According to Variety, Harry Styles will perform alongside Coachella superstars Billie Eilish and Kanye West. Swedish House Mafia are also expected to perform, though it is uncertain whether they will be the main attraction. On Wednesday evening, the official announcement and full lineup were made public.
Styles’ debut performance at the event, according to sources, who may release new music before the performance. He recently finished the largest North American tour by any major artist since the pandemic began in early 2020, despite the fact that he hasn’t released a new album since “Fine Line” in December of 2019, and rumors about new music have been rampant in recent weeks. Billboard published the news of West’s appearance on the bill first; Variety released the news of West’s performance last week.
West was a Coachella headliner in 2011, and Eilish made her festival debut in 2019 (at 20, she is the youngest artist to top the bill); SHM previously performed at Coachella in 2012.
In addition to West, Eilish, and Styles, the lineup includes Lil Baby, Daniel Caesar, Phoebe Bridgers, Big Sean, Megan Thee Stallion, 21 Savage, Danny Elfman, Doja Cat, Joji, Run the Jewels, and many others.
The festival, which is already sold out, will be held on the weekends of April 15-17 and April 22-24, 2022, at the Empire Polo Ground in Indio, California. However, the frightening omicron spike and the recent postponement of the Grammy Awards have many people wondering whether the festival will take place in April or be postponed for the fifth time.
Coachella, North America’s largest music festival, has already sold out of its 125,000 per-day tickets, and the sheer logistics of more than 100,000 individuals flying to and congregating at a single place creates incalculable opportunities for disease transmission.
While Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, and Rage Against the Machine were the original headliners for this 21st version of the event, which was first announced in January of 2020, the festival has been postponed four times owing to the epidemic. Ocean shifted his appearance to 2023 last year, while Scott was dropped from the lineup in the aftermath of the Astroworld disaster in November, though his agent tried to keep him on the bill, according to Variety.
Coachella’s dates were shifted from April to October 2020, then to April 2021, and then to October of that year — although the October 2021 dates were never formally verified by organisers — and the current dates were posted on the festival’s website last autumn. Goldenvoice rarely speaks to the press and has not issued a statement on the most of the postponements; the one in January of last year came from the Riverside County public health officer.
Plans for the April event have been moving at full speed since the entertainment industry began to return to normalcy last summer. Several major festivals, including Lollapalooza and Rolling Loud, went off without a hitch, though both Travis Scott’s Astroworld in Houston and the Once Upon a Time in L.A. festival were marred by tragedy: 10 people died of asphyxiation in a massive crowd surge at the former, and rapper Drakeo the Ruler was murdered at the latter in a still-unsolved backstage incident.
The 2022 festival also sparked some debate when it changed its previous required-vaccination policy to require proof of a negative test within 72 hours of the event, though the controversy stemmed more from the unusually covert manner in which the announcement was made — via the festival’s official Instagram story — than the move itself. According to Variety, the decision was made to better promote the country-themed Stagecoach festival, which is also managed by Goldenvoice and takes place the weekend after Coachella.