Music fans will return to the desert this weekend for the 22nd edition of Coachella, with Bad Bunny, Blackpink and Frank Ocean set to headline.
It’s a return to normal pacing for North America’s largest music festival, which resumed last April after two years away and several false starts owing to the pandemic. While last year was marked by concern over organizers’ removal of mask and vaccination restrictions two months before the festival, the pandemic has receded farther into the background for this year’s rendition, which is expected to draw about 125,000 people daily to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California.
Festival organizers have reiterated that all attendees “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to Covid-19 and confirm that they will adhere to local quarantine mandates and the CDC quarantine requirements”.
The focus will be on a global array of artists, including two history-making headliners. The 29-year-old Puerto Rican singer and rapper Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as international superstar Bad Bunny, is the first Latino artist and Spanish-language performer to headline Coachella. The most streamed artist in the world for three years running, Bad Bunny is coming off the highest-grossing tour of 2022, his aptly titled The World’s Hottest Tour, and an album of the year Grammy nomination for his 2022 summer smash Un Verano Sin Ti (A Summer Without You).
Saturday’s marquee Blackpink, whose splashy 2019 Coachella debut marked a breakthrough moment for K-pop in the US, is the first Asian and all-female group to headline. Since their formation in 2016, the band – Jisoo, Jennie, Lisa and Rosé – have racked up dozens of streaming and chart records thanks to their loyal, and massive, fanbase (the Blinks). This week, the group surpassed Justin Bieber as the most viewed artist channel in YouTube history.
“I think performing for Coachella in 2019 was a moment that really woke us up as Blackpink – to be motivated, to dream on and dream big,” Rosé told Billboard this week. “But we never expected anything as big as being the headliner of a festival we’ve all grown up admiring and hoping someday we could find ourselves in the crowd of.”
Jisoo, who like her bandmates also performs as a solo artist, promised that the group’s headliner set would “show our improvement as Blackpink on stage”.
Sunday will bring Ocean’s long-awaited return to the stage; the 35-year-old American singer has not played a live show since 2017. The notoriously reclusive and enigmatic pop innovator was originally scheduled to headline in 2020 before pandemic delays, then rescheduled his slot to 2023. (Last year’s headliners were Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and a double-act set by Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd after Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, dropped out a week before the festival.)
Ocean, widely considered a major influence on pop music since his 2012 debut album Channel Orange, has not released a full-length album since 2016’s Blonde. Speculation about new music has run high, though he has remained mum on the subject outside a cryptic message in January.
Another infamously private musician, Jai Paul, the British songwriter/producer whose early 2010s demos served as a major influence on underground and mainstream electronic music, will make his live performance debut on Sunday.
Other acts performing over the weekend include Rosalía, Gorillaz, Charli XCX, boygenius, Björk, Calvin Harris, the Chemical Brothers, Blondie and Kali Uchis. Blink-182 and James Blake were also last-minute additions this week.
