Lollapalooza 2026 returned to Grant Park in Chicago this past weekend, and while it may be in the rearview mirrors for some, I am still processing the experience. It was my first year in attendance at the festival, and being from Los Angeles myself, I’ve heard bits and pieces about the music-driven extravaganza that takes place during the region’s most desirable months.
But if there was one thing I noticed on my own volition, it was that the people here are no ordinary festival people. Lollapalooza has carefully cultivated a community that extends beyond the park’s 319 acres and spills into the city streets, the after-shows, the glamorous pre- and post-parties, and even the outskirts—the “cornfields,” they say—reinforcing that a festival is not defined by its stages, but by the people who fill the space between them.
On Wednesday evening, I touched down at Chicago O’Hare, and I’m rushing off the plane because one of my best friends of 15 years, Amanda, has flown in from New York to meet me. We’ve always bonded over our shared love of music—as many do. We were together when we saw All Time Low for the first time at 14 (when she crowd-surfed for the first time), and Trey Songz at 16, when I got so high off a blunt, I bummed from two random French girls that I thought my stomach was going to explode. And here we are, together working in our respective music-related fields, meeting up to go to one of North America’s biggest music festivals. Best of all, we are staying with the third part of our trio, who lives just on the fringes of Chicago in Michigan City.
The plan was simple: we would wake up, work and take the train to the festival in the evening. After, we’d check out the after-shows for our favorite artists and split a rideshare home. At least, that is how we planned it. Thursday night at Lollapalooza—from what I heard—was great. John Summit apparently crushed his hometown headlining debut, Lorde brought out Charli XCX for “Girl, So Confusing,” Sombr was joined by boy band-to-the-gods 5 Seconds of Summer, and the testy Midwestern weather withheld its sunny skies from afternoon until close.
We, unfortunately, were stuck to the seats of the South Shore Line, playing 20 questions because, may the odds be ever in our favor, the train completely broke down. “I’ve never seen this happen before,” the conductor said in earnest. No amount of begging would retract the steel doors, so we sat scanning minute-long snippets of the first day’s sets.
When we were finally released, after being paraded across hot train tracks, my friends and I arrived just in time for Finn Wolfhard’s after-show at Subterranean. Tall, lanky and with uninhibited confidence, the Stranger Things actor lit up the cozy venue with stellar stage presence and epic electric guitar skills—backed by a band that even included a violinist. The crowd was clued into his new album, Fire From The Hip, which was released a few weeks prior, but he was still sure to play all his hits from his barely year-long career as a professional musician. “If I don’t move and I can’t see/I choose the latter, choose the latter,” he belted in all its alt-rock glory.
It wasn’t until Friday night that we were boots-on-ground in the festival, and we were already off to a better start because A) our train didn’t break and B) we remembered to buy rain ponchos. As expected, the forecast called for a very wet evening, but first, we were able to catch a few minutes of Not for Radio’s ethereal set: a mossy, fairy-like garden land that frontwoman María Zardoya commanded with her airy vocals.
Like any festival, you’re already on the move before the last lyric, and trekking across Grant Park is not for the weak. All the way at Tito’s Stage, my friend and I decided to indulge our curiosity at Nettspend’s set and were fascinated by the way that the rapper was able to captivate the shirtless throng by essentially mumbling into the microphone for 45 minutes. I attempted to push through the masses but was immediately deterred when fans started throwing drinks.
That was one of the only experiences during my first Lollapalooza I could even mark as unpleasant, and even so, as I pushed away from the stage, the many “excuse me’s” and “so sorry about that’s” that followed were a consistent reminder that this is not a typical festival we’re dealing with. Maybe my view of festivals is skewed by the influencer-ridden, frenzy-filled battlegrounds that the big leagues have become (Coachella, for one), but Lollapalooza has some of the friendliest people around, and it makes it nearly impossible to have a bad time.
While we were disappointed not to have been a part of the thousands gathered for Zara Larsson’s girl-powered set or catching Yungblud bringing a diehard fan onto stage, we did make it by the skin of our teeth to Charli XCX—and the whole experience was pure poetry. She looked razor-sharp in a trench coat as she strutted down the catwalk, but the real showstopper was in collaboration with Mother Nature herself. The stage fell silent, and the sky darkened when the forecasted rain finally began to pour. As the audience wrestled into their plasticky ponchos, “I think I’m gonna die in this house” blared from the speakers, and it was hauntingly beautiful.
What else was important about the festival was that every corner of Grant Park catered to a different crowd, and somehow they all fit together under the same festival umbrella. That included families, too. I cracked the joke to my friend a few times that we should drop her off at Kidzapalooza—yes, a designated stage where children can live out their dreams of being festival-goers—but there really were parents who felt secure enough to bring toddlers into the mix. I’m not sure I would after later seeing a video of a bag of urine being crowd-surfed out of the audience, but to each their own.
For me, Saturday’s biggest takeaway wasn’t a singular performance: it was how often the festival reminded us that thousands of strangers could still find ways to connect. Crater-sized puddles of muddy slosh encouraged respectful tiptoeing as strangers tried to avoid splashing one another, though plenty of people simply embraced the mess. Elsewhere in the park, a lesbian mud wrestling ring reportedly broke out—exactly as enthusiastic as you’d expect.
That same sense of togetherness carried over once the music started. We began with Geese, where Cameron Winter quickly won over a devoted crowd. “This song is about adversity,” he crooned, and with no further explanation. In the few songs I caught, it was enough to completely understand the hype around the band that’s been unfairly labeled an industry plant.
We barely had to pivot to catch headliner Olivia Dean grace the nearby stage with all her British charm and jazzy ballads. She prefaced the next song she was about to perform, “Carmen,” a ballad she wrote in tribute to her immigrant grandmother—and really, for any immigrant out there. But the overarching message of the set, and quite frankly, the entire festival was this: “I don’t know how we’ve become so fearful of each other,” Dean preached. “We’re all just people.”
To which Lollapalooza is a refreshing reminder. Complete strangers were holding open porta-potty doors for each other, stopping in their tracks to take group photos, lending lighters, voluntarily scooting over so you could get a better view of the set you’ve waited months to see. It feels like nowhere else, let alone the loud, overstimulating metropolis that is a music festival, can bring this out of people anymore. But it did, and if I were an artist lucky enough to perform here, I’d certainly be feeling the love.
As our Saturday came to a close, we accomplished the impossible: seeing not two, but three acts, all scheduled at the same time. We sprinted through the sea of Olivia Dean fans to end up in a neon wonderland of sweaty dancing for Disco Lines and ultimately landed at JENNIE, who governed the stage with expertly in-sync backup dancers.
To cap off the night, because nothing ever just ends at Grant Park with Lollapalooza, we made our way across town to The Salt Shed. Here, 5 Seconds of Summer had drawn an incredulous block-wrapping line to see the recently resurrected boy band for themselves. The show wasn’t just the band’s pop-punk-fueled bangers like “She Looks So Perfect”; instead, the four-piece went a different route with a DJ set fusing popular songs with their own hits—and eventually throwing blow-up doll replicas of themselves into the crowd, because why not?
And somehow, the night wasn’t done surprising us yet. It came from an Uber driver who told me if I guessed which 70s artist was playing on the radio, he’d give us the ride for free. Spoiler: it was Stevie Wonder, I did get it right, and he really did cancel the ride so we wouldn’t have to pay. “I’m a man of my word,” he assured us.
By Sunday, the crowds were still going strong — rushing into the park as the rain finally cleared. We were particularly excited to catch banker-turned-party-girl-music maker INJI for her high-energy set in the heat of the day. Racing onto the stage in a pink toy car, she brought out all the theatrics and catchy lyrics that made her songs like “Bellydancing” and “Gaslight” go completely viral on TikTok.
Back-to-back on the T-Mobile Stage, we experienced MUNA’s infectious indie pop sound transitioning into Beabadoobee’s grungey lo-fi tracks, which were really one of the festival’s highs. And while we heard Tate McRae closed out her Sunday night set by dipping herself in gold, my posse had already crammed into the South Shore Line alongside the many glitter-tinged, slightly damp and heavily exhausted Lolla-goers ready to get the best sleep of our lives. We thought we were, too, until we missed our stop and ended up miles away in the cornfields of Indiana. But in a rare change of fate, a lovely woman and her daughter were willing to rescue us, no questions asked.
Others might not see Lollapalooza through the same rose-colored glasses as I did, but I personally think the air of this festival is different. It could be the drugs, or the disorientation that lowers your inhibitions, but I’d argue the magic beyond the music is that, for four days, friends reunite, artists truly connect with their fans and the whole city falls into a kind of symbiotic psychosis where, in an era that often feels increasingly self-focused, everyone genuinely wants each other to have a good time.
