Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
This year starts off on a bum note with the singer’s downbeat energy and underpowered vocals proving to be a buzzkill while even special guest Billie Eilish couldn’t save the day
The cliche image of Lana Del Rey – flower crown, heart-shaped sunglasses, Lolita pout – matches the cliche of a Coachella girl. Both Del Rey and the festival saw a peak in the mid-2010s, during the early years of influencer culture excess. So it makes sense that Coachella’s golden girl would headline … even though, in 2024, Del Rey doing so feels about a decade too late.
Indeed, Del Rey first played Coachella exactly 10 years to the day before Friday’s opening night performance, as she proudly told the crowd. This time, she rode in on a biker motorcade, clad in a baby blue sequin dress, smiling and waving like the beauty queens she’s prone to singing about. It was ambitious, lively crowd work – literal momentum to started the show off right. But then she opened her mouth.
