Image via Pranav Trewn
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
Even after the countless festivals I’ve notched in my concert-going career and with my increasingly weakened knees, I am deeply committed to the early crew. Where most of my friends and fellow industry folks find their way onto the festival grounds in the late afternoon hours, I’m always racing to be there each day in time for the first sets. Many of the best artists of the weekend perform for the sparsest crowds of the most committed attendees, who are present to get as much value as they can out of their festival ticket. Hope Tala was among the greatest rewards for their dedication.
The British singer performs winning soul songs straddling the line between R&B and bossa nova, and her band sounded pristine recreating live the swaying momentum of her studio recordings. Few people go to a festival of Coachella’s scale just to see an artist still firmly on the club circuit, but enough fans were so enthralled watching from the rail that you could believe they came solely for her. Where some smaller musicians are diminished by the scope of the event hosting them, the bright atmosphere of the desert and pleasantly delirious fatigue of being on your third day removed from reality made for the perfect context to enjoy a cheery understated talent.
Much of what happens on Coachella stages is enacted for the benefit of the recorded media that will come out of the weekend and be used as key promo for growing artists to continue jockeying for new positions and placements in our attention ecosystem. That leads to an emphasis on clout-capturing special guests, fireworks and pyrotechnics and confetti cannons, and gimmicky on stage antics that might generate headlines. In this environment, there’s often little room for earnest singer songwriters to break out of the noise. Medium Build, the project of Anchorage-based Nick Carpenter, however, shone through. He wore his heart on his sleeve for songs about disappointment and shame and other emotions rarely on offer for fashionable festival goers running from feel good spectacle to spectacle. I came in without much emotional investment in his music, and walked out rooting for him not just as an artist, but as a human.
Charli XCX’s go-to producer has enjoyed a positive spillover effect from Brat summer, in that many of their collaborations make up his setlists to roaring response. Yet A. G. Cook proved in his Friday performance that he’s got plenty to offer outside of that newly coveted association. He lived up to his John Lennon resemblance during a soft-rocking singing section, disarming the crowd as he crooned earnestly into an oversized hot pink microphone. Behind the decks, he turned the tent inside out as he ran through 7G and Britpop singles that glittered as brightly as anything he’s made with Charli. When he did call upon friends, he subverted expectations by conjuring Danny Brown out of an onstage phone booth. The Detroit rapper then rode through a rendition of “Attak” and a remix of “Party 4 U” that I need a studio release of yesterday.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s rundown, the international celebrations that take place throughout the weekend gives Coachella an edge relative to other US festivals. I’ve enjoyed over the years Bad Bunny and Karol G dedicate portions of their shows to celebrating Latin music’s global impact, Indian artists from Diljit Dosanjh to AP Dhillon put on their home countries and cultures for an audience rarely exposed to their nuances, and 88Rising celebrating the diaspora of East Asian artistry in showcase slots on the festival’s biggest stage.
Amaarae, a pop music chameleon straddling the line between Sabrina Carpenter opening gigs and rave Pitchfork scores, put Ghana on in her triumphant midday performance, making her sidestage feel for a few moments like a headlining slot. Ghana flags were hoisted up around the audience, and she interspersed anthems from the country between her avant-garde, sex-positive bangers, including her own global smash “Sad Girlz Luv Money”. The pride was infectious, but the victory lap energy didn’t crowd out her boundary pushing sensibilities, including ending the set by shaving her head while singing along to the searing slow burner “Come Home to God.”
People continue to underestimate Weezer. Upon returning from the pandemic, Coachella began a tradition of revealing with their set times surprise big name additions to the lineup. Compared to the past offerings – a pre-cancellation Arcade Fire, a reunited Blink-182, a resurgent Vampire Weekend – Weezer could surely feel like a step down, especially when Weekend 2 somehow got in the same unbelievably early time slot the stadium-breaking Ed Sheeran. Still, they proved to be a savvy booking by Goldenvoice. The workmanlike rock band has a stable of hits that span decades, and the energy never dropped as they moved through one to another. Weezer generated less excitement on the page than the previous folks in their position, but having as a bonus to an already stellar lineup an hour of sing-alongs to enduring anthems like “Say It Ain’t So” and “Buddy Holly” and a canny cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (speaking of which, get that band to the desert ASAP) was like having a second Christmas morning the day after Christmas.
Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner took the stage for her third Coachella dressed like Max from Where The Wild Things Are, performing her daydreamy indie pop songs on a deep sea themed set complete with a central clam she nestled into while her band performed in Victorian ruffles. It was a very compelling visual world to watch her frolic around in, and probably among the best feel good sets I saw despite it marking the debut of her misdirectionally titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) tour. As a Plastic Beach enthusiast, I loved the cheeky “On Melancholy Hill” cover, even if her special guest and tourmate Ginger Root brought nothing to the table in his evident lack of familiarity with the song.
His subsequent befuddled response as Zauner threw him a bone to promote his own set the next day (he didn’t know the name of his own stage), was actually an apt disposition to bring to a show that had an unshackled, too-free-to-care presentation. This whole column ranking performances against one another is an exercise in overthinking, and so here I am placing this show at #14, even though being there in the moment – dancing along to music that sounded like the most buoyant Sufjan Stevens tunes – felt in real time like the best concert of my life. The greatest Coachella sets hold that kind of magic, like you’re enveloped in the sensation of what it felt like when you first began watching live music.
You don’t need to be a Bushwick bum to recognize the glorious charm of dance-punkers Fcukers. The three piece outfit holds strong “next big thing potential”, but take themselves so casually on stage you almost wonder if they’re aware of how much energy they are inciting in the crowd. This was my third time seeing the group in the past eight months, but the mark of a great live band is that they only get better with repetition. The sole notable shift from my prior experiences was that they beefed up their sound with a turntablist scratching vinyl, which added a nice texture to their velvety and irreverent house jams. But even without any expectation of new songs to come or further instrumental adjustments, I’m already looking out for the next opportunity I get to enjoy again their irreverent swagger.
T-Pain is an unimpeachable gold-plated hitmaker, and yet he’s been rocking something of an underdog status these last few years, at least ever since the story came out of Usher cursing his contributions to music. Even if at this point the man likely makes more money on Twitch than from his new music, there’s something about his mainstage performance that felt like a necessary moment for T-Pain’s journey. He seemed genuinely moved by the attendance, and tapped into the same instinctual showmanship that ignited his last career resurgence on NPR’s Tiny Desk. He rapped technically commanding verses, soulfully sung with and without his trademark auto-tune, and blitzed through impressive dance moves when he wasn’t simply spinning around like a toddler on a summer day. From “All I Do Is Win” to “Get Low” to a perfectly earnest “Don’t Stop Believin”, there wasn’t a moment for anyone in the crowd to do anything but smile.
An early cognitive dissonance I felt at Coachella was figuring out where the joy on display bled into a blind eye to what was happening outside of Indio. I don’t need to go into the laundry list of crises occurring right now in the US and abroad, but I carried with me a low-level anxiety as I moved through all the ephemeral decadence of the weekend. It felt like a miracle that the international acts weren’t held back by custom issues, or that transgender artists were able to perform with the support of a behemoth company like AEG. But I craved some type of further, explicit acknowledgement that we are in a new abnormal, that simply showing up and keeping on wasn’t sufficient resistance for this moment.
So props to Clairo, who’s set began with the biggest surprise guest of the weekend, a resurgent Bernie Sanders in the midst of his Fighting Oligarchy tour. That his brief speech hardly deviated from his long-running talking points said less about a stale approach to meeting the moment than it proved he has long been ahead of the curve on what the moment has needed. As he has done across his tour stops, he gave a genuine and impassioned intro to a musician he admires, contextualizing Clairo not just as an artist writing soul-stirring songs, but one willing to use her platform for the type of advocacy we all desperately need more of right now. That intro brought her subsequently accomplished and joyous performance to light, renewing my faith in the meaning of gatherings crowds like the one I was a part of. Everything I was participating in suddenly felt much more necessary, from the catharsis of booing this new regime in an audience of tens of thousands to the electrifying recognition of political stances that haven’t been forgotten just because of a change in administration. Music can be resistance, but not if we take that designation for granted.
Kneecap get special acknowledgement for being the first of very few artists I heard make mention to free Palestine during their set, and they were undoubtedly the most ardent to get that message across, going so far to recruit famed streamer Hasan Piker to make an uncensored alternative for remote fans to watch their Weekend Two performance after Coachella blacked out part of the group’s first weekend livestream. Beyond simply making space without reservation to speak against the horrors, the Irish trio stayed true to the rebellious spirit that has powered their rise and last year’s excellent eponymous film – rapping and chanting in both English and Irish against undercover cops, British imperialism, and Margaret Thatcher.
In a moment in which our fundamental reality as Americans is being altered day-by-day for the worse, to not use your stage to make it clear what you believe, no matter how seemingly self-evident, is a missed opportunity. We don’t need to dwell at a music festival on this mess we’re in, but I do genuinely believe we should be energized by the arts to sustain our actions. I appreciated the rare proof on a stage as commercialized as Coachella’s that you can stand for something and still succeed in this industry, or at the least be successful and also be able to say something.
We don’t deserve Arca, who’s late evening Sunday set radiated in equal measure uninhibited trans joy and avant garde noise mutations. Her set felt like an exhibition on what freedom looks like, finding the Venezuelan producer singing in venomous Spanish on top of industrial percussion while simultaneously making room to bring out Addison Rae to sing her airy synth pop. Side by side, the two were juxtaposed almost symbolically in black leather and pillowy white like that one meme of the two neighboring houses.
Several years ago I saw Arca perform at the late FYF fest, struggling with tech that was simply not working, with a vision for her set that was not yet cohering. How much more confident they seemed now, commanding the stage while playing new music that has only gotten stronger from their already groundbreaking early work. That the best Arca show is likely still to come only made the one we have now all the more awe-inducing.
Quick callout on the corniest concert behavior: FaceTiming your friends into a show. Similar to hoisting someone up on your shoulders for more than 10 seconds, it benefits one person at the expense of annoying almost everyone around you (although I can’t help but be at least a little impressed that anyone has a phone carrier offering good enough service to make those FaceTimes possible).
The one exception I’ve now made to this rule is FaceTiming someone when Missy Elliott is onstage. Everyone who did so during her Friday night set were all seemingly called upon by an irresistible instinct, a higher calling that “I need someone else in my life to witness this living legend go full Transformer and turn from a car into a fly extraterrestrial space captain.” Several times throughout her marathon of hits on the main stage, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and turned to my friends for confirmation. Except that I can’t see her logo as anything other than the Gmail icon, every visual element of her set was perfect, and she gave an on-mic performance besting most of the half-her-age MCs I’ve seen perform at the same festival. Missy is an icon, and the one two punch of her into Lady Gaga on Friday night was perfect programming, both as a fully engaging sequence of entertainment and presenting a historical narrative tracing one visually iconic pop star to another.
I think for people more tapped into UK garage, it’s overdone at this point to comment on Sammy Virji’s unmissable smile. I don’t care, the man’s beaming canines were news to me. Besides being the best dance music set of the weekend that literally kicked up a storm of dust in the Sahara (my friends and I all put on our masks halfway through to stop inhaling the dirt, and then watched as our masks all turned several shades darker), Sammy’s time on the decks made for a postcard image of the festival. His infectious grin, perfect for Orbit ads, spreads rapidly to the hordes in the tent. I might have been more impressed by other performances, but I don’t think I caught the spirit quite as deeply as I did for Sammy.
After the Prodigy’s equal parts disorienting and dialed-in performance – a hybrid between Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack – one of my friends less studied on the lineup turned to me and asked if anyone else this weekend would be like that? I was as disappointed to share as she was to hear that, no, nothing else would come close to resembling the laser-guided transcendental noise meditation the English rave rockers carried us through.
I was a KROQ kid, or at least a regional variant (shouts out 94.7 FM in Sacramento). That means I’ve seen the likes of the Foo Fighters, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer, and the rest of their turn of the century “alternative rock” ilk all several times in the past. Yet somehow in my two decades of concert going, I’ve never caught Green Day, a band that hasn’t been particularly hard to catch. I identified them as washed well before their peers, being a particularly ardent hater on 21st Century Breakdown (before most of what followed turned out to be even worse). So I had mixed emotions seeing their headliner booking; on one hand I get to cross this band off my bucket list, on another, is this really an exciting booking in 2025 for the biggest music festival in America?
Within a couple of songs, I had turned a new page. Green Day proved to be among the best headliners I’ve seen at Coachella since I began attending in 2019. I’ve come a long way from listening to Sublime Radio on Pandora in middle school, but the band helped me tap back into what made “Holiday” and “Brain Stew” and “Basket Case” all so enticing to me when rock music first began transforming my brain chemistry. Far removed from their Gilman days, the trio are consummate professionals, which means they put on a show, almost certainly dropping tens of thousands on the fireworks and pyro budget alone (it was utilized truly on almost every song). Many selections had on stage gimmicks, which proved far more compelling than I would have expected – from a genuinely endearing fan blacking out on stage as she shouted along to “Know Your Enemy”, to a different, more smarmy audience member coming onstage to play guitar and entertainingly annoying the hell out of Billie Joe Armstrong.
Throughout the show I was reminded that Green Day have hits. Like, monocultural hits – not just a handful of streaming behemoths that only certain sects of internet users care about. “Longview”, “When I Come Around”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”? These songs aren’t just endlessly catchy, but have lived their own histories. Green Day’s appeal spanned demographics; there wasn’t a performance that united the festival more.
[Quick note before I get into the Top 5: I saw both Darkside and Basement Jaxx perform in San Francisco the week before Coachella, so I skipped them for other artists during the festival weekend. If I was including them in this list, they would both be somewhere after here.]
Is Kumo 99 my new favorite band? For those uninitiated, the LA-based project features Ami Komai chomping on the Japanese language, turning her syllables into shrapnel sprayed across Nate Donmoyer’s hardcore-minded drum and bass. Coachella is a festival where your brain can be split in too many directions – thinking about what you want to see next, when you have to leave for it, if you will be able to find again your friends that you left for this set – let alone encroaching reminders of your responsibilities back home. But I didn’t look away or have any unrelated thoughts during the duo’s all-too-brief-but-densely-packed 30 minute set, a spell that had a vice grip on my psyche, in the most positive way.
There has been a lot of talk within Coachella subreddits and forums that Lady Gaga set a new watermark for the festival’s headliners, that she has to now be in the conversation as one of the greatest of all time. I wasn’t there for Beyoncé, Prince, or Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, so I can’t be an arbiter for this debate. However, it is indisputable that Gaga basically nailed everything that could have been asked of her and then some. Each of the show’s concepts were extraordinary, from the chess board dance battle to the skeleton partner dancing to the opening image of Gaga’s cast trapped beneath her oversized ball gown. She split the operatic show into acts that were only vaguely comprehensible narratively, but she sold everything contained within each through sheer dexterity. The abundance of craft and athleticism on display made her choice to lean so heavily on selections from the new album less risky than inspired.
Of course, I’d have loved to have heard some other Gaga favorites like “Telephone” and “Just Dance”, but I can’t say the momentum stalled for even a moment (beyond the comically long encore break that at least a third of the crowd left during, fully convinced she couldn’t possibly come back to give us even more). The audience was fed, but this wasn’t fan service. Gaga has definitively proved that almost 20 years after her breakthrough – an eternity in pop music – she is still conceiving her most vital work to come.
One of the most packed sets all weekend was for Yo Gabba Gabba!, which speaks to the appeal of simple commands and bright colors for otherwise overstimulated festival-goers. I skipped that one, but I imagine I achieved a similar effect at Kraftwerk. The electronic pioneers’ mathematically melodic music and hypnotic visual loops felt soothing to my brain after a full weekend of some other 37 acts seen to that point. You could argue that their primordial influence is what everything else at the festival spun out of, an impression that really sunk in when I looked over to my left and could see Zedd’s insane light show peaking out into the sky. Unmoving on stage, unconcerned with speaking to the current moment they helped shape over the last fifty years, Kraftwerk continue to celebrate how fully-formed their music was in the first place. One thing about Coachella is that while the promoters don’t shy away from appealing to their lowest common denominators, they also continue to place respect where it’s due.
This is something that shouldn’t have worked. “Ride of the Valkyries,” “Shower” by Becky G, John Williams’ “The Imperial March,” and an LL Cool J medley do not make sense sitting together in an hour long setlist. But Goldenvoice and departing LA Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel knew what they were doing when they cooked up their desert orchestral fever dream. They connected several contemporary genres back to classical music through an inspired series of collaborations, from the obvious (Laufey) to the savvy (Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso) to the surprising (Zedd). The conglomeration of musicians was impressive across scale (it is not easy to soundcheck and set-up so many instruments on stage), scope (Beethoven segued directly into “Clarity”, some two centuries of music history traversed in seconds), and execution – not a single choice sounded kitschy or overwrought. Instead, as the sun began to set and folks fully submitted from curiosity into full-blown ardor, Gustavo – with a smile that could maybe rival Sammy Virji’s – captained a beautiful odyssey that few promoters would conceive of and fewer conductors would attempt.
I have seen many breakthrough stars meet their cultural moment at Coachella, but few who have broken through as deep into their career as Charli XCX. Long a pop music pariah, she took on fantastical levels of cultural saturation with Brat. Thankfully, she is one of our savviest media commentators, and knows how to both lean into the perception around her while also sending it up. So while we got the expected parade of newly minted coked-out club classics, complete with the Coachella-expected run of guest stars to do their remixes, we also saw a emotionally affecting inclusions of slower numbers like “I might say something stupid” and “Track 10”, as well as a closing sequence of earnest texts flashing across the screen offering a reflective coda to one of the most successful artistic “eras” in modern memory.
On the way to the desert, I drove past Charli’s viral billboard of the iconic Brat cover scratched out. Much of the 2020s pop music playbook is focused on how to tease your fans to anticipate and build hype around your next moves. Charli played around with that strategy in her own way over the past year, but she seems ready to go back to being an unpredictable current. Brat is the kind of album that musicians spend their whole life hoping to record – when your vision is aligned perfectly with your audience’s reception. It would be so easy to continue mining that vein for further fortune, giving us Brat sequels for the foreseeable future. But Charli was burned back when she tried to make the moves expected of her as a pop star. Now that she’s in full command of her future, she’s not going to keep things conventional. How lucky we are to be living through her figuring it out as she goes.
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