Park Waves Festival Lineup Currently Features No Women

The Park Waves festival 2026 lineup dropped last week, featuring Parkway Drive, The Amity Affliction, and more. Who it didn’t feature? A single woman.

Park Waves 2026 is set for a blistering run across 11 shows hitting areas in Australia that rarely get to see shows, let alone festivals, on their doorstep.

The hype is real – it’s Parkway Drive’s own festival featuring a lineup of who’s who in heavy Australian music, and the promise of “plus more” at the end.

While it’s not clear if that’s more major acts, or (more likely) event and state specific acts joining along for the ride in their home states – here’s hoping it involves at least one woman, because the current lineup is completely barren.

This isn’t a shock, unfortunately – Aussie heavy music festivals haven’t exactly been flush with lineup diversity in the past. According to lineupswithoutmales, 2024’s Knotfest Australia saw 7% of artists feature at least one non-male member (for reference, that was one band). Good Things 2023 fared slightly better at 22%, which clocked in at 7 acts.

The local heavy and alternative music scene does have a number of amazing acts that feature women – Terminal Sleep is up and coming in a big way, Make Them Suffer has been on an absolutely massive global and local run as of late, to name a few. There’s also RedHook, The Beautiful Monument, Stand Atlantic, Waax, Future Static – and these are just the acts off the top of my head currently making their way through the scene, not accounting for the talented musicians throughout the last few decades.

However, there seems to be a divide that’s been echoing out across the internet whenever the discussion of the poor representation of lineups crops up. While there are women in the scene absolutely killing it, some believe there’s just not that many acts at the size or notoriety for festivals like Park Waves to put them on the main lineup (especially one of this size) – and when there is, there’s so few that it’s just as possible scheduling conflicts or a mismatch for more genre-specific festivals cancel those few out.

It’s a fair argument – but it does beg the question how much promoters are doing at a more grassroots level to uplift diverse acts to give them the platform to grow into mid-to-large sized bands that could feature on a lineup like Park Waves. The punters at shows themselves are more than ready for it – to jump back, you only need to look at the level of local support Terminal Sleep is getting – and the bigger bands are more than ready for it, putting them on as supports for their tours.

Right now, there’s only five bands on the Park Waves lineup in total and they make up a decent chunk of the heavy Aussie groups that many would consider the closest to ‘household name’ status – and perhaps it’s simply that there aren’t enough acts featuring women that fit into that category as well. It’s a smaller festival, so doesn’t enjoy the same line-up size as Good Things that can have a whole heap of acts of varying sizes in the initial announcement.

It’s likely (and we’re hopeful) that additional acts will be announced for Park Waves and will feature women among the mix given the sheer amount of local talent – but right now, looking at the lineup poster with bands only featuring men removed shows an empty one, and we can do so much better.

Park Waves has been contacted for comment – if they respond, we’ll update this piece.