We Belong Here has set its Tampa Bay return, and it is the festival's biggest local swing yet: three days on the Hillsborough River, December 11 through 13, on the open-air riverfront grounds behind Armature Works. The Miami-born house and electronic brand debuted in the bay last December with two days at the St. Pete Pier; year two crosses the water, adds a day, and grows the bill to 40-plus artists.
From the Pier to the river
The debut ran December 13 and 14, 2025, with three stages set against the St. Pete waterfront, Kaskade and Lane 8 topping Saturday, and an Odesza DJ set with Elderbrook closing Sunday. For a first-year event it was an unusually heavyweight bill, and it established the festival's bay-area template: strictly 21 and up, daytime into night, water on at least one side.
The weekend also left a mark the festival never advertised. Sound carried off the Pier across downtown St. Pete, and the noise complaints that followed were reported by the Tampa Bay Times in the days after. The second-year announcement made no mention of any of it; it introduced a new waterfront home instead, up the bay in Tampa Heights.
The new grounds sit behind the 1910 Tampa Electric streetcar barn that became the Armature Works food hall, on a riverfront lawn at the north end of the Riverwalk where the downtown skyline stands directly across the water. As settings for a stage go, the festival has effectively traded a pier for a postcard.
Three days, no video walls
We Belong Here was built in Miami by Charles Hochfelder and Justin Dauman and first staged in February 2022 at Historic Virginia Key Beach Park. Its signature is a 360-degree center stage set on an oversized dance floor, and a standing production rule: no LED walls. Where most festivals wall the stage in screens, this one leaves the sightlines open so the setting does the visual work, and in Tampa Heights the setting will be the river and the skyline behind it.
That rule is less an aesthetic quirk than the whole thesis. The brand picks venues the way other festivals pick headliners, a beach park in Miami, the middle of Central Park, and now a lawn where a working city skyline reflects off the water behind the decks. The venue is the co-star, which is exactly why the address change matters more here than it would for a festival that ships the same screens to every city.
