Brisbane Festival's brand new nightly river show has The Veronicas doing the soundtrack, and it kicks off this week

Brisbane Festival kicks off tomorrow, Friday 4 September, and the headline act isn't even a person. It's water.

Bright Nights by ANZ is the festival's brand new nightly spectacle, turning the Brisbane River into a fifteen minute show of floating fountains, waterscreens and jets shooting up to 80 metres into the sky, all synced to an exclusive soundtrack from The Veronicas. It's free, it runs three times a night at 6pm, 7.30pm and 8.30pm, and it plays every night of the festival from 4 to 26 September.

The best view is from Festival Village at Clem Jones Promenade in South Bank, though honestly any spot along the river or either bridge will do. Each show opens with a Welcome to Country from Yuggera and Turrbal man Shannon Ruska, so there's substance under the spectacle, not just lasers for the sake of lasers.

Bright Nights isn't the only reason to show up though. Riverfire returns on Saturday 5 September with fireworks off bridges, barges and rooftops across the city, plus the usual RAAF flyover that makes half of Brisbane jump every year regardless of how many times they've seen it.

The live music side of the program, running under the Night at the Parklands banner at South Bank, is genuinely stacked. Missy Higgins, Icehouse, The Temper Trap, Pnau, Aloe Blacc and Katie Noonan are all playing across the festival's three week run, which stretches all the way through to 26 September.

Three weeks is a long festival by anyone's standard, so don't try to do it all in one weekend. Riverfire and the opening weekend of Bright Nights are the two unmissables if you're only free once. Everything else, from the Spiegeltent program to the morning Daybreaker sessions, is there for whenever you've got a spare night before it wraps on the 26th.

Get down to South Bank this week while the opening buzz is still fresh, because a free nightly light show set to a Veronicas soundtrack is not something Brisbane does twice.