Royal Blood play a surprise Reading festival set in The Gallery tent

Royal Blood packed out The Gallery tent at Reading 2026 on Friday afternoon for a set the band had trailed as a surprise, having confirmed it themselves earlier in the week. The rain stopped shortly before their 2pm slot and the crowd came anyway.

Sci-fi effects and helicopter noise brought the pair on before they went straight into Out Of The Black. "Are you feeling good?" frontman Mike Kerr asked partway through the song. Drummer Ben Thatcher spent part of it in the crowd handing out high-fives before returning to the kit.

The ten-song set drew its biggest reactions from unfamiliar material. Ten Over Ten and Swallow The Bomb, both from the incoming album Dead Company, opened circle pits, which is rare for songs most of the tent had heard once or not at all.

From there the band ran How Did We Get So Dark? into Little Monster, then Turn The Lights Out into Trouble Coming from Typhoons, before closing on Figure It Out. Come On Over and Boiler Maker filled out the middle.

Kerr told NME beforehand that the break had left the band hungry for the stage. He said Ten Over Ten already sat alongside the biggest songs in the set, and that watching people connect with Swallow The Bomb on a first hearing had settled an argument about whether the new material worked live.

This was the duo's fourth appearance at Reading and Leeds, more than a decade after their 2014 debut there as a new band. Neither Royal Blood nor Jamie T, who played his own unannounced set on the main stage the same day, appeared at the Leeds site.

Dead Company is due on November 13 and a UK headline tour follows. The set is logged on the festival tracker, and the band already have Ten Over Ten and the Dead Company announcement and a run of UK shows behind them. It was a straightforwardly heavy rock hour.