Strokes, Lumineers lead Minnesota Yacht Club’s 2026 lineup

Next year’s Minnesota Yacht Club festival is going to be a little more in tune with the 21st century music scene than the heavy 1990s flavor of its first two years.

The Strokes, the Lumineers and Matchbox Twenty are listed as the headliners for the three-day mid-July festival on St. Paul’s Harriet Island alongside a rocky undercard that includes the Black Keys, Cage the Elephant, Lord Huron, Mt. Joy, All-American Rejects, Lucy Dacus, Geese, the Fray, Passion Pit, Dashboard Confessional and homegrown favorites Atmosphere and Semisonic.

Scheduled for its third annual installment July 17-19, Minnesota Yacht Club quickly became the biggest music festival in the state during its first two years with lineups that leaned heavily on both ‘90s acts and more women rockers than most other modern rock fests.

Those traits — evidenced last year with names including Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Hozier, Sheryl Crow, Garbage, Alabama Shakes and Gigi Perez — are somewhat lost in the lineup announcement sent out Tuesday, which instead leans more into 2000s-era hitmakers. This one’s more for the millennials than the Gen-Xers.

Organizers did at least book some lesser-known women singer/songwriters or female-fronted rock bands making a buzz, including Die Spitz, Couch, Jensen McRae and the aforementioned Dacus. Alongside Dacus (known from the supergroup Boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers), the buzziest and edgiest name on the lineup is Geese, an experimental indie-rock quartet from Brooklyn, N.Y., whose 2025 album is ranking high on many critics’ year-end lists.

Semisonic’s booking at their big hometown festival is a makeup date from last year, when the “Closing Time” hitmakers had to cancel their appearance after bassist John Munson suffered a stroke. He returned to the stage bright and shiny again last weekend playing annual holiday concerts with his other well-known band, the New Standards, at the State Theatre.

Other Minnesota-born names on the 2026 MYC lineup include Yam Haus, Night Moves, Porch Light, Prize Horse and Heart to Gold.

Presale ticket access for the 2026 festival begins on Thursday at 10 a.m. with a code sent out after signing up for email or text alerts at MinnesotaYachtClubFestival.com. Prices are expected to go up modestly from last year, when they started at $275-$295 for three-day general-admission passes and $150 for a single-day ticket.

Minnesota Yacht Club is produced by Texas-based concert company C3 Presents, which also runs the popular Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits music festivals. C3 specializes in offering several different layers of VIP options at its events. For last year’s Yacht Club, those starting at $395 for a “GA+” three-day pass on up to $880 for a Riverboat pass and $2,300 for Platinum access.

With its maiden voyage in 2024 using a curious name that played up its riverfront setting, the Yacht Club offered a higher level of music fest production that Twin Cities fans had not seen since Live Nation tried (and failed) to launch the River’s Edge Festival in 2012, also held on Harriet Island. It featured several VIP areas, an eclectic variety of food and drink stands, and even paddleboat cruises for some of the attendees.

Tuesday’s mid-December lineup announcement was something of an early surprise for Yacht Club fans, because the past two years’ lineups were not announced until late January. The announcement was likely bumped up at least in part because of extra competition the festival will face for outdoor concertgoers in 2026.

Live Nation (which now co-owns C3) will offer many more outdoor summer concerts in 2026 at its new Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee. More festivals are expected, too, with C3 planning a country music offshoot of the Minnesota Yacht Club. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon also is planning to bring back his Eaux Claires music festival of the late 2010s to nearby Eau Claire, Wis.

With a layout naturally limited by the “island” setting — it’s actually just a peninsula now, but same difference — C3 representatives have said they do not plan to increase the capacity much beyond the 35,000 ticketholders allowed the first two years of the festival.

“I think we found our sweet spot with that number, and we intend to stick with it,” C3’s promoter in charge of the festival, Tim Sweetwood, told the Minnesota Star Tribune last year.

Sweetwood’s team mostly garnered praise from attendees in Year One except for gripes over long concession lines, a problem they improved on but did not solve in 2025. Last year they heard complaints over a storm evacuation that cut Hozier’s headlining set short on the first day, and over increased concession prices that saw most beers and cocktails costing $18-$20 or more after taxes.

Here’s how the MYC 2026 lineup breaks down by day:

Friday, July 17: The Lumineers, Black Keys, Mt. Joy, the Fray, Dashboard Confessional, Shakey Graves, Marcy Playground, Night Moves, Prize Horse, Pat Kennedy