Robbie Williams, Red Hot Chili Peppers and more for Mad Cool Festival 2023

Mad Cool Festival has announced a stacked lineup for 2023 that includes Robbie Williams, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queens of the Stone Age among the headliners.

The Madrid bash returns for its sixth edition between July 6 and 8 this summer, and returns to a three-day format after expanding to five days for a bumper post-pandemic edition last year. Joining the aforementioned bill-toppers in the Spanish capital are Lizzo, Lil Nas X, Machine Gun Kelly, The 1975, The Black Keys, Sam Smith, Liam Gallagher and The Prodigy. The lineup poster still shows two headline slots empty, on Friday 7 and Saturday 8, suggesting that the list of big names is not yet finalised.

Full weekend tickets went on sale on December 15, followed two weeks later by day tickets being made available on December 29. Purchase options for both can be seen here. Also on this year’s lineup in the Valdebebas area of the city are Rina Sawayama, Sigur Rós, Paolo Nutini, Puscifer and Franz Ferdinand. You can see the full poster below.

Since its inception in 2016, Mad Cool has become one of the biggest names on the European summer calendar, thanks to its consistently impressive blends of pop, rock and alternative names. Last year, it returned after a pandemic-enforced break with a lineup that included Metallica, Twenty One Pilots, The Killers, Muse and Kings of Leon. The event was nominated in the Best Festival in the World category at the NME Awards in 2020; last year, the festival’s booker, Cindy Castillo Núñez, spoke to that publication about the importance of gender equality at Mad Cool.

“Diversity in all ways enhances creativity and brings different perspectives to music,” she said. “This not only gives us not innovation, but richness,” she explains before going on to add that from a business point of view, “diversity brings inspiration, insight & growth to teams which makes a business more competitive.”

She is part of a 30-person full-time team at the festival that is 70% female, and went on to say: “any situation of equal representation behind the scenes will for sure always contribute directly or indirectly to inspire equal representation in all other areas of the music business.”