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
