III Points 2026: Raging Through the Rain

There are very few festivals where you can watch Blood Orange command one of the biggest crowds of the weekend, disappear into a dark room for hours of Red Axes, stumble onto a local DJ playing weird acid-tinged house to a few dozen people in the rain, and finish the night bouncing between techno, UK garage, indie dance, dubstep, disco, and whatever else happens to pull you in. That remains the magic of III Points.

The Miami festival returned to Mana Wynwood on October 16 and 17 with 13 stages and an almost comically deep lineup. Trying to follow a rigid schedule at III Points is practically asking to miss something better happening around the corner. Some of my favorite moments all weekend came specifically because we abandoned whatever plan we had made beforehand.

This does not mean the festival was flawless. Friday’s will-call situation became one of the biggest stories surrounding the weekend, and deservedly so. Certain sets also suffered from questionable stage placement and uncomfortable crowd congestion. Those shortcomings have to be part of any honest review, even though my own experience entering and moving through the festival was dramatically smoother.

Once inside, however, III Points delivered almost everything I want from a festival. The production was excellent, the food and drinks were surprisingly reasonable by Miami standards, the art and activations rewarded wandering, and several performances rank among my favorites I have seen all year.

More importantly, the best moments rarely came from simply standing in front of the biggest name on the lineup. They came from getting soaked in the rain, discovering artists we had not prioritized beforehand, wandering into rooms that sounded interesting, and realizing 45 minutes later that we had lost track of time.

Getting In, Getting Around, and Getting Out

If you spent any time scrolling through III Points content after Friday night, you probably saw something about will call. There is no way to discuss the festival honestly without addressing it.

Attendees described lines wrapping around the block and waits stretching beyond three hours, with the situation becoming increasingly disorganized as frustration built. One firsthand Reddit account described people cutting toward the front, pushing and shoving inside the resulting crowd, attendees saying they could not breathe, others experiencing panic attacks, and some eventually giving up and going home. The same attendee alleged that wristbands eventually began being distributed rapidly without normal ticket scanning and that people entered without a proper security check.

Those are serious allegations, and they were not isolated to one angry social media post. Other attendees described crowd surges, missed performances, heat, confusion, and hours spent waiting outside instead of experiencing a festival they had paid hundreds of dollars to attend.

My personal experience was totally different. I had VIP, the staff and security personnel I interacted with were friendly, and both entry and exit were extremely smooth for me. But part of reviewing an event is acknowledging that my experience was not everybody’s experience. When a meaningful number of paying attendees report losing a substantial portion of their night in an unsafe or poorly controlled queue, that becomes part of the festival experience whether I personally stood in that line or not.

III Points did respond before Saturday. The festival issued digital passes to two-day GA and Saturday GA ticket-holders who had not received their wristbands, added more staffing and scan points at will call, created additional ticket-scanning lanes, cleared infrastructure from the main entrance to create more space for queues, and stationed dedicated staff at both ends of NW 6th Avenue to direct guests toward the correct lines. Organizers also said they were actively responding to refund requests from ticket holders who were unable to make it inside Friday.

Those were meaningful corrective steps, but they do not erase how badly Friday went for some attendees. The responsibility for preventing that kind of situation ultimately falls on the festival. More will-call staff, more processing lanes, better queue management, and enough infrastructure to accommodate peak arrival periods should be the baseline at an event of this scale.

There is also a separate conversation to be had from the perspective of someone who has attended a lot of festivals. This is not meant to excuse III Points or blame people who got stuck outside. It is simply advice I wish more people knew before festival weekend.

Whenever possible, I avoid will call entirely. Buying far enough in advance to have a wristband shipped removes one major variable from your day. If money is tight, festivals commonly offer payment plans that allow you to make a smaller initial payment rather than waiting until the last minute. And if your plans change closer to the event, resale marketplaces like CrowdVolt give you another option rather than making will call part of your festival day.

If will call is unavoidable, going early is one of the easiest ways to reduce the risk of hitting the peak rush. Pick up the wristband before the majority of the crowd arrives, then use the extra time to explore. At a festival with this much programming, showing up a little earlier is hardly wasted time.

The other complaint I heard repeatedly involved crowding. Interestingly, I did not come away feeling that III Points was universally oversold. There was ample dancing room at plenty of stages throughout both nights. To me, the bigger issue was artist placement.

Max Dean B2B Luke Dean was the clearest example. My group and I are huge fans, and I had a gut feeling before their Saturday set that Isotropic was going to become a shit show. That instinct proved correct. Once we arrived, there was so much pushing and so little room to move that the set immediately stopped being enjoyable.

For a pairing drawing that level of demand, I have a hard time understanding why they were not placed somewhere larger like Mind Melt. But this is also where III Points’ enormous lineup becomes a gift. We did not spend the next hour fighting for six inches of dancing room and getting angry about it. We left.

With 13 stages, there is almost always another good option. We walked over to Vertex for MPH instead and ended up seeing my favorite set of the entire weekend. That became a recurring lesson for me at III Points: if a crowd is ruining the experience, stop forcing it. There is probably something incredible happening 200 yards away.

Transportation was another pleasant surprise. III Points encourages rideshare, but we drove both nights and found parking much easier than I expected for a festival in Wynwood. Friday took some trial and error because we were figuring out where the entrance actually was, and our eventual street spot left us with around a 25-minute walk. That is not particularly offensive for a festival this size. Once we understood the area, Saturday was simple. We found street parking less than 10 minutes away and paid under $25 for roughly eight hours. For Miami, I will happily take that.

VIP was also worth the upgrade for the way we like to attend festivals. If your only priority is getting as deep into every crowd as physically possible, the value might be less obvious. But if you appreciate being able to decompress, sit down, eat, regroup, and still remain inside the festival world, it added a lot.

Players Club was particularly cool because it functioned as an actual indoor stage rather than a glorified VIP lounge. The turf area near Mind Melt became another useful home base whenever we wanted to get off our feet for a bit. Most of the VIP viewing areas were worthwhile too. Ironically, the one I liked least was Mind Melt’s elevated section. Height sounds great in theory, but during larger sets, only the first couple rows near the edge had an especially useful view of the performer. Fortunately, the ground-level VIP viewing area offered close access, so we mostly stayed there instead.

I also used GA bathrooms whenever they were closer and had no complaints. In general, once we were through the gates, actually navigating the festival was far easier than the horror stories surrounding Friday’s will call might suggest.

Food & Drink

Festival pricing has gotten so ridiculous that I am almost conditioned to expect financial abuse every time I order food inside one. Considering III Points takes place in Miami, one of the most expensive cities in the country, I thought the food and drink prices were exceptionally reasonable.

Water was around $5. Each day, I bought one bottle and simply refilled it at the festival’s water stations for the rest of the night. That probably sounds like the most obvious festival tip imaginable, but if it saves somebody from buying six bottles of water over the course of a weekend, there you go.

One of my favorite drink discoveries was Spiked Ade. I did not drink heavily either night, but the canned cocktails were low-calorie and zero-sugar, making them an easy option when I wanted something alcoholic without stacking another syrupy festival cocktail onto an already long night.

Food generally seemed to fall somewhere around $17 to $25.

Friday, my partner and I grabbed a bulgogi beef bowl from one of the Asian vendors. It was delicious, and the portion was big enough for us to split and feel sufficiently refueled for the rest of the night.

Saturday, we ate inside the VIP turf area and split tacos along with bao buns stuffed with fried chicken. Both were equally tasty.

Could I find cheaper food outside the gates? Of course. But when the comparison point is what major festivals routinely charge for mediocre chicken tenders and fries, I never felt ripped off. That is about as glowing an endorsement of festival food pricing as I can offer.

The World Beyond the Lineup

One of the reasons III Points continues to stand apart is that its stages rarely feel interchangeable. You are not simply walking from one giant LED rectangle to the next. Each area has an identity, and some of the strongest production decisions were less about raw scale than creating environments where certain kinds of music made sense.

Red Bull Unforeseen may have been my favorite stage from a pure design perspective. DJs performed on top of a boat, and the room around it felt immersive. It was one of those spaces where the stage concept immediately communicated that you were somewhere different before you even paid attention to who was playing.

::444:: was my favorite stage overall. According to III Points’ own technical description, the room was conceived as a dedicated deep-listening space built around extended four-hour DJ sets and an 11.1 L-Acoustics L-ISA surround sound system. I obviously did not walk around measuring speaker specifications, but I can absolutely speak to how it sounded: phenomenal. The sound felt dimensional and detailed rather than simply loud, while warm red and orange lighting, dramatic curtains, and bursts of blue lasers made the room feel theatrical. More importantly, ::444:: encouraged you to stay.

So many festival stages feel designed around quick impact. Walk in, see the spectacle, catch a recognizable song, take the video, move on. ::444:: felt like the opposite. The room rewarded settling in and allowing a DJ to actually develop an idea over time. It also happened to be an excellent place to cool down or escape one of Miami’s inevitable rainstorms without sacrificing the music.

Vertex offered an entirely different type of immersion. The platforms wrapping around and behind the booth gave parts of the stage a semi-360-degree feel, removing some of the usual barrier between performer and crowd. At night, the darker visual design gave the space an almost futuristic, cyberpunk-rave quality. It became one of those stages where the architecture itself could alter how a set felt.

Players Club belongs in this conversation too, while Door IV and Halo 88 scratched the warehouse-rave itch with darker indoor environments that offered a different energy from the outdoor stages.

Mind Melt, S3QUENC3, and RC95 were all impressive as expected. Isotropic was larger this year, although this is one of the rare instances where bigger did not necessarily mean better for me. I personally preferred the vibe of the previous Isotropic build-out.

Another stage that deserves considerably more attention is III Points Radio. It was easy to walk past compared with some of the massive production elsewhere, but its programming was full of local artists and selectors with individual approaches. It felt like a space where you could hear someone mixing differently, playing stranger records, or representing a corner of Miami’s scene that might never translate to a giant festival stage. The programming also connected back to local station WVUM 90.5, which made it feel like something rooted in Miami rather than another interchangeable branded activation.

The art throughout the festival worked similarly. Instead of putting every installation in one obvious “art zone,” III Points rewards wandering. Little pieces, rooms, backdrops, and activations reveal themselves as you move between stages, giving the festival an exploratory quality even when no artist is currently pulling you in a particular direction.

MOKIWORLD was easily our favorite experience away from the music. Its Hialeah Park Casino partnership turned the installation into a playful little gambling universe with poker, blackjack, slots, craps, and other games. There was also a prize wheel; I walked away with a hat, while my partner won a keychain. The entire space was packed with colorful backdrops and little details that made it just as fun for photos as it was for killing time between sets.

None of those extras are why I buy a ticket to III Points. But collectively, they are an essential part of why the festival feels like III Points.

Friday: Dancing Through the Rain

We started our weekend at Red Bull Unforeseen with Aabel B2B Siegel, who kicked things off with groovy underground house. Maccabii B2B Pezlo MD followed and kept us there a little longer before we moved over to ::444:: for DJ Harvey.

DJ Harvey was an ideal early introduction to why I ended up loving that room so much. His blend of disco and funky house was hypnotic without feeling like it needed to constantly announce itself. Instead of waiting for a massive festival drop every few minutes, we could settle into a groove and let the selections do the work.

Then the weather went to hell. Brunello B2B Rafael at Isotropic ended up being a top performance of the weekend, and the rain became inseparable from this memory. It was absolutely pouring. Instead of clearing out, the crowd collectively seemed to decide that nobody gave a fuck. We were stomping through puddles, getting drenched, and dancing like the weather had become part of the production.

Brunello generally sits closer to house, while Rafael leans further into indie tech, and their approaches complemented each other remarkably well. The set moved between those worlds and the spaces around them without ever feeling like two DJs taking turns forcing their own sound onto the room. Their transitions were smooth enough that tracks seemed to fold naturally into one another, and the chemistry made us forget that every article of clothing we were wearing was slowly becoming waterlogged.

Brunello’s “Ghost Dance” stood out, as did Mita Gami’s recent Maccabi House release “Looking For You.” A nasty edit of Rafael and Adam Ten’s “Sweet Boy” was another immediate highlight. The rain could have ruined the set. Instead, hundreds of people decided the music was worth being uncomfortable for, and we stayed through the entire thing.

Already soaked, we made our way to RC95 for Levity B2B Taiki Nulight. I am a huge fan of both projects, but what surprised me was the direction of the set. Rather than leaning toward Levity’s more accessible side, the pairing seemed to gravitate toward Taiki Nulight’s darker, more underground approach to dubstep and bass music.

It worked. They threw down raw, murky dubstep with some riddim creeping into the mix, and hearing music that dark while the rain continued coming down around RC95 only made everything hit harder. I walked away wishing Levity would explore that side of their project more often.

Then came one of those III Points moments that would have been impossible to plan beforehand. Godisound at III Points Radio was right there with Brunello B2B Rafael as my favorite performance of Friday. There may have been 15 of us dancing in the rain when we first arrived. By the end, I would estimate the crowd had grown to more than 50 as people passing by gradually realized something weird was happening and stayed.

Her house selections were minimal, techy, acidic, punchy, and deeply weird. I spent a significant portion of the set wondering where she was even finding the records she was playing. Even more impressive was the flow. It became difficult to tell exactly when one track ended and another began. Everything seemed to bleed together into one continuous little universe, and for the duration of the set, we were locked in.

Watching the dance floor steadily grow as people wandered over and decided not to leave made the whole thing even better. Keep an eye on Godisound.

We eventually closed Friday with Vintage Culture B2B Max Styler. The pairing delivered the polished late-night house energy you would expect, but by then, Friday had already given us what I want most from a festival: great sets we intentionally sought out and even better moments we never knew were coming.

Saturday: Red Axes, Sleeper Sets, and a Very Good Change of Plans

Saturday started for us with Rebolledo at S3QUENC3, whose mastery of indie dance immediately pulled me in. As someone who spends a lot of time listening to and digging through that world, I appreciated that his set never felt like a parade of whatever tracks happen to be circulating most heavily through the genre at the moment. There was patience to it.

Then came Red Axes at ::444::. Their extended performance was one of those sets where you walk in telling yourself you will stay for a little while, and suddenly leaving becomes an increasingly stupid idea. The duo moved through indie dance, underground house, and unexpected musical detours without sacrificing cohesion. Their selections kept us guessing, and the extended format gave them the freedom to build, pull back, and head in directions that would be difficult to explore during a standard hour-long festival slot.

One of my favorite individual track moments of the weekend came when they dropped an edit of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” It was unexpected, instantly recognizable without feeling cheap, and perfectly in line with their willingness to reach beyond conventional dance-floor selections.

Eventually, we pulled ourselves away and made it to Blood Orange. I think Blood Orange drew the largest crowd I personally saw all weekend, and hats off to them because the performance justified it. After spending so much of our weekend inside DJ sets, seeing a fully developed live performance also reminded me why III Points’ genre diversity matters. The festival can take you from underground house in a dark room to a live band commanding an enormous audience without either experience feeling out of place.

Afterward, we headed to Vertex for KinAhau. He was one of the biggest surprises of the weekend. We expected him to be good. He ended up blowing past those expectations, firing through strong selections and edits while casually chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette behind the decks. There was something wonderfully nonchalant about the whole thing.

His darker, futuristic sound also fit Vertex perfectly. The wraparound platforms and semi-360-degree booth gave the performance a cyberpunk-rave feel without distracting from what actually mattered: the music. KinAhau was not necessarily one of the performances we entered the weekend talking about, but he was absolutely one of the artists we left talking about.

We eventually found ourselves back at Red Axes before catching part of Seth Troxler at ::444::. Troxler remains one of those selectors who rarely needs much explanation. Put him in a room with good sound and give him time, and he tends to figure out the rest.

Next up was Max Dean B2B Luke Dean… for about two minutes. As soon as the pushing started and it became obvious that dancing freely was going to be nearly impossible, we bailed and walked to Vertex.

This turned into the best decision we made all weekend. MPH was absolutely destroying the place. His set ended up being my favorite of III Points and one of my favorite performances I have seen all year. UK garage banger followed UK garage banger, but what pushed it over the top was the crowd. The energy was ridiculous.

Every time another bassline landed, the crowd seemed to roar back. There are technically excellent DJ sets where the crowd never quite connects, and then there are those rare performances where DJ and audience seem to realize at the same moment that something is happening. This was the latter.

We had gone from being annoyed and unable to move at Isotropic to losing our minds at Vertex. Sometimes festival logistics have a funny way of working themselves out.

Later, techno queen Charlotte de Witte took control of RC95 and delivered exactly the kind of set you want from her late in a two-day festival. There was no need to overcomplicate it. The set was driving, controlled, heavy, and relentless enough that our feet seemed to keep moving whether the rest of our bodies were tired or not.

We closed out our weekend by splitting roughly 30 minutes between Tiga and 2UP!, both of whom gave us the late-night energy boost we needed before finally admitting that we had nothing left in the tank.

What III Points Gets Right — and What It Needs to Fix

III Points is difficult to review because there really is no singular III Points experience.

Someone who lost three hours of Friday standing in a chaotic will-call line understandably experienced a very different festival than I did. Someone who spent most of the weekend at Mind Melt attended a different festival from someone who practically moved into ::444::. A person chasing live bands could build an entirely different two-night itinerary from someone interested in techno, bass music, house, indie dance, experimental electronic music, or Miami’s local scene.

That multiplicity is still III Points’ greatest strength.

The festival had legitimate shortcomings this year. Friday’s will-call operation was not acceptable, even if organizers made substantial changes for Saturday. Certain crowding issues could have been mitigated with smarter artist placement. As III Points continues growing, making sure its infrastructure and stage assignments grow intelligently with demand will matter just as much as continuing to book an incredible lineup.

But inside the festival, I was reminded over and over why III Points remains one of my favorite events to wander through.

We danced in a downpour while Brunello and Rafael refused to let the energy drop.

We watched Godisound turn a tiny rainy dance floor into a steadily growing crowd.

We got lost inside ::444:: while Red Axes dug through the kind of selections an extended set actually gives artists time to explore.

We stumbled into KinAhau and found a set we are still talking about.

We abandoned an overcrowded performance and accidentally discovered MPH delivering my favorite set of the entire weekend.

We watched Blood Orange sway a massive audience back anf forth, got pummeled by Levity and Taiki Nulight in the rain, danced to Charlotte de Witte until our feet stopped cooperating, became part of an art installation in MOKIWORLD, won random prizes, ate bao buns on turf, wandered into warehouse rooms, stood under lasers, discovered local DJs, got soaked, dried off, and then went back outside to do it all over again.

This is ultimately what I keep coming back to with this festival. The lineup gets you through the gates. The moments you never planned for are what make you remember it.

Photos courtesy of ADINAYEV.