Haunted Dancehall 2026 at NCH: Kelela brings superstar aura to risk-taking festival’s first night

Haunted Dancehall

National Concert Hall, Dublin★★★★☆

Halloween has arrived a week early at the National Concert Hall, where a crowd fancy-dressed as the coolest people in Dublin – if you don’t have an ironic mullet you’ll feel out of place – has gathered on Saturday for the first day of Haunted Dancehall.

The charmingly esoteric festival grew out of an ambition to open up the 19th-century NCH building to an audience that might not typically don a dicky bow to attend a sit-down recital. Where else would you see people dressed as random members of Fontaines DC lining up to shuffle into a classical-music chamber?

The tension between the left-field attendees and the formal setting gives the event a distinctive ambience, and nobody better embodies its genre-blurring ethos than Kelela, the opening-night headliner.

The avant-garde R&B singer from Washington, DC, exists in a pop netherworld entirely of her own imagining. Think Janet Jackson singing over a grime remix of My Bloody Valentine. Then add the presence of a singer who brings a superstar aura to the comparatively small auditorium.

Kelela attracts a huge crowd to the main stage, where, framed by dry ice and backlighting, she shape-shifts from the bruised power balladry of Goin Down to the weightless space rock of Idea 1. She dances like a sad robot, while her voice, whether processed through a Charli XCX-style filter or gloriously unadorned, adds human vulnerability to her songs.

Her star power contrasts with an intimate early-evening set in the Kevin Barry Room by the Dublin musician Finn Carraher McDonald, aka Nashpaints, who delivers a suite of gauzy postrock. There’s the bonus of an early jump scare when someone turns the lights up and the audience can see the whites of each other’s eyes.

The same space later hosts the Galway DJ, broadcaster and barber Cóilí Collins, aka Shampain. He weaves through a selection of electronica, crouching studiously over his decks like a one-man west-of-Ireland Kraftwerk.

But perhaps the most atmospheric component of opening night is the Studio room, which has the feel of an illegal rave in a cave in the early 1990s. A highlight is the woozy turn by Voice Actor, the stage name of the Sheffield producer Noa Kurzweil, whose processed vocals unfurl like mysterious diary entries.

She is followed by Edinburgh’s Proc Fiskal, whose blend of electronic music, grime and Scottish trad attracts a decent crowd despite drawing the short straw of going on opposite Kelela.

Haunted Dancehall takes a real risk by unleashing hordes of hipsters on the genteel National Concert Hall. Out of this brew emerges a microfestival that is big on thrills and has more highs than a fistful of Halloween Haribo.