for legendary solo acts, but will they ever revive the magic of Destiny’s Child or *NSYNC that made us fall in love with them in the first place? This year, Dot Dev is going off the superstar-beaten path. They’re not going solo – they’re squadding up.
This isn’t going to be a routine version of Dot Dev with some decorative guitar in the background. It’s a whole new experience. Dev explained, “Everything is completely re-interpreted — it doesn’t really sound anything like the record I put out last year. It’s a totally new thing with my lyrical wiring and storytelling as the anchor.”
Dev is a Boston music scene staple and therefore a Nice staple. Through different projects, Dev has landed on previous Nice lineups, but they don’t take it for granted. “People have seen my shtick before. I wanted to surprise and excite festgoers this time around.” New Nice, new Dev. (DJ)
Exit 18
It’s not 2016. It’s 2006. Exit 18 returns to Nice Fest to play the kind of emo music you heard the girl with the swooped black-and-red bangs play from her iPod Nano in high school around the time of the housing crisis. The loud, glitzy alt band from Beverly started in 2013 and put out some singles over the past few years while playing basements across Greater Boston.
They released their first album, “Incantations,” last December – and people loved it. After a few hundred thousand streams and a show at The Sinclair, Exit 18 has arrived. Even though their sound feels like it belongs in the time of Paramore and MCR, now is the perfect time to hear them. (CU)
Baby Bowler
This is the story of three high school friends who love playing emo together and took a chance on themselves. The world was trying to pull Joey, Mike, and Conor apart. Through different jobs, different preoccupations, different bands. It’s been five years since Baby Bowler gave us their sophomore EP, “Homework.” In that time the band has found a new perspective and refinement. It may be sappy but nonetheless touching: music brought them back together. (DJ)
Cade Earick
Also known as: your favorite band’s favorite sound guy’s band.
An amateur sound guy mixes; the accomplished sound engineer paints. They know when to uplift the neon brushstrokes of an E string frequency and when to quell the muddy smears of a kick drum. Now it’s their time to get off the soundboard and into the spotlight. Please welcome Boston’s sound sweetheart, Cade Earick, to the Nice stage.
Through service, Cade Earick has become a necessity of the Boston music scene. They’ve mixed everyone from promising locals to world touring headliners. No matter who they’re mixing, they bring the trust and respect to be invited into an artist’s live experience.
Now the Boston music scene returns that very same trust with this Cade Earick celebration. “It means a lot that people have welcomed me into this scene with open arms,” says Earick, “and to be able to finally play it and play alongside my friends is so special to me.” Don’t miss this performance from a true artist who knows exactly how a song is supposed to sound. (DJ)
Class President
The only link at Class President’s Instagram directs you straight to the Nice website. Who would question their commitment to Sparkle Motion? If they don’t want to link their debut album, 2025’s “Kids These Days,” I’ll at least shout it out. It’s an effervescent, and occasionally introspective, pop punk album that’s drowning in satisfying hooks and catchy chord progressions. Available now on Spotify and morally-compromised streaming platforms everywhere. (MG)
JVK
Boston’s JVK craft hard-rocking, glammy riffs that punch you in the gut with a robust low end: the bass, the bass drum, the weird robot voice that inhabits the nooks and crannies of their latest album, “Pop Culture Affair.” The result is a kind of rock n roll songwriting that begs for quality subwoofers. Nice should have plenty on hand. Lead vocalist Jo Krieger has a knack for lyrical anthems. (MG)
Kind Being
A relationship with a bandmate is incomparable to any other relationship. They’re more than a best friend, a lover, or a sister. They share a form of love, fun and joy no one else will ever understand. This year, Kind Being is celebrating 5 years of that very bond forged in bandhood.
The band formed as a pandemic baby. Unlike many COVID bands, though, which went the way of COVID puppies, Kind Being has endured. Credit belongs to a firm focus on that bandhood bond and sidelining superficial benchmarks of “success.” They don’t care about their Instagram follower conversion ratio – they’re just in it for the music.
After five years, Kind Being has upgraded its production (e.g. upgrading phone beats to laptop beats), but their authenticity is just as perfect as it was on day one. Cheers to a half decade of Kind Being. (DJ)
Pintail
Emo, cosmic country, indie rock. Pintail is the kind of band that would map on perfectly to the “underground rock” slot at Solid Sound. Somebody call Jeff Tweedy. Chief songwriter Tyler Zucco-Bernard is a wiz when it comes to loading in interesting sonic details without burdening the ear under the load of excess complications. The title of their latest LP “Bury A Body, Grow A Person” demonstrates a glaring lack of understanding about basic human biology and physiology. (MG)
Sunday
Headband
Slanted and possibly enchanted indie rock that delivers jangly refrains and a bit of wobble. Wobbly by design. The song “A Day in the Life of a Hole in a Sock” gives a dubious subject the Daniel Johnston-style lyrical treatment it deserves, both earnest and absurd. A sock with a missing part is at least not itself missing. (MG)
MonaVeli
Brockton’s MonaVeli is an alt rap, RnB, pop mashup special. Her latest album “SIREN EXP26,” available via EveryDejaVu Records, works its magic at multiple levels. There’s even a club-ready “deep house” remix for a closer. When it comes to live performance, though, hip hop gets foregrounded and her intricate rhyme schemes take second place to nothing and no one. (MG)
School
Melodic indie rock out of Rat City that can trend into fuzzy, buzzy, gazey territory. School is surprisingly easy to Google, given its nondescript name. Whatever promotional bandwidth the band has left after pushing Nice has been devoted to “Flesh Casket,” a release dropping on July 13. Is that spruced up version of the song “Flesh Casket” that’s already streaming at Bandcamp? Or is that a brand new album by the same name? We’ll find out soon.
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