Portugal’s NOS Alive Is A Jewel In Global Music Festival Crown

For years now, Uproxx has been advocating for concert tourism. A live show, be it a one-off concert from your favorite band or a festival that introduces you to a country’s musical perspective, is a wonderful peg for leaving your comfort zone and seeing the world. While this decade has had a couple unfortunate years that prevented such activities, you don’t have to go farther than Instagram to see that this is becoming a major thing, thanks in large part to Taylor Swift’s jaunts across Asia and now Europe for The Eras Tour. It seems that people I know from all walks of life are pegging travels to see her in far-off locations, and having the time of their lives in the process.

Over the past weekend, music fans had the opportunity for this kind of experience just outside of Lisbon, Portugal, as the gorgeous waterfront locale hosted their annual NOS Alive festival. Since debuting in 2007, the festival has hosted some of the biggest artists on the planet, ranging from Coldplay to The Weeknd to Metallica. This year, the festival, which takes place on the Algés riverside, featured headliners Dua Lipa, Arcade Fire, and Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam actually headlined the very first edition of the festivals, as did one of the weekend’s sub-headliners, The Smashing Pumpkins. Below the top line was a rich mix of both regional and international artists, including the country’s most popular local artist in terms of Spotify streams, T-Rex, Arlo Parks, past Uproxx cover artists Ashnikko and Khruangbin, Black Pumas, Kenya Grace, and many more. It was an eclectic mix that underscored the festival’s evolution to embrace a wide variety of genres, while still remaining rooted in its rock roots.

Beside the music, one of the coolest things was a particular aspect of the festival where you could roam down temporary buildings made to look like Lisbon’s iconic colorful and tiled architecture. The buildings hosted branded activations, food vendors, and at the end of the “Fado Street,” a café that featured sets of the traditional Portuguese music style of the same name. It was a way to incorporate hyper-local flavor into a global event, and one that would be amazing to see more festivals attempt. It was little details like this set NOS Alive apart from its peers.

In terms of the headliners, Pearl Jam’s closing set on Saturday felt like the most anticipated from the audience. Throughout the weekend and particularly on their performance night, Pearl Jam t-shirts could be seen everywhere on site, while the festival felt like it reached its greatest capacity for their set. For his part, bandleader Eddie Vedder did his best to honor the moment, reading off some (truly terrible) Portuguese to communicate with his fans, noting that longtime keyboardist Boom Gaspar’s family originated from the country, and underscoring that it was the final show from their European support of their recent Dark Matter album, a tour that had a truly scary moment as an illness spread through their camp and forced them to cancel several dates.

It has to be noted that during their set, news of the attempted assassination of American presidential candidate Donald Trump spread throughout the crowd. It doesn’t appear that Vedder’s encore solo performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which was prefaced by a message about the hope for healing and unity with upcoming American elections, was a reaction to this, but it still felt strangely coincidental for the moment, and all the more impactful.

Elsewhere, the band delivered a load of fan favorites (“Yellow Ledbetter,” “Jeremy,” “Porch,” “Daughter,” and “Do The Evolution” were standouts) while giving a healthy dose of recent material. They don’t quite play as long as they used to and I personally think they could have folded in a little less of Ten and a little more of their other beloved work, but Pearl Jam are still one of the great bands of our time, and the crowd ate up every second.

For her part, Dua Lipa also drew a massive audience, virtually as large as Pearl Jam’s. Supporting her recent Radical Optimism album, the Albanian pop force proved ideal for the festival environment. She has just enough massive hits that it never felt too long before hearing a song that was deeply known, while her dance moves and stage presence were charming and evocative, showing no real weakness in her stadium-sized presentation.

The most interesting thing to note is how she didn’t lean heavily on the new material, opting only to perform a handful of tracks from the new album. It is unclear if this is a reaction to the tepid reception for the album or the reality of playing in a festival setting where people want to hear the hits, but it was absolutely the right choice, though the best recent songs (“Houdini,” “Training Season”) sounded perfectly in place with her modern classics (“Levitating,” “Physical,” and “New Rules”). When she eventually makes her way to America for arena and festival headlining performances, fans are going to be blown away.

Speaking of knowing how to craft a setlist, Arcade Fire’s headlining set on Thursday was about as ideal as could be imagined. Only one song each were performed from their most recent albums, “Rabbit Hole” and “Everything Now” respectively, while they opened their performance with four straight songs from their 2004 classic debut Funeral (“Tunnels,” “Laika,” “Power Out,” and “Rebellion (Lies)”). There are still few better live bands in the world, and for moments, the adrenaline rush of hearing these songs, along with some of their transcendent numbers like “Afterlife” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” was enough to push the controversies surrounding the band to the back of the mind.

This was only temporary relief, though, as I spent the next several days considering what it feels like to be a fan of the band in 2024. It’s a lot to unpack, and it’s enough that, for me at least, I’ll never be able to enjoy the band without an asterisk, knowing that leader Win Butler is at best an admitted creep and at worst an alleged sexual abuser. It’s a situation made more complicated by the way the band portrayed themselves throughout their career with moral platitudes and self-aggrandizing gestures, and warrants conversations about cancelation, the history of bad people in rock, power dynamics, and the gray area that Arcade Fire seems to inhabit now. Put in the shortest of possible ways: it stinks to have to think about all this stuff when you want to enjoy a rock concert, and I’m still mad at the band about it. But, that’s much less important compared to the alleged damage to women of which Butler is accused. I can say that the band performed well, that for moments I felt the same emotions that I felt 20 years ago with the band, and that the crowd, though easily the smallest of the headliners, seemed to enjoy it as well.

Elsewhere, it was fun to see some of Uproxx’s cover stars win over international audiences, as Khruangbin and Ashnikko both provided lively sets. Arlo Parks was a last second replacement for Tyla and proved more than ready for main stage attention, particularly with standout closers “Devotion” and “Softly.” And Alec Benjamin proved to be a charming discovery with a lively pop set that was personable and proficient.

On the more negative end, The Smashing Pumpkins seem to be in a bit of a wilderness period. From their ensembles — now the members all seem to dress like they are in different, deeply unstylish bands, and not in the fun way that Big Thief does — to their stage presence to their song choices, I just long for the band to remember that there was a time when they were very cool. It’s not too late for them to return to it, but instead they keep adding members who change the band’s aesthetic and drift farther from what made them great in the first place. I’m glad I got to see them when James Iha first returned in 2018, but I worry that they’ll never get back to that second peak.

But even at that moment, I could look around and be reminded of the beautiful festival I was at, in a beautiful city, in a beautiful country. And that’s a big part of the joy of concert tourism, that the experience of going somewhere greatly affects the experience of the concert, and vice versa. For the many local fans at NOS Alive, this was a great chance to see many international acts that likely don’t visit Lisbon as often as they do their home countries, and that energy could be felt in the audience. And for NOS Alive in particular, it proved to have a few special tricks up its sleeve, including ace production, great sight-lines, and, honestly, one of the best festival bathrooms situations I’ve ever witnessed. It also didn’t cater to VIP audiences the way so many other festivals do (it was reported that the President of Portugal could be seen in the Pearl Jam pit with the regular audience members). Everything was very democratic and led to a camaraderie in the crowd, something other festivals could take note of as more lean into tiers that end up providing more vibe-sucking division. When you let the most eager fans have the prime locations, the performances become all the better.

In a crowded festival landscape, NOS Alive is a jewel in the crown of global events. Its reputation as a special place to see special musical moments is earned.