WTF Showcase invades Viva Sounds – Here are the acts!
Words by
Music Finland
Published
4.11.2026
In the last week of November, the WTF Showcase will take over Viva Sounds in Gothenburg! The night's line-up consists of psych-gazers Polymoon and alternative rockers Free Carmen. Dig in!
A total of 94 bands and artists from around the world will take the stages at this year's Viva Sounds in Gothenburg on the last weekend of November. The news is that we have some amazing Finnish acts also in the mix this year!
On Thursday 26th November, we start off the festival with an installment of Music Finland's very popular WTF Showcase! The venue will be the 2Lång Theatre, where we present two amazing bands from the alternative, indie, psych, and shoegaze realm: Polymoon and Free Carmen.
Among the festival's headliners is also Finnish shoegaze kraut punk sensation Teksti-TV 666, making their Viva Sounds debut on Saturday, November 28 at Pustervik. Showtime for Teksti-TV 666 is 23:40.
Browse the festival's complete schedule here and grab your ticket here. The festival is also an intimate music conference with amazing networking opportunities, built mostly on folks working the international indie circuit, so Viva Sounds is a definite recommendation!
WTF Showcase acts at Viva Sounds 2026
Free Carmen
Finland’s Free Carmenserve up live-wire alternative rock, big riffs and seasonal existentialism, with two solstice albums under their belt and a new EP, Beekeeping, on the way. Free Carmen took three years to get their sound together, then made up for lost time by dropping two self-produced albums in 2025. Solstice I and Solstice II arrived six months apart, on the summer and winter solstices, capturing the changing seasons through a sound built around playing live and loud.
Since then, the four-piece has taken their show across Finland, supported Black Country, New Road in Helsinki and hit the festival circuit. This autumn, they’re taking the Solstice Tour abroad, including four Nordic dates supporting Razorlight, before dropping their five-track EP Beekeeping on November 27. Turns out they’ve got plenty more where that came from.
Polymoon makes psychedelic post-gaze for getting lost in, where guitars melt, rhythms drift and reality gets a little blurry. Polymoon move in a realm they’ve helped define: psychedelic post-gaze that shimmers, swells, and dissolves at the edges. With a new album Mariposa Magic!, the band are pushing toward a clear next level — further developing the language introduced on Caterpillars Of Creation and Chrysalis, while widening the canvas in every direction.
Their songs feel less like tracks than like drifting states: luminous guitars and slow-blooming textures, rhythm and melody interlacing until the listener loses the sense of where one ends and the other begins. It’s meticulous without feeling clinical — carefully shaped, weightless, and quietly overwhelming when it hits. If the previous releases were a promise, what comes next suggests a fuller emergence: magical, finely executed music to get carried away by, built for repeat listens and long afterimages.
