Stray Kids Becomes Rock in Rio's First-Ever K-pop Headliner
Rock in Rio has been headlined by Queen, Guns N' Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and Muse since it launched in 1985. Tonight, for the first time in the festival's 41-year history, the Palco Mundo headliner is a K-pop group.
Stray Kids close out the night at Cidade do Rock, capping the second of Rock in Rio 2026's two weekends. The festival confirmed the booking on November 25, and by July 16, tickets for the full run were sold out. "For the first time in history, K-pop comes to Rock City," Rock in Rio wrote when the lineup went public. "And who opens this new era is one of the biggest groups in the world: @realstraykids."
The eight-member group - Bang Chan, Lee Know, Changbin, Hyunjin, Han, Felix, Seungmin and I.N - will play the same 23-song set they debuted two nights ago in Bogotá, the opening stop of their Latin America run "STRAYCITY." Labelmates NEXZ are also on the bill for the day. Elton John, in one of his few live shows since retiring from touring in 2023, headlined the festival's first weekend on September 7.
The Rock in Rio slot lands in the middle of a run Stray Kids has spent three years building. The group headlined Lollapalooza Paris in 2023, then BST Hyde Park and Lollapalooza Chicago in 2024 - each one a rock- and pop-festival stage that had rarely, if ever, put a K-pop act at the top of the bill. Rock in Rio is the largest of them by history and scale: 1.38 million people attended its first edition in 1985, and Live Nation took a majority stake in the festival in 2018.
This year's two-weekend bill mixes generations and genres the same way it always has. Demi Lovato, Maroon 5, Mumford & Sons and Brazilian singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil all played sets across the September 4-7 and 11-13 dates, alongside Elton John's September 7 headline slot. Stray Kids is the only act on either weekend's bill performing primarily in Korean.
Tonight's show is also a stop, not a destination. Stray Kids leave Rio for Buenos Aires on September 14 and 15, then Mexico City on September 25 and 26, closing out the STRAYCITY run they opened in Colombia this week. The same setlist has now been built to travel - Bogotá, Rio, and two more capitals before the month is out.
Rock in Rio's founder, Roberto Medina, built the festival's reputation on the idea that a single stage could hold rock royalty and whatever came next. Forty-one years and ten Rio editions later, "whatever came next" has a name in Korean for the first time.
