The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has made its much-anticipated comeback after a two-year hiatus. The desert event, which takes place in Indio, California, and runs from April 15-17 and again April 22-24 has grown in popularity over the years thanks to its extravagant Instagram-worthy dress code and frequent celebrity sightings.
20-year-old Billie Eilish became the youngest headliner in the festival’s history and was the star of the night. Eilish’s meteoric journey from Soundcloud kid to headlining one of the world’s most prestigious music festivals has been nothing short of incredible – and no one is more astonished than the pop sensation herself tonight. Eilish had performed at Coachella in 2019, but this time, she headlined the second day.
In “Halley’s Comet” and “Billie Bossa Nova” she sounded terrific — breathy but precise, longing yet ever so sneaky — and in “Your Power,” about the victim of some industry creep’s machinations, she touched a deep vein of empathy. She commenced with Bury a Friend, and the title tune of her newest album, “Happier Than Ever,” was a grandly emotional show-closer that had the audience roaring along with her as she cataloged the insensitivities of a loser ex-boyfriend.
Eilish has struck such a chord with Gen Z partly and her Coachella performance showed how fast she overcame the vocal and emotional obstacles of performing in front of tens of thousands of people. Eilish tweaked a few aspects of her stadium show, including bringing in a large group of dancers dressed in vinyl bodysuits for a juddering rendition of “Oxytocin.”
She also brought out a few special guests, including Khalid, with whom she sang their duet “Lovely,” and Damon Albarn, who sauntered onstage during “Getting Older” and joined her for the second half of the song.
Megan Thee Stallion lit up the main stage with a flurry of her biggest hits. The “Savage” MC got the crowd jiggling along to “Body” and conjured the devil-may-care spirit of a much-missed Cardi B for their controversy-courting “WAP,” dressed as a dangerous fembot in a chrome bodysuit. She also enthralled the crowd with a new song in which she mocked ‘Some Loser Who Will Remain Unceremoniously Nameless.’
Danny Elfman, the former vocalist of Oingo Boingo and now a Hollywood film composer, led a snappy rock band through a couple of his insane art-punk compositions before handing over to a full orchestra to perform his eerie-whimsical movie music from “Batman,” “Spider-Man,” and “Pee-Big wee’s Adventure.” For a scene from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” in which he sang the part of Jack Skellington, he mixed the two styles.
Milli of Thailand, Warren Hue, Niki, and Rich Brian of Indonesia, Hikaru Utada of Japan, and Jackson Wang of China were among the Asian pop and hip-hop stars who plied the main-stage crowd with a parade of crazysexycool jams from a new compilation, “Head in the Clouds Forever,” under the banner of a record label.
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