From underground venues to career-defining performances, Gregory Little breaks down the sound, staging, and standout sets that shaped this year’s Coachella.
By Gregory Little
After 18 years of attending Coachella, I’ve learned that trying to rank one year against another misses the point. What keeps the festival compelling is its constant reinvention—new spaces, new staging concepts, and artists finding fresh ways to present themselves in the desert.
From a production standpoint, Coachella 2026 was one of the strongest in recent memory.
The most fascinating addition this year was The Bunker, a massive underground venue built beneath a man-made hill near Sahara. After watching crews excavate the site for the better part of a year, finally stepping inside was remarkable. The engineering alone is impressive: a cavernous subterranean structure capable of supporting an entire hill overhead while housing serious sound and video infrastructure below. Debuting with an immersive Radiohead film installation, The Bunker feels poised to become one of the festival’s most exciting future performance spaces.
This year’s headliners each brought something distinct.
Sabrina Carpenter opened the weekend with a polished, highly produced pop spectacle. Her set featured massive staging, sharp visuals, and celebrity cameos, all executed with the scale one expects from a modern headliner.
Sunday’s closing headliner, KAROL G, delivered a huge, high-energy performance with commanding stage presence, excellent sound quality, and production large enough to fill the main stage with ease.
But the weekend’s most memorable headlining performance belonged to Justin Bieber. Rather than rely on oversized spectacle, Bieber built his set around a deeply personal production concept, most notably harmonizing live with archival footage of his younger self performing on screen behind him. The result was one of the weekend’s most emotionally effective moments—nostalgic, inventive, and surprisingly intimate for a main-stage headline performance. His surprise appearance at the Do Lab only further cemented his presence as one of the weekend’s defining artists.
Beyond the headliners, several other performances stood out.
David Byrne delivered what may have been the weekend’s finest pure performance a flawlessly choreographed production that felt more like Broadway than a festival set. Meanwhile, Nine Inch Noize, the collaboration between Trent Reznor and Boys Noize, fused dancers, lasers, industrial sound, and electronic production into one of the weekend’s most visceral spectacles.
And among the weekend’s most pleasant surprises, Teddy Swims delivered one of the strongest vocal performances of the festival. His powerhouse live vocals, paired with memorable guest appearances, made his set one of Friday’s most unexpectedly standout moments.
After nearly two decades, Coachella remains compelling for the same reason it always has: not simply because of who performs, but because each year offers something new to discover—and new ways to hear, see, and experience the familiar.
