By its eighteenth birthday, you’d think LEVITATION would have settled into itself, learned some manners, maybe gotten a little complacent. But the opposite keeps happening: the thing just keeps getting weirder, bigger, harder to pin down. It has morphed itself into a gathering where psych, punk, metal, indie, dream pop, and darkwave all cram into the same bloodstream and somehow make sense together. This year’s edition, which landed September 25th through 28th, promised and delivered the most dizzying lineup yet.

On the daylight side of things, Palmer Events Center hosted a roll call of giants: Pavement, TV on the Radio, and Mastodon all anchoring a bill that seems designed to encroach the essences of nostalgia and endurance. Built to Spill flexed their guitar heroics in broad daylight, while Unknown Mortal Orchestra floated their cosmic funk through the atrium. Boy Harsher, Blonde Redhead, and La Femme ensured that the vibe evolved into darker, stranger, more seductive as the sun dipped.

But LEVITATION has never been just a daytime thing. When Palmer shuts down at 10:30 p.m., the city opens up. Night Shows scattered across downtown clubs—Stubb’s, Mohawk, Elysium, Kingdom, 29th Street Ballroom—where attendees caught Model/Actriz exploding molecules in real time, Pixel Grip electrifying dance floors, or Being Dead making a convincing case that chaos is a kind of order. It’s the part of the behemoth that is LEVITATION that feels like a secret: smaller rooms, sweatier walls, sets that you’ll brag about seeing years later to those who were unfortunate enough to not attend.

What LEVITATION has perfected over the years is the balance: headliners that feel insurmountable, cult heroes that feel essential, and new artists that feel like discovery in real time. It’s a festival where you can wander between Destroyer’s precise melancholy and The Sword’s stoner riffage and never once feel disoriented—because the through line isn’t genre, it’s intensity.

So no, LEVITATION isn’t psych rock anymore, not strictly. It’s a gravitational pull. A community. A reason to go without sleep for four days in September. In Austin, the city of too much live music, LEVITATION remains the one that refuses to touch the ground.