Best Friends Forever Festival Taking 2026 Off As Venue Becomes Parking Lot

For the past two years, the people behind Utah’s great Kilby Block Party have been putting on an excellent festival in Las Vegas called Best Friends Forever, centered on an array of gritty underground rock bands from the pre-MySpace moment in the late ’90s and early 2000s when there was a large overlap between emo and indie rock. The Stereogum staff attended the inaugural BFF together in 2024 and had a splendid time, and the 2025 lineup was just as impressive. Unfortunately, the fest will be taking this year off.

The Downtown Las Vegas Event Center, which hosted the first two Best Friends Forever fests, is being turned into a parking lot. Because of this, the BFF team has announced that the fest will “pause” in 2026. The message affirms that organizers are already working on assembling the 2027 version of the fest, but for now they don’t know where and when it will happen. Here’s the full text of their note:

WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK!
Hi friends! We have loved sharing the past two years with all of you at Best Friends Forever Music Festival. This fest means the world to us and we appreciate all of the fans and artists who helped make these first two editions truly special.

As you may have heard, our host venue the Downtown Las Vegas Event Center will no longer be functioning as a regular venue. Due to this unexpected change, we have made the call to pause in 2026.

The good news: our team has already begun working on bringing Best Friends Forever back to you in 2027. We are in the early stages of planning the what/when/ where and there isn’t much to share at the moment. However, we are hoping to come back with some nice changes (dare we say, surprises) and present to you the third edition of Best Friends Forever that will be well worth the wait.

Stay tuned for updates and don’t be a stranger! We will be posting more info here as we have updates, and you can also sign up to receive emails from us at bestfriendsforeverfest.com.

See you again soon!
-BFF TEAM

This is a shame. Hopefully the fest really does come back.