Elements Music & Arts Festival returned to Long Pond, Pennsylvania, August 7–9 for its ninth edition, bringing more than 150 artists and a sold-out crowd of 33,000 people to the Poconos. With names like Porter Robinson, GRiZ, Subtronics, Excision, Above & Beyond, Chris Lake, CloZee, Ray Volpe, Charlotte de Witte and dozens more spread across the weekend, Elements once again brought a lineup capable of competing with some of the biggest electronic festivals in the country.

This was my fourth year attending Elements, and every year I’ve watched the festival grow. There are things Elements does remarkably well, and there is still something distinctly unique about the world it creates in the woods of Pennsylvania. But 2026 also left me wondering whether some parts of the experience are keeping pace with that growth.

And, unfortunately, Mother Nature wasn’t particularly interested in making things easier this year.

A Rough Start to the Weekend

Elements began with its Thursday pre-party, and before the music could really get underway, severe weather rolled through the area. A heavy thunderstorm prompted a Code Red evacuation shortly after I entered the grounds, sending attendees back toward their vehicles and campsites while the storm passed.

The festival eventually reopened that evening, but the rain had already begun transforming parts of the grounds into the mud that would become a constant companion for the rest of the weekend.

Friday was hit even harder.

Persistent rain kept the festival grounds closed for most of the day before Elements announced that gates would finally open at 6:30 p.m. That should have salvaged at least part of the first full day. Instead, getting people back onto the property became its own challenge.

Vehicles were funneled through wet, grassy areas that had endured roughly two days of rain. Mud, stuck vehicles and security checks contributed to an enormous backup entering the festival. After spending around an hour and a half waiting with very little progress, my group ultimately abandoned our attempt and returned to our Airbnb.

Other attendees we spoke with who stayed in line reported not reaching the festival until close to midnight.

None of this changes the reality that Elements cannot control the weather. Outdoor festivals inherently carry that risk, and prolonged storms would have created problems for almost any event.

What an organizer can control is how effectively its infrastructure responds when those problems arrive.

By Saturday, there were noticeable improvements. Vehicle traffic and security operations had been moved toward gravel and paved surfaces, and when we arrived later that afternoon, entering the festival was dramatically easier. It was encouraging to see Elements adapt, although it was difficult not to wonder why some of those precautions weren’t in place earlier given the amount of rain the grounds had already received and it’s history with heavy rainfall in previous years.

Inside Elements

Once the festival was fully operational Saturday, Elements finally began feeling like Elements again.

The grounds remained extremely muddy throughout the weekend, with certain areas considerably worse than others. Air Stage, tucked into the woods, was particularly difficult. The forest setting is one of the reasons Air has always been one of my favorite concepts at Elements, but after substantial rain, reaching it meant navigating deep mud and saturated ground.

The location also creates another problem as Elements continues to grow: capacity.

Air simply doesn’t have the open viewing space available at stages like Earth and Fire. When a popular artist draws a large crowd, getting close enough to comfortably see the stage can become difficult. It’s an incredible setting when everything works, but one that increasingly feels constrained by the number of people Elements now attracts.

That growth could be felt elsewhere as well.

With 33,000 attendees and a second consecutive sold-out year, Elements is no longer a small festival. Large crowds aren’t inherently a problem, but certain areas felt increasingly bottlenecked, particularly around Earth Stage.

The growing amount of space dedicated to premium viewing areas also contributed to that feeling. VIP and Entourage areas occupy substantial portions of viewing space at some stages, leaving general admission attendees concentrated into smaller sections.

Premium experiences are hardly unique to Elements, but as the festival continues expanding, maintaining enough comfortable space for the majority of attendees is going to become increasingly important.

Cell service was another challenge. Reception at Elements has never been perfect, but this year I found my phone effectively useless throughout much of the grounds. Losing your group at a festival with tens of thousands of attendees becomes considerably more complicated when a simple text message can’t get through.

New Stages, Bigger Production

Two of the biggest advertised changes for 2026 were redesigned Earth and Fire stages.

Fire Stage received a substantial redesign, including a wider DJ booth positioned closer to the audience. That’s a welcome improvement over previous iterations, where performers could feel surprisingly disconnected from the crowd.

Unfortunately, the booth remains elevated enough that visibility near the front can still be surprisingly poor. Moving farther back provides a much better view of the performer and overall production.

The other notable change was a greater reliance on video screens in place of some of the physical scenic elements seen in previous years. The screens allow for impressive artist-specific visuals, but I found myself missing some of the physical installations that previously gave Fire its identity. Pyrotechnics also felt less prominent than I remembered—which is a slightly strange feeling to have at a stage literally named Fire.

Earth received a similarly substantial overhaul. Screens again played a larger role in its design, accompanied by lasers, smoke effects, pyro and additional effects that made larger performances feel appropriately massive.

Water Stage, meanwhile, didn’t need a dramatic reinvention. Its basic identity remained familiar, but an expanded laser package gave the stage some of my favorite visual moments of the weekend.

These changes represent an interesting direction for Elements. Production is becoming larger and more technically impressive, but I hope that doesn’t come at the expense of the handmade, physical and slightly strange aesthetic that helped distinguish Elements from other electronic festivals in the first place.

More Than Four Stages

One of Elements’ biggest strengths has always been that there is considerably more happening than whatever DJ happens to be playing.

The festival returned with its Vibe Villages, Neon Forest, Fun Factory, Zen Den, Healing Garden, Eco Hub and numerous interactive experiences scattered around the grounds. New additions included the Glitter Tongue Candy Bar and the expanded Find Your Element initiative, which allowed attendees to take a quiz identifying them with Fire, Earth, Air or Water and participate in themed activities and meetups.

Completing Find Your Element also unlocked a complimentary piece of themed merchandise. It’s a fun concept, although the merchandise itself didn’t particularly resonate with me.

After four years, however, some of the larger art installations around Elements are beginning to feel very familiar. Part of the excitement of my earlier years at the festival came from wandering around and discovering something bizarre that I hadn’t seen before. There is still plenty to explore—particularly for someone experiencing Elements for the first time—but as a returning attendee, I found fewer moments of genuine discovery this year.

The vendor experience also felt somewhat smaller to me, particularly among the artists. That’s naturally subjective; art that doesn’t connect with one person may be exactly what someone else has been searching for.

Food was less subjective on my wallet.

Most meals I encountered were somewhere in the roughly $15–$25 range, making eating inside the festival an expensive proposition across an entire weekend. One notable exception was Popeyes, quickly became one of my default options.

Festival food is always expensive. At a certain point, though, the combined cost of tickets, lodging or camping, transportation, premium upgrades, food and everything else required to attend begins affecting how accessible the experience feels.

When the Music Finally Took Over

For all of the problems surrounding this year’s festival, Elements still knows how to build an electronic lineup.

Once Saturday night was underway and the logistical headaches faded into the background, there were finally moments where the weekend became about music again.

Ray Volpe delivered my favorite set of Saturday, bringing exactly the kind of energy needed after such a chaotic beginning to the weekend. Across the grounds, the production upgrades were at their best once darkness arrived: lasers cut through the trees, Earth erupted with effects, and the festival finally started resembling the experience everyone had spent two rain-soaked days trying to reach.

Sunday brought another packed day of music, culminating for me with Porter Robinson. As one of my favorite artists, Porter was one of the sets I was most excited to see going into the weekend, and getting to photograph and experience that performance provided a fitting musical ending to an otherwise complicated Elements.

Those moments are important because they’re ultimately why thousands of people make the trip.

Elements can be exhausting, expensive, muddy, chaotic and occasionally frustrating—and then the right artist takes the stage, the production comes alive, and for an hour those problems become considerably easier to forget.

Four Years of Elements

My relationship with Elements is different now than it was when I first walked onto the grounds four years ago.

Part of that is the festival changing, and part of it is me changing.

Elements has become bigger. The lineup is bigger. The crowds are bigger. The stage production is more ambitious. Selling out two consecutive years with 33,000 attendees is a significant accomplishment, and it’s easy to understand why people continue coming back.

But growth comes with tradeoffs.

Some spaces that once felt intimate now struggle under larger crowds. More viewing space is dedicated to premium ticket tiers. Prices across the festival experience continue climbing. Some familiar art installations no longer carry the same sense of discovery for returning attendees. And when something goes wrong—as the weather demonstrated this year—the logistical challenge of moving tens of thousands of people becomes impossible to ignore.

At the same time, I don’t think my experience this year can simply be reduced to “Elements was bad.”

Saturday and Sunday demonstrated that when Elements is functioning properly, there is still an incredibly fun festival underneath the logistical frustrations. The production can be spectacular. The lineup remains excellent. Dancing in the middle of a forest while lasers shoot through the trees is still objectively cool.

For someone attending their first major electronic festival, Elements remains easy for me to understand as a recommendation. It’s large enough to offer major artists and impressive production while retaining some of the eccentricity of a festival built around art, community and wandering into something weird at 1 a.m.

For someone walking through those gates for the first time in 2027, there will undoubtedly be things that feel completely new.

For me, four years might have been enough.

Elements Music & Arts Festival returns to Long Pond, Pennsylvania, August 6–9th, 2027. The festival’s 2027 loyalty sale launched August 18. If you plan on returning to Elements, check your email for your loyalty code and lock in before lower tiers sell out.