Image via Pranav Trewn
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
Goldenvoice tried to preserve as much of Coachella’s 2020 lineup when the festival finally returned post-pandemic, but quickly dropped Travis Scott as a headliner after the harrowing carnage of his 2021 Astroworld Festival performance. Travis has proved industry resilient, however, finding himself back at international festivals less than a year later, and then domestic festivals and arenas shortly thereafter. He’s simply too big a cash cow for promoters to cut ties with, even the ones who originally shied away out of moral conscience or simply legal caution.
So, Goldenvoice tried to have their cake and eat it too by bringing him back in an all-but-in-name headlining performance on Saturday night, denying him the official title but still hoping to leverage his pull.
The promoter’s cake wound up collapsed on the floor, as Travis gave a shaky and vapid shadow of a spectacle widely panned even by his staunchest fans. Every grand move he attempted fell flat, whether bringing on stage a poorly practiced brass band to vamp out of tune, or debuting new tracks that left the audience colder than his apathetic delivery of the hits already had. It was a demoralizing experience, and altogether unnecessary since the day held two headliner-caliber acts delivering on the same stage the type of thematically whole and tightly executed shows the festival built its name on. Travis was considered a public safety risk for the festival when his name first appeared at the bottom of the lineup; it’s clear now he was a creative liability too.
The worst format for any concert, and especially a festival set that is already truncated in time, is splitting the show with an opening DJ trying to “warm up” the crowd before the billed artist comes on stage. The ascendent afrobeats star Rema made his audience wait for more than half his set length before appearing, a galling tease for a crowd probably at baseline questioning whether they made the right choice on where to spend the competitive time slot.
“Calm Down” is frankly not a good enough song to put up with those antics, but at least Rema performed his big hit shortly after he finally arrived. I walked away soon after to try and catch a bit of BigXThePlug, until his own DJ came onstage and began playing nostalgic rap tracks to kill time before the rapper’s arrival. I didn’t wait before abandoning ship; you gotta respect your time even if the artist won’t.
I got to check out the inside of Coachella’s new Red Bull Mirage thanks to an industry homie, and I loved getting to present myself like a big deal to the friends I brought along as plus ones. But proximity to a pop-up Nobu or knowing I’m standing beneath where Justin and Haley Bieber dined the night prior doesn’t do much for me, nor does getting a “private” DJ experience by Ryan Hemsworth, who although immensely talented, should not really be ranked as a performance when he was mostly making it hard for my bartender to hear my request for a free Red Bull (because even the well drinks as a VIP cost over $17). But if I didn’t include him on this list, how else would I be able to flex to readers that I was there?
Tyla can dance, quite impressively, and she looks incredible on stage and on the screens. Can she sing though? I wouldn’t know based on what of her performance I saw, which seemed mostly to be one long dance break, broken up by an entirely confounding moment where she spray painted her name onto an enlarged prop tiger. Rather than make the most of the extra attention artists receive at Coachella compared to their other live performances, Tyla simply did the most.
Shoegaze has become too much of a trend for its own good. While we’re far from ever having another industry moment like the post-Nirvana ’90s grunge boom, shoegaze artists like Wisp and julie have somehow caught a commercial wave landing them on the rosters of Interscope and Atlantic. I saw neither play their Coachella debuts, but I did catch as my first act on Friday Glixen, who’s schtick is basically shoegaze but more sensually-charged. They have the right sound, but offer very little by way of songs. The whole performance pleasantly washed over me and was quickly supplanted in my memory by everything else I saw afterwards.
Shaboozey’s gimmick – not just at Coachella, but as an artist – is that he’s countrifying non-country spaces. But I liked Beyonce better before Cowboy Carter, and Coachella more when it wasn’t giving Post Malone headlining spots to reimagine “Sunflower” as a Nashville-factory hit instead of one from the pop-machine. From what I caught of his cartoonish Coachella “Country Hour,” Shaboozey has fallen into the trap of leaning so heavily on sonic pastiche and wild west imagery that it smothers the soul that might otherwise exist in his music.
I hadn’t listened to Together Pangea since college, when a song like “Badillac” could soundtrack the afters of co-op parties. The band’s most popular music today still comes from that time period, and so while I appreciated their punchy hit of nostalgia in the mercifully AC’ed Sonora tent, I walked out of their set mostly wondering why their Coachella debut was in 2025 and not a decade ago.
Similar to Together Pangea, Tops was a college favorite without much by way of new music to promote at Coachella. I have to assume their presence at the festival was due to some kind of random TikTok boost putting them on bookers’ radars, and I could see how their retro analog aesthetics would appeal to a younger generation still for some reason buying cassette tapes. I love their music, and the new song they played sounds like a hit to me, but the energy around their performance was muted.
Much of the joy from a concert comes from the narrative you project onto the artist performing, but Tops had little by way of a hook to offer. Are they already a nostalgia band, or are they about to hit a new commercial breakthrough? Has their personnel changed at all since I first heard them in 2014, or are they breaking into new genres? Are they really still doing that talent show-esque flute solo bit? Why are they here, and why now? Without any context, my emotions throughout the whole set got no more animated than repeated internal recognitions of, “Oh yeah, this one!”
I really do want to give flowers to Megan Thee Stallion, a star who deserves all of her fame and accolades and puts on an excellent live show worthy of her sub-headliner billing. Except I had seen her relatively recently on the same stage, at a very similar slot as the last time she performed at Coachella, and not much had changed in her sound, let alone her discography, to make me feel like I wasn’t simply watching a retread of her past achievements.
Her approach is so consistent, it felt a bit too familiar during my time watching. So I left early, well before the many guest spots and the curious decision to cut her mic when she went two minutes over, so I could instead catch Arca – a more unpredictable star constantly pushing boundaries both on and off record – at the same time. I would have loved to be met with FOMO after the fact as a validation of Megan’s draw, but instead my decision was somberly justified when her performance didn’t come up once from any of the other dozen friends who stayed behind in our roundup from the weekend.
Maribou State feels like discount Disclosure. But something that resembles in any capacity Disclosure’s sublime live shows is going to be a good time. Live band electronic music fronted by sonorous British vocals is rarely a bad way to spend a sunny festival afternoon.
This was a sick booking by Goldenvoice, one I respected immediately when the lineup dropped, and I hope my placement here does not suggest to the bookers they should stop signing on unsung legends like the Go Go’s on future lineups. But the first day 100 degree heat was brutal, and the massive and impersonal Outdoor Theater, which had several mixing issues throughout the weekend, did the group none of the favors the more intimately sized Mojave tent offered Blondie when they performed in 2023. I came too late to hear “Vacation” and left too early to hear “Our Lips Are Sealed” or “We Got The Beat,” which is on me, but part of the compromise we make at festivals. Everything in the middle was simply insufficiently energizing (even Billie Joe Armstrong coming out for “Head Over Heels”) to make this slam dunk booking on paper rise to the occasion it should have been.
Lisa, the member of the blockbuster K-Pop quartet Blackpink that had a breakout television role in The White Lotus this year, released her debut solo album Alter Ego back in February. The idea is that there are several different sides of herself each represented by different characters on the album, from the bite and bile of Vixi to the cherubic Sunni. She brought those thinly drawn on record characters to life for her Friday night set in the Sahara, lavishly draped by high budget backdrops and costumes and a (more fun in theory than in practice) “character selection screen” framework. But what she achieved in set design did not match her almost insulting indifference to actually singing along to her backing track or performing choreography with her ensemble of dancers. I had fun, but I’m not sure if Lisa did.
Jennie, Lisa’s fellow solo-going Blackpink-mate, has better songs and put more of her K-Pop machine training behind giving them an oomph factor live. She offered fewer costume and set changes, which helped keep the momentum going since she rarely had to leave the stage and task her dancers to do the heavy lifting in her absence.
From the absolutely packed crowd to the celebs in attendance (including ROSÉ, another Blackpink member with a recent solo album that somehow did not make it onto the lineup) to the steamy guest appearance by Kali Uchis, this felt in many ways like a star-securing performance. Except the crowd around my group spent the entire show motionless, their phones held in the air like alms to an idol as they pushed their storage to the limit to capture the entire set in full. Would-be sing-along anthems or dance-ready remixes were received with an unblinking stoicness. If you were a K-Pop skeptic watching on the livestream, you might have become a little more receptive to the genre’s thrills. In person, I saw how the fans could ruin the magic of the talent.
The last time I saw the Beaches perform they opened for the Rolling Stones in a football stadium, running around and doing their best to fill out the massive stage as seniors waited in line at the concession stands. Suffice to say, the band is much better suited for a standing and enthusiastic crowd of festival-goers without an AARP card. They have the stage presence of a far more seasoned group, and absolutely delivered on a fun mid-afternoon set of crowd pleasing modern rock rippers – several of which remained lodged in me and my friends’ heads as we walked from stage to stage for the rest of the day.
Timing can really make or break a set. Ravyn Lenae seems poised to be a much bigger star than her assigned 3 p.m. time slot suggests. Her mellifluous voice and springy stage presence were enchanting, and she sang with an understated power as she ran through recent discography highlights like “Days” and “One Wish.” Yet she felt smaller than she hopefully will one day be by the languid energy of the early afternoon.
Saturday was the most rock-forward Coachella day I’ve had in five years of attendance. Jimmy Eat World’s mid-day set directly followed a surprise early afternoon Weezer performance, and occurred a few hours before Green Day’s headlining performance on the same stage. I came up on all of these bands in middle school, and was surprised by just how vital all three still felt some two to three decades after their heydays. Beyond sounding tight and full of life, with the new songs like “Something Loud” standing right up there with jams like “Pain” and “Bleed American,” there are few better ways to spend 4 p.m. at a festival than making your own mosh pit amongst friends to “The Middle.”
The DoLab is a funny dividing line for Coachella attendees. Some never set foot once in the adjunct stage housing DJ performances throughout the day, others spend a majority of their time dancing beneath its paper mache mushroom structures. I had two experiences with the DoLab this year, which for me is more than average, and both during the dispiriting headliner options I strayed away from.
Sara Landry offered a surprise set for the full moon alongside an all women roster of friends, including Amelie Lens, Indira Paganotto, Bad Girl Bailey, Coco & Breezy, J Worra, Jenna Shaw, Mary Droppinz, and VNSSA (don’t worry, I didn’t know half of them either). The onslaught of hard techno, drum n’ bass, and gothic house was a nice contrast to the rest of my aforementioned “Rockchella,” and was so immersive that when she kept going past her allotted time, due to what was later revealed to be drop outs for the surprise closing slot from both Skrillex and Charli XCX – no one seemed to mind carrying on in throwing down.
The more EDM-oriented members of my crew assured me that the dubstep duo Zed’s Dead was going to “go crazy,” and they did not disappoint. The best part of attending a festival with as wide-ranging a lineup as Coachella’s is the opportunity to break out of your own listening routines, and I enjoyed the opportunity to join my friends in their own elements as much I enjoyed bringing them into mine. Would I ever pay separately to spend another night with these suited up Torontonian bros? No, but their lasers, glitchy drops, and body-shaking wubs made for a great closing dance party to the festival.
Doing her best to not throw up throughout her 45-minute set, the British 24-year-old charmed an audience eager to support her through her visible discomfort. I’m not sure if it was the heat or illness or stage fright, but Lola seemed ready to upchuck at any moment, which gave an incidentally thrilling high wire energy as she pushed her way through delivering her setlist, each song of which the massive Mojave audience treated with nearly as big a reaction as “Messy,” her skyrocketing breakthrough single.
Even when she had to take pauses in her singing to swallow down vomit, Lola Young’s self-effacing and heart-on-sleeve personality shined through. Had she been healthy, I think this set would have been talked about in the future similarly to last year’s precipice-of-superstardom performances by Raye and Chappell Roan.
The seven members of XG, a Japanese girl group that is very much built on the K-Pop model, each demonstrated more vocal ability and dancing talent than either Lisa or Jennie, and their songs have a visual edge and depth of hooks that made it disappointing to see their Sunday night crowd fail to reach even a third of either Blackpink members. Didn’t matter, they showed up for those savvy enough to spend with them their final festival moments, delivering visual theatrics and deft group harmonies for diamond-sharp singles like “WOKE UP” and “SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT” (side note, I love that they’ve bucked the modern trend of all lowercase song titles by fully tilting in the opposite direction). The ability to see rarer international acts on a stage as vast as the Sahara is one of the reasons Coachella’s programming bests any other US fest of its caliber.
Whatever you make of Coachella’s cultural reputation – each year serving as a rorschach test food optimist and pessimists’ perceptions on contemporary pop culture – their overall booking approach is still more adventurous and globally-minded than any of their peers. In a moment in which the US is becoming increasingly isolationist and clamping down on both diversity of expression and existence (more on how that shaped my festival experience tomorrow), this open-minded booking philosophy matters, and I hope is something Goldenvoice doesn’t back down on by this time in 2026.
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