A Festival Lineup That’ll Spin You Right Round
Flo Rida to Headline Wake the Giant 2026
Story and photos by Sidney Ulakovic
The club can’t handle Flo Rida, but Wake the Giant fans can this September.
Wake the Giant will return to the Marina Park festival grounds on Saturday September 12, and it was revealed today at the official lineup announcement that international icon Flo Rida will headline this year’s festival.
The lineup revealed as a Dennis Franklin Cromarty student helped screen print the lineup onto a t-shirt with the support of Superior Screen Printing and Ungalli Clothing Co
“Flo Rida [was] really big at the same kind of time as Black Eyed Peas for a generation of people that went out dancing to that kind of music,” says festival co-founder and organizer Greg Chomut. Last year’s festival marked the first-ever ticket sell-out as 8,500 people filled Marina Park to participate in this special celebration of diversity, inclusivity, and culture. Following on the heels of this massive success, organizers believe that this year stands to live up to the hype. “I think that we’re constantly growing, constantly getting bigger and better. And I’m really excited about the lineup this year,” Chomut adds.
Also scheduled to perform at this year’s festival are story-driven rock veterans The Wallflowers and pop-rock hitmakers the Plain White T’s. Indigenous R&B artists Tia Wood and Sebastian Gaskin will also perform this September, as well as country-rock artist Shawnee Kish and rising soul-pop star LOV.
Festival organizers also revealed that Wake the Giant will be taking a hiatus next year. “I think the development of the waterfront is going to be really cool,” Chomut says. “It’s going to be a bigger area that we could bring more people in.”
Aside from being a music festival, Wake the Giant is a cultural awareness project aimed at creating a more welcoming and inclusive environment for Indigenous people, youth, and their communities in the city of Thunder Bay. With the seventh year of the festival underway, Northern Nishnawbe Education Council director Norma Kejick reflected on its enormous impact at today’s announcement. “When we talked about Wake the Giant and bringing people together for this movement for awareness, we thought it was going to be a one time thing,” Kejick says. “Music brings people together. Music is healing. Music is therapeutic. And what better way to bring the community of Thunder Bay [and] our students, together [than] by having different genres of music, different artists—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—coming together to support our students and make this a welcoming place.”
Tickets for the 2026 Wake the Giant Music Festival are on sale now at wakethegiant.ca.
