The Pines Were There First – Love International 2026 Review
At some point during the boat party, the Prosecco was getting warm in my hand and Jonnie was an hour into his set with absolutely no plan of stopping – someone out on the bow said that thing that everyone eventually says about Tisno.
“It’s basically a religion at this point.”
In my earlier years I’d roll my eyes at a line like that. I don’t anymore.
Nobody writes about the pines, which is odd, because the pines are doing more work than most of the acts on the bill. They run the length of the site, low and salt-bent, and instead of bouncing bass back at you, they just absorb it, soften it, hand it back a half-second later, slightly warmer. There’s a small, genuinely strange body of acoustic literature on this — a 1979 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America is simply titled “The Absorption of Sound by Pine Trees” — which either backs up every half-cut observation ever made on that patch of grass, or makes it worse. Stand at the back of the Garden or the aptly titled Olive Grove stage during anything heavy and you can actually hear the difference – the trees are doing the acoustic treatment.
The boats get mentioned every year Love International gets written up, always as a nice bit of colour – sail about, have a drink, very picturesque. What doesn’t get said is that a boat is the one part of the whole programme where the sea is the booking. No line of sight, no walls to hold anyone’s attention for you. A set either works on open water or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t you know within twenty minutes because half the boat has drifted to the bow to talk about something else. Ours worked – it was Optimo, obviously. Babyschon, Matt Cowell and Kieran took turns either side of them, the coast went past, and nobody checked a phone.
Sunday got taken out by weather rather than anyone’s running order. A storm rolled in off the strait after dark and shut the whole thing down cold – the same pines that spent the week quietly eating the low end were bent nearly sideways. What should have been a roll through into the early morning ended up with a 2 am finish, a river on the way home and an early bed. No matter – LI just shrugged and found something better on the other side of Sunday night, rearranging things for a Monday all-nighter.
The Pier is the recent addition nobody flags in advance, and everybody ends up talking about. It makes for one of the festival’s finest early-afternoon rituals – a perfect spot for those still piecing themselves together while the Beach Stage begins to gather pace. Whether hanging about on the Pier itself, stretched out on the beach, or floating in the Adriatic alongside, it’s hard to think of too many better places to see in a Monday afternoon. Nadia Ksabia, Rosie Ama and Sarahtonin bring a blissful, fun-soaked four hours before long-time Tisno believers Bill & Frank take the controls. For us, a fair few bottles of the local fizz and a boat-taxi pit stop for lunch more than set us right for a stacked Monday night programme.
Matthew Jonson’s live set that night landed like the storm had been the plan all along — all analogue tension and robotic vocals — with Unai Trotti making sure we saw the sunrise. If anything, it was a better night.
Sunrise sessions get talked about like an aesthetic – a nice photo, some room tone, everyone either looking wistful or slightly enhanced. What it actually is is a specific register: get the tempo half a beat too fast, or the low end too heavy, and the whole thing collapses back into a normal set with better light. It’s one you have to get right.
This corner of the programme has, not coincidentally, been handed to the same outsiders for the better part of a decade. Test Pressing’s Apiento has run Sunrise Sessions since the mid-2010s, and by his own account the appeal was never really the music being better at that hour – it was the pines doing what they do, holding a crowd that’s already stopped needing to be held. Alex Kassian, Lovefingers, Vladimir Ivkovic, Piers Harrison and Croatia’s own Adriatic Social Club have all logged hours in that booth, with ddwy, Tornado Wallace and Begin joining more recently.
That’s what the slot is built to hold, and this year it held something it shouldn’t have had to. Chris Stoker – of Not An Animal and Magic Castles/Almost Cut My Hair, and one of the first people, along with his cohort Andy Bainbridge – outside our crew to support Ransom Note, passed away in May, and Saturday’s Sunrise Sessions became the place his friends chose to say goodbye. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” played as the sun came up, his ashes went into the sea after, and for a few minutes the pines and the water did exactly what they’ve always quietly done for this crowd: held something too big for an ordinary room.
None of this is really about whether the music was better this year than last. It’s that Love International has spent ten years building a festival around what one specific bit of Croatian coastline is actually good at, rather than despite it. Plenty of festivals run on the strength of the booking alone, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But swap the pines and the strait and that particular slope down to the water for somewhere else, and you’d be running a different festival entirely, even with the same ridiculous lineup – which it definitely was this year – on the poster.
So that’s the case for going back. Not the sunsets, not the boats as a novelty, not the idyll — the fact that somebody sat down at some point and built a week of music around exactly what this coastline does well, and hasn’t stopped fine-tuning it since. I said “religion” earlier and I’m going to leave it in, because it’s closer to the truth than “holiday” – not anything to convert to, just a thing people organise a year around for reasons that don’t fully survive being said out loud on a boat at midnight. Which, to be fair, is exactly where I said it.
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