19 Thoughts On The Coachella 2027 Poster

How are we supposed to feel right now? What is the effect supposed to be? When the powerhouse booking company Goldenvoice unveils the lineup for their next Coachella Music & Arts Festival, how do they expect the world to react? The deluge of names always overwhelms, even when it underwhelms. It always has a few galactically famous acts and then a bunch of people who you have never heard of in your life. Maybe it's unavoidable, but my big takeaway is that they want you to feel confused. They want you to feel old.Do you feel old? I feel old, but that's because I am old. I feel old every day. If you're old, Coachella shouldn't be an issue anymore. You're not going to be there. Instead, you have the unbelievably luxurious option of livestreaming the entire festival on YouTube. You can flip around between things happening in real time, and you don't even have to deal with the long hikes in between stages. It's great. You can learn a lot of things watching those streams.You will have to learn those things, though, because every Coachella lineup necessarily includes a whole bunch of acts whose names will be absolutely unfamiliar to you. This is part of the game. You have to accept it. You can't possibly keep tabs on every ascending and descending name in the worlds of EDM, K-pop, emo, reggaeton, hyperpop, rage rap, and whatever other subgenre might be cool this year. Nobody can. It's a fool's errand. Don't try. You should be confused.Nevertheless, the main reaction that I see to every Coachella lineup announcement is a kind of theatrical eye-rolling exasperation. People are like: This? This is what they're giving us? I'm not strawmanning here. More and more often, this is my reaction. Why? What's wrong with me?I'm not going to Coachella. I went once, more than a decade ago, and now I watch every festival stream on my laptop. Nobody's ripping me off. Also, every Coachella lineup has a ton of stuff that I like. If you did go to the festival, you could easily find three days' worth of acts that would blow your shit back. That's true of the 2027 lineup, too. If you can't find a ton of cool shit, then the real inescapable conclusion is that you don't like that much music.But this annual column isn't really about Coachella itself. Instead, it's about the poster — the placements, the font sizes, and the stories that they tell. I have been writing versions of this piece every year for a long, long time. I have watched people climb up the poster and then fall back down. The thing that I love about the Coachella poster is that it lays everything out in stark, hierarchical terms. Some acts are bigger than other acts. Some festivals don't want you to know that. They'll list out all the artists alphabetically, or they'll organize them into different tiers or stages. Not Coachella. If two acts are playing the same day at Coachella, then one of them is going to be listed higher than the other. There are winners, and there are losers. There's no focus on any particular vibe or genre here. Coachella does not narrowcast. If you are on the Coachella poster, then the people at Goldenvoice have deemed you to be part of the conversation. When the poster drops, you know exactly where you stand.The Coachella poster is not an organic document. Artists tend to invest a lot of feelings in where they might sit on a Coachella poster, and their teams care even more deeply. I'm sure artists turn down Coachella bookings because they can't stand to be listed in the fourth line when they think they should be in the third. We rarely get to see any of those negotiations. Though we did get some leaks this year, the final document comes to us like tablets carried down from the mountaintop. This is who's on top, who matters. It's up to us to parse what that means.So let's do that. Let's get into a Coachella-poster close read and parse out some of the stories that it tells. It's an annual tradition. It's what we have to do. You can just look at the Coachella poster and get frustrated, if you want. For me, though, it's a whole lot more fun to get lost in the weeds. What follows is one old man's take on what next year's poster tells us.1. The headliners are booooring. We knew this. It's not a surprise. Back in September, Tame Impala and Dua Lipa were both reported to be headlining Coachella, with SZA jumping on board in October. Because of the reports about those headliners, we've also seen a ton of unconfirmed stories about the headliners that Goldenvoice tried and failed to book — Rage Against The Machine, Miley Cyrus, BTS, Radiohead, Oasis. All of those acts would've been big swings, and all of them evidently said no. Instead, we're left with a tremendously safe trio.In isolation, Tame Impala, Dua Lipa, and SZA all make perfect sense as Coachella headliners. They're all big names. They all have hits. They're all culturally present. They're all fully established, and you could argue that all of them are at or near their peaks. They're neither young nor old. Tame Impala's Kevin Parker is 40. SZA is 37. Dua Lipa is 31. Tame Impala has worked with both Dua Lipa and SZA, which means there's a high likelihood of crossover moments.I'd have fun watching all three headliners. I have had fun watching two of the three; Lipa is the only one I've never seen live. Tame Impala and SZA have both played multiple Coachellas, and Tame have headlined before, though they're riding a new peak since "Dracula" blew up. Lipa has never played the festival, but that's kind of a surprise. I'm sure she'll be great.But none of them feel special, do they? There's no real surprise factor. Lipa has taken a few years off from pop stardom, but she's pretty clearly about to come back to it. All three acts have done big tours in recent memory. They're all used to the spotlight. Coachella hasn't coaxed any reluctant legends back to the big stage. They haven't figured out a way to channel mass gen-Z nostalgia, like they did when Justin Bieber headlined last year. (Miley Cyrus could've done that.) There's no sense that any of these artists have suddenly elevated themselves to headliner status. We could spend all day listing off possible headliners who might've been more exciting. Olivia Rodrigo and/or Chappell Roan. Arctic Monkeys. Rosalía. The Cure, returning to the desert. The Hole reunion that we'll probably never get. The Daft Punk reunion that we'll definitely never get. Hell, Bruno Mars, why not.Coachella's reputation depends, at least in part, on holy shit bookings. These are not holy shit headliners. Fortunately, there's plenty of holy shit action in the high undercard.2. Holy shit! Madonna! Now we're talking. I was in the crowd at Coachella in 2015, when Drake introduced Madonna as a surprise guest, and then she surprised him by shoving her tongue down his throat. When she walked offstage, he wiped his lips off. It was funny. Madonna is the most famous person on this poster by a good distance. She's arguably our greatest living pop star, and she's got more hits than all three headliners combined. She could've presumably headlined, if she wanted. But the poster specifically tells us that Madonna will be "in the dance tent." This is what she wants us to know.Back in 2006, Madonna made a surprise appearance in Sahara Tent. It was a big deal. She was promoting Confessions On A Dance Floor, and that was her way of signaling her engagement with yet another generation of ravers. This year, Madonna released Confessions II, and it fucking slaps. She hasn't toured behind that record. I'm guessing that this Coachella appearance will be something like Nine Inch Noize last year — a full-on superstar doing something special that was created with this specific venue in mind. Madonna might not be the headliner, but if I were going to the fest this year, that would be the main event of the whole weekend for me.3. DA! DEE! YAN! KAAAAAY! And then there's our other bonus headliner. Reggaeton originator Daddy Yankee gets the special spot at the bottom of the poster, and I think that's a lot more interesting than the big dance acts that sometimes get the nod. Yankee did a retirement tour in 2022, but I don't think anyone took that seriously. His '00s hits have persistently refused to disappear from the culture. My kids' Spanish is elementary at best, but both of them love "Gasolina." Coachella is clearly still shooting for global reach, and a huge percentage of the biggest acts in the world right now are directly inspired by what this guy did in the not-too-distant past. A cool booking. 4. Pop music on top. An interesting development that I've been noting in the past few years: A lot of the most exciting music being made right now exists in the realm of straight-up pop. Sometimes, that stuff can get experimental, which is cool. Sometimes, it just goes for endorphin-rush thrills, and that's cool, too. A pop artist doesn't necessarily have to make actual pop hits to tour big venues, though it doesn't hurt.In his book Major Labels, Kelefa Sanneh noted that people seem to use the term "pure pop music" to refer to stylistic descendants of Madonna, so it's significant that Madonna is on this year's poster. It's just as significant that Dua Lipa, a clear Madonna disciple, is a headliner. A lot of the other exciting acts on this year's lineup fit into the pop category in one way or another: Zara Larsson, Robyn, Adéla, Tove Lo, Haute & Freddy. Remi Wolf and Caroline Polachek are in that mix, too. I'd never heard of After, an LA duo pretty far down the poster, but the couple of tracks that I heard today go hard. If these artists all go off the way I think they will, Katy Perry might start thinking about another comeback attempt.5. Glitched-out underground pop gets its spotlight moment. It's hard to say where straight-up pop ends and its various freaked-out online variants begin. But this year's Coachella is awfully heavy on a certain strain of debauched, hedonistic, static-addled internet music. Most of those cult heroes are in the smaller lines, but look at Snow Strippers, back for the second year in a row and all the way up there in line three. Snow Strippers have a proven festival track record. But a lot of the other hyperpop acts on this year's lineup are new to the idea of playing shows at all. They're here on energy, on swirling vibes. Some of them will probably shit the bed. Others might achieve transcendence. It's time for people like Shygirl, underscores, the Hellp, Bassvictim, Tiffany Day, ear, and rommulas to show the world what they can do. Maybe I should mention Drain Gang, Nettspend, and xaviersobased here, too, since there's not exactly a firm border between hyperpop and brainrotted rage rap these days.6. K-pop, plus the rest of the world. At this point, Coachella is part of the K-pop promotional machine. When K-pop acts play the festival, it's a big deal. Blackpink's 2019 set got a ton of attention, and then they (technically) headlined in 2023. That's probably why Jisoo, the least interesting solo Blackpink member, is so far up near the top of this year's poster. There's other K-pop at the top, too. Babymonster are a YG Entertainment girl group who just debuted in 2024. And then there's NCT, a baffling interlinked network of seven different boy bands. There are 23 different guys in NCT across all of those groups. They're like the K-pop Wu-Tang, where it just looks like absolute chaos if you're not all the way plugged in. Are they all going to be there?I've spent the entire day digging through the names on the festival poster that I didn't already know. Most of them are dance DJs, but some of them are pop acts from different parts of the world, and I'm happy to learn of their existence. For instance: Where you aware of SB19, a K-pop-style idol group from the Philippines? I was not. I'm fascinated.There's so much stuff from all around the world on this lineup, Daddy Yankee being only the most obvious and immediate example. There's a lot more, too. Becky G is American, but she's part of what Yankee started. So are Argentina's Milo J, Spain's Bad Gyal, and Chile's Akriila, though none of them sound anything like each other. (Honestly, Akriila is at least as much hyperpop as she is reggaeton.) Punjabi star Diljit Dosanjh has played Coachella before, and his set looked crazy. The chaotic Japanese girl group ATARASHI GAKKO! are back for a second round, too. Ayra Starr is this year's designated Afrobeats representative. Los Pibes Chorros, from Argentina, belong to the subgenre of cumbia villera — raw, stripped-down cumbia, at least from what I'm reading right now. The slinky girl group no na follow the K-pop blueprint, but they're from Indonesia. People used to talk about how you should go see any Australian band play Coachella. Historically, lots and lots of Australians come out to the festival and then go fucking nuts for their own stars. Now, people come to Coachella from all over the world, and they do the same thing. One of my favorite things about this year's lineup is the way it offers so many radically different versions of that spectacle. 7. A big year for R&B. Plenty of past Coachella headliners have been R&B singers, or singers with heavy R&B influences — Prince, Beyoncé, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber. From that perspective, it's not at all surprising to see SZA as a headliner. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a previous Coachella lineup where R&B overshadows rap. This poster also has Steve Lacy, Kehlani, Victoria Monét, Leon Thomas, Mariah The Scientist, Jorja Smith, Kelela, Odeal, the Womack Sisters — artists who don't necessarily have much in common, but who could all be considered R&B singers in one sense or another. That's pretty striking!8. Rap is maybe not in crisis anymore. Last year, I was lightly shocked at the relative lack of rap on the Coachella lineup. This year's selection is arguably paltry and certainly chaotic, but it feels a bit more robust. Don Toliver, who recently graduated to arena status, is probably the biggest newish rap star to come along in the past few years. He's in the immediate support slot this year, and I wouldn't be shocked if he's a headliner somewhere down the line. His music doesn't compel me at all, but I might stream his set anyway. I bet it'll be something to see.The rest of this year's rap selection are all over the fucking place, though I can't help but notice that a lot of them are white guys. Someone should really follow Mike D around with a camera and record his reactions to EsDeeKid and Nettspend, his distant descendants in the white-rapper lineage. Drain Gang, history's greatest Swedish rap crew, have prominent billing. (They're not all white, but they are Swedish.) Beyond the slightly uncomfortable race factor, I'm into the idea of Freddie Gibbs, xaviersobased, Fetty Wap, and Genesis Owusu, plus all those white and/or Swedish guys, representing the genre in vastly, discombobulatingly different ways.9. The Turnstile effect is over. In the past few years, I've been tracking the way that Coachella has treated hardcore. Turnstile have had some big, magic moments at the fest. If they hadn't played last year, they'd probably be on this poster, likely pretty close to the top. But unilke past years, this Coachella has no hardcore bands. I honestly don't get it. I'm not saying chug-mosh bands like Final Resting Place belong at Coachella, but a group like Angel Du$t would probably crush it.Instead, next year's Coachella has a few of the legacy punk acts that were once Goldenvoice's specialty — the Damned, Social Distortion, and Pennywise, all of which will probably be a lot of fun. And then there's a healthy dollop of emo. Pinegrove, on hiatus for the past few years, are the closest this poster has to a big reunion, which probably accounts for why they're so high up on the poster. Basement and American Football, whose reunions are not new, are in the mix. So are La Dispute.For me, one of the most exciting bands on the bill is First Day Back, an extremely young '90s-style DIY emo crew who just released the debut album Forward last year. They went from playing basements to big stages very quickly, and it's both shocking and cool to see them already at the Coachella level. I guess that surprise factor makes them this year's equivalent to Drain or Soul Glo or Speed. Maybe the Turnstile effect is something else now.10. The dream of the '90s is alive. When I was listing off those emo bands, I almost threw Weezer into the mix, just for fun. Even though they've spent decades making some of the worst music you ever heard in your life, Weezer remain hugely powerful. Kids love them. They're way up near the top of this poster, and they're only the second band I've ever seen that evidently warrant their own Coachella-poster font. (The reunited Misfits were the first.)Speaking anecdotally, my children have come to absolutely fucking love '90s alt-rock. I did not indoctrinate them into those ways. They found that shit via TikTok. That's one of the effects of an internet environment that strips music of its context. Bands aren't old or new anymore. They all exist on the same plane. So when Weezer get booked at Coachella today, it's not because they're trying to convince fortysomethings to buy tickets. They're doing it for the kids.Plenty of other '90s heroes will also return to the desert next spring: Mike D, Underworld, Pennywise, American Football. Since I Left You technically came out in 2000, but I feel like the Avalanches belong in this category, too. And most intriguingly, motherfucking Enigma will play Coachella. What will that be like? I bet it will rule. I am just now picturing myself stoned in the desert late at night with "Return Innocence" playing really loud, and I'm wondering if maybe I should go to this festival after all.11. Nostalgia takes different forms. I love seeing Giorgio Moroder's name on a festival bill, especially one that's this heavy on EDM acts who could've never existed if not for what that guy did. (I guess Moroder is the fest's obligatory film-score composer, too. He does have an Oscar.) But given that all of Moroder's greatest hits are older than any of this year's Coachella headliners, I'm not sure he fully qualifies as a nostalgia act.Beyond the '90s throwbacks, this Coachella poster has a few acts who call back to moments in the much less distant past — artists whose music might remind people much younger than me of their own pasts. That's my best explanation for why Empire Of The Sun are so high on this bill. Is Fetty Wap there for nostalgia purposes, or just because he's been having a TikTok moment lately? Is there any difference? What about Måneskin? Do the Neighbourhood make teenagers think about when they were eight years old?What about Martin Garrix and Tiësto, big names of the '00s EDM boom? Are they here for nostalgia or because they're the guys who always play the dance tent? Much to consider.12. Indie rock...? Phoebe Bridgers is both a real-deal indie rocker and a genuine crossover star. She'll headline a lot of festivals in 2027, and she's also in the immediate support slot at Coachella. I wonder if she was in the headliner conversation there, too. But she's a generational figure, a one of one. The festival has plenty of other indie rockers, but they don't exactly get marquee billing here. Look at This Is Lorelei — universally respected among his peers, the maker of one of this year's finest albums, still way down there in the small print.Do Angine de Poitrine count as an indie rock band? They're very much their own thing, and the perfect storm of festival-friendly virality still wasn't enough to get them too far up this poster. They're still higher than buzz-band types like Julia Wolf, Twisted Teens, Getdown Services, Chanel Beads, Fat Dog, mary in the junkyard, Lambrini Girls, and Florence Road. Indie rock has its own festivals. At Coachella, it's just a small part of the landscape, and not exactly a priority. I could spend all day naming indie bands that could've played this festival. Maybe I'll do some of that later in this article. 13. Lots of collectives. I already mentioned NCT, the vast K-pop army, and Drain Gang, the Swedish rap crew, but they aren't the only loose confederations on the poster. There's also the UK house label Solid Grooves (pretty high on the poster) and the American DJ crew Close Friends Only. Dinner Party — Kamasi Washington, 9th Wonder, Robert Glasper, and Terrace Martin — might be more of a supergroup than a collective, but maybe that's splitting hairs. I'd guess there's a high probability of guest stars at the Dinner Party set. 14. The wave gets darker. Coachella will always be the place where Peter Murphy led a Bauhaus reunion set while hanging upside down like a bat. Theatrical goth shit belongs there. So it's fun to see stuff like Boy Harsher and Twin Tribes on this poster. I don't think Brutalismus 3000 count as darkwave, exactly, but they also belong in the general "music for the blood rave in Blade" vicinity. 15. Something is happening in dance music. I need to tell a quick story here. Last year, the whole Stereogum staff went out to Barcelona for Primavera. The main-stage area at that festival gets really packed, and I was right in the middle of the crowd for Charli XCX's set. I'm extremely tall, and I felt bad for the girls stuck behind me. After a few songs, I asked them if they'd like to go in front. There was this absolutely stunning woman next to me in the crowd — she was pretty tall, too — and she didn't think I should have to do that. She was like, "Nooo! You were vibeeng!"I played that interaction over in my head a few times, and I'm pretty sure the stunning tall lady was Amelie Lens, a Belgian tech-house DJ and former model. (She played that Primavera, too.) Lens is playing next year's Coachella, doing a back-to-back set with Sara Landry, another impossibly glamorous DJ. Dance music, like so many other genres, used to be dominated by men to a baffling degree. Prominent female acts like DJ Rap were extremely rare. Those days seem to be over. The Coachella poster always has so many EDM acts, and I'm just now noticing that some of them — Peggy Gou, Charlotte de Witte, KI/KI — are women who look like movie stars. I didn't know this was happening, and I have no idea how to discuss it, but there it is.16. Some of these people are very high on the poster. Congratulations to Dom Dolla, Empire Of The Sun, Jisoo, Role Model, Solomun, Solid Grooves, Snow Strippers, BOLO, Barry Can't Swim, Cloonee, Remi Wolf, Boy Harsher, Boris Brejcha, Pinegrove, Chris Stassy, Odd Mob, Franky Rizardo, and Vintage Culture. You're all a lot more popular than I realized. I'd never even heard of some of you. (Dance DJs, mostly. Same as it ever was.)17. Some of these people should be a lot higher on the poster. I don't have any love in my heart for the Neighbourhood, but I thought they were an arena-level band, not a "billed under Four Tet" situation. (Congrats are also in order for Four Tet, who always seems to do well at these things.) I'm similarly confused about the poster placement for acts like Mike D, Leon Bridges, MUNA, Victoria Monét, the Avalanches, and Mariah The Scientist, all of whom probably deserve bigger font sizes than what they got. Tell your agents to get tougher!18. The part of the column where we name some guys who could be playing the festival but aren't. Doechii! Fontaines D.C.! Tinashe! Hayley Williams! Wednesday! Atlas Sound! King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard! Sturgill Simpson! Cameron Winter! Ratboys! DIIV! Westside Cowboy! Nia Archives! Lime Garden! Grace Ives! Erika de Casier! Quiet Light! RIP Magic! Lip Critic! Sophia Stel! untitled (halo)! PISS, if you wanted to make everyone really uncomfortable! I guess maybe Drake! 19. Violet Grohl.Honestly. Come on. Read the room. Same goes for you, Villanelle frontman Gene Gallagher.