Evolution Festival, the massive music festival that has taken over Forest Park the last three falls, has announced it will not occur in 2026. In a message posted to the festival website as well as its social media pages, the Evolution team stated a desire to not have to compete with the numerous even larger events happening throughout the country next year, including the World Cup, the Summer Olympics, and America’s 250th birthday. The full statement is below:
This reasoning may seem a bit odd as the America’s birthday celebrations would take place two full months prior to Evolution’s normal dates, the Olympics are in California, and the World Cup doesn’t get any closer to here than Kansas City, so none of those would seem to be drawing too many people from the St. Louis area. But St. Louis Public Radio got the full story from Evolution’s Executive Producer, Steve Shankman, that it wasn’t so much the competition for attendees, but the competition for sponsors. “Instead of everybody hitting up Anheuser-Busch and Worldwide Technology,” Shankman says, “we feel the right thing to do is to step aside.” STL PR does also note that attendance did drop for this year’s fest, as the 2025 edition (headlined by Sublime, Lenny Kravitz, Public Enemy, and Father John Misty) drew about 17,000 attendees, about a 30% drop from the approximately 25,000 that attended the 2024 edition featuring the Killers, Beck, and Tom Morello.
While this is a bummer, it’s a much better situation than 2018 when Loufest, Evolution’s Forest Park predecessor, canceled their final announced iteration just three days before it was scheduled to start. Here’s hoping it will be able to return as strong as ever in 2027. In the meantime, please enjoy our photo galleries from this year’s Evolution Festival here and here, or check out all of our past Evolution Festival coverage here. | Jason Green
