Coachella has always flexed its muscle as one of the world’s most influential music festivals by booking big-name reunions and comeback shows that fans can’t see anywhere else. The desert fest hosted the reunion of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg (and the now-fabled 2Pac hologram) in 2012 and the return of Outkast in 2014. Prince melted faces off in 2008 when he was a last-minute add to the lineup, which also included Roger Waters and Kraftwerk.
Around 2017, promoter Goldenvoice began moving away from these kinds of mega-watt reunions and glitzy legacy acts — a long-established part of the Coachella brand — in favor for global pop stars with bookings like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande and Harry Styles. An attempt at a classic Coachella reunion had a false start with the attempted Rage Against the Machine headlining set in 2020 canceled (along with the rest of the festival) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Other legacy artists, meanwhile, were re-allocated to 2016’s Desert Trip and 2023’s Power Trip, which Goldenvoice also hosted at the Empire Polo Club and targeted older demographics with artists including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, Metallica and Tool — any of whom in previous years could have been Coachella headliners.
But Coachella has never completely abandoned this booking strategy, and the 2024 lineup suggests a renewed interest to lean that way.
This lineup, announced Wednesday, features a healthy dose of ‘90s alt-rock alums with No Doubt, Sublime and Deftones, who this year feel newly minted as legacy acts with the prestige brought by a splashy Coachella appearance. (Even if in some cases, they have been consistently touring and/or recording for decades.)
As Coachella ages — now with 25 years of experience under its belt — so too has nostalgia for newer eras of music ready to be mined for bookings. This year’s embrace of ‘90s/Y2K artists had a successful test case in 2023, when Coachella added a reunited classic-lineup Blink-182 to the bill the day before the festival began. The success of that booking — the trio, which hadn’t played together since 2015 and which packed the massive Sahara Tent and then became the weekend two Sunday night headliners after Frank Ocean dropped out — demonstrated an appetitive for millennial nostalgia among attendees.
As Goldenvoice has done deftly in years past, with this through line Coachella has delivered on a demand that only recently taken form. The recent re-mainstreaming of alt-rock and guitar music in general through crossover artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Machine Gun Kelly likely played a part. And with generally fewer proven modern acts of their size to assemble lineups from, the allure of recognizable past hitmakers is greater than it has been in a long time.
Here are the acts Coachella 2024 is putting forward to satisfy this historic element of the lineup.