Down The Rabbit Hole

Down The Rabbit Hole does not simply use a green landscape as scenery for a music festival; it tries to make that landscape part of the programme. De Groene Heuvels, near Nijmegen between the Maas and Waal rivers, offers fields, woodland, paths and a lake where festivalgoers can swim during the day. Large tents, hidden clubs, restaurants, art installations and strange temporary structures are scattered through that geography. Since its 2014 debut, DTRH has treated wandering as one of its central activities. The line-up matters enormously, but so does the possibility of leaving the timetable behind, disappearing into the trees and finding something that was never among the reasons you originally bought a ticket.

MOJO first revealed the project during Lowlands 2013, so the early description of Down The Rabbit Hole as Lowlands’ younger sibling was unavoidable. It shared organisers, a taste for adventurous contemporary music, camping and the belief that a festival should extend far beyond its main stages. Yet the first edition, held June 27–29, 2014, established a different scale. Only around ten thousand people arrived at De Groene Heuvels for The Black Keys, Damon Albarn, Foals, MGMT, Warpaint, Little Dragon, De Staat and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. There was room to explore rather than rush, and the organisers openly spoke about growing gradually rather than immediately pushing the site towards maximum capacity.

Recognition came quickly. After that first summer, Down The Rabbit Hole won Best New Festival at the European Festival Awards. Its directors were already speaking in unusually long terms about building something that could last for decades. Growth followed steadily: roughly thirty-five thousand visitors by the end of the 2010s, around forty-five thousand after the pandemic, and more than fifty thousand for the first time in 2025. Yet each expansion was accompanied by more activity between the headline shows — art, theatre, restaurants, workshops, pop-up performances, night programming and areas whose purpose was sometimes simply to encourage people to stop following the obvious route.

The main stages developed their own mythology. Hotot, Fuzzy Lop and Teddy Widder are named after rabbit breeds, an appropriately playful detail for a festival built around a descent into another world. Around them sit woodland spaces, tiny performance areas, clubs and temporary constructions that can change from year to year. The lake is equally important to the rhythm of the weekend. A day can begin with a swim before the first band and end many hours later in a hidden disco after the large stages have stopped. Camping extends that continuity further: people begin arriving on Thursday and do not fully leave until Monday, turning a three-day programme into something closer to a short communal holiday.

Musically, Down The Rabbit Hole has always been broader than its indie reputation suggests. Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty, Warpaint and Spoon shared 2017 with Bonobo, Nicolas Jaar, De La Soul, Soulwax and Moderat. Two years later, Thom Yorke, Editors, Foals and Vampire Weekend appeared beside Robyn, Skepta, Janelle Monáe, Grace Jones, Rosalía, The Roots, Kamasi Washington, Khruangbin and Underworld. That flexibility remains one of the festival’s most useful qualities. A day might move from guitars and intimate songwriting into hip hop, jazz or soul before the night disappears into house, techno and experimental electronics. The common language is less a genre than a certain confidence that the audience will follow interesting programming wherever it leads.

The pandemic created the only prolonged break in the festival’s history. The July 2020 edition was cancelled when the Netherlands prohibited major summer events. For 2021, MOJO attempted an unusually elaborate rescue plan: move Down The Rabbit Hole to late August and temporarily relocate it to the Lowlands site in Biddinghuizen as Rabbits in the Lowlands. That edition also collapsed when government restrictions continued to prohibit multi-day festivals with camping. The real return came in July 2022 at De Groene Heuvels, with Gorillaz, Erykah Badu, HAIM, The War on Drugs, The Smile, Disclosure, St. Vincent, Phoebe Bridgers, Little Simz, Bicep and Moderat giving the weekend the feeling of two summers of stored energy being released at once.

The post-pandemic years pushed DTRH to its largest scale. In 2025, more than fifty thousand people attended for the first time, while Massive Attack, Underworld, Beth Gibbons, FKA twigs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Tems, Wet Leg and Amyl and the Sniffers illustrated how easily the festival could move between generations. Ticket sales behaved differently in 2026, and the organisers made an unusual choice: rather than keep preparing for the previous year’s maximum, they configured the site for roughly forty-two thousand people. Florence + The Machine, Little Simz and The xx led a programme also featuring David Byrne, Empire Of The Sun, Loyle Carner, The Last Dinner Party, Beirut, Apparat, Overmono, Johnny Marr and Sierra Ferrell.

The next descent is already fixed for July 2–4, 2027. More than a decade after its debut, Down The Rabbit Hole no longer needs the “little Lowlands” comparison that followed its launch. It has its own audience, visual language and rituals. What growth has never entirely removed is the sense that something significant might be happening away from the obvious stage. That may be its hardest quality to manufacture. Tens of thousands arrive because they recognise names on the poster, yet the festival keeps asking them to abandon the schedule, swim in the lake, enter a tent without knowing what is inside or follow a path through the woods simply because it looks interesting. The rabbit hole is ultimately not an image on the branding; it is permission to get distracted.