By Guest Contributor, Lyndsey Parker
What if I told there was a music festival with a lineup featuring pop superstars like Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, and Marina; indie darlings Lola Young, Japanese Breakfast, Clairo, and Beabadoobee; hip-hop goddesses Missy Elliott, Megan Thee Stallion, and GloRilla; rockers the Go-Go’s, Amyl & the Sniffers, the Marias, the Beaches, and BellRays frontwoman Lisa Kekaula; R&B divas Muni Long, Tyla, and Tink; J-pop sensations XG; and both Jennie and Lisa from K-pop sensations Blackpink?
Wow! Sounds like Lilith Fair 2025 is going to be awesome, right?
Actually, that was the impressive partial lineup of the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Coachella used to be a frustratingly macho affair — even though it launched in 1999, it took until 2007 for promoters Goldenvoice/AEG to book an official female headliner, Björk, and then another woman didn’t headline until 2017. This became such a problem that a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Coachella: Plenty of bros, but where are the female headliners?” pointed out that women comprised less than 25 percent of any Coachella lineup. But thankfully, some progress has been made in recent years. In fact, so many women played Coachella this year that we couldn’t possibly catch them all — which is, obviously, a much better problem to have.
Honorable-mention shoutouts must go to allies Soft Play, who created a “safe space” during their raucous performance of “Girl Fight” for a no-boys-allowed moshpit, and especially to Green Day, who invited a young lady named Stephanie onstage to sing on “Know Your Enemy” and another fan named Lexy to play guitar on a cover of Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge” (and let her keep the guitar!). But here are 10 standout artists who truly radiated divine feminine energy during Coachella 2025’s second weekend:
1. Lady Gaga
There’s no need to keep readers in suspense by ranking this list from 10 to 1. We all know Gaga owned both Coachella weekends. She actually first headlined Coachella nine years ago, when a pregnant-with-twins Beyoncé had to postpone her set upon doctor’s orders and Coachella’s powers-that-be decided that the only consummate entertainer capable of filling Bey’s mighty big Dereon shoes was Mother Monster. Due to having only two weeks to prepare back then, Lady Gaga’s 2017 Coachella show was a stripped-down affair — by Gaga standards, anyway. But this year, she was able to give festivalgoers, and herself, the full #Gagachella experience. “I have been wanting to go back and to do it right, and I am,” she vowed on Instagram, and it really did seem like she’d been preparing for this career-defining moment for almost a decade.
Over the course of 110 epic minutes, 21 songs, five acts, and at least five costume changes (we literally lost count), Gaga — one of the hardest-working and most interesting pop stars of her generation, or any generation — presented a night at the Gothic opera, pulling off the most dazzlingly artful set since Sia’s 2016 theater piece and the most ambitious since Beyoncé’s above-mentioned deferred “Beychella” of 2018. Gaga opened her Friday show atop a multi-story, decaying opera house, belting “Bloody Mary” in a towering red Lady Macbeth Tudor gown. She also engaged in some PPV-worthy graveyard sandbox wrestling. She trailed a yards-long parachute cape that looked straight out of an ‘80s Maxell ad or Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” video. She danced with Tim Burton-meets-Busby Berkeley exoskeletons. She rocked Thierry Mugler exoskeleton armor and matching chrome crutches for “Paparazzi,” and battled a spiky-crowned queen on a three-dimensional chess board during “Poker Face” — just two of the self-referential Easter eggs she offered this Easter weekend. And in another full-circle career moment, she played “Shallow” on the very same desert stage where A Star Is Born had been filmed (although this time around, she played it on a Catacombs-style skull piano), while across the field, two of “Shallow’s” co-writers, Andrew Wyatt and Anthony Rossomando, performed as members of the indie band Miike Snow.
The entire spectacle was timed with such military precision (Gaga started her set promptly at 11:10 p.m., which meant that she sang the “11:59” lyric from “The Beast” at exactly 11:59 p.m.), yet she made it all look so easy. Even when her headset mic glitched out during the Mayhem club banger “Abracadabra,” she handled the snafu so seamlessly, switching to a handheld microphone and adjusting her choreography accordingly without missing a beat or a note, that no one even noticed until she quipped, “At least you know I sing live!” And while she wasn’t able to tackle her all of her wide-ranging discography — there was no “Just Dance,” “The Edge of Glory,” “Telephone,” or anything from Artpop, Joanne, or Chromatica tonight — her Little Monsters left the desert happy. “Thanks for being there for me in the good and bad times,” Gaga tearily told her thousands of fans. “When I’m with you, I don’t feel weird.”
2. Charli XCX
While Gaga employed every imaginable bell, whistle, and kitchen sink to maximum effect, this pop provocateur’s Saturday set was an expert exercise in minimalism — so much so, we literally didn’t even realize that she had no backup dancers, costume changes, or elaborate sets and props until someone pointed this out hours later. For almost an hour, it was just the raw charisma of Miss Charlotte Emma Aitchison (whose Zeitgeist-capturing/shifting album Brat was the album of 2024) in her skimpy Cynthia Rhodes-circa-Flashdance two-piece wet-look athleisure, eye-sexing the camera and whipping her sweat-slicked curls with such frenzied intensity that they were literally straightened by the show’s end. There was nothing and no one else on the main stage besides a brief shrieking cameo by Addison Rae and an occasional glass of red wine in Charli’s hand, but nothing else was needed. (Watching this unbothered 365 partygirl strut the Coachella catwalk in her Y2K wraparound shades, sipping vino while singing about generational trauma, as Bowen Yang did the “Apple” TikTok dance on the video screens, was a whole vibe.)
The festival was a field of Pantone 3507C green as fans were bumpin’ that to audacious but relatable Brat Summer anthems like “360,” “Von Dutch” “Club Classics,” “365,” and “Sympathy Is a Knife.” And while Charli ended her set with a lime-green-flag-burning video that implied Brat Summer is over (she suggested that Lorde Summer, Addison Rae Summer, HAIM Summer, PinkPantheress Summer, Kali Uchis Summer, Rosalía Summer, or Caroline Polachek Summer take its place), we feel Charli is a girl for all seasons. While the bratty Brit sparked controversy when she wore a “Miss Should Be Headliner” pageant sash at a Coachella afterparty, which some fans felt was disrespectful to Saturday’s actual headliner, Green Day, she made a valid point. We’ll see her in the headlining slot at Coachella 2026.
3. Missy Elliott
The fact that Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott — a performer so magnetic, she had to close the 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony because no other inductee could possibly follow her — was also not a Coachella headliner this year should actually be a misdemeanor, or maybe even a felony. But her smaller-font booking proves just how stacked this year’s lineup really was. Triumphing on the main stage right before Gaga, Elliott delivered a Friday set so breathlessly hits-packed that it was practically one gigantic medley, from her Transformers-style grand entrance disguised as a hydraulic robot/car to her iconic Hype Wiliams Hefty-bag moment for “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).” The hip-hop queen lost control, got her freak on, got all in our grill, worked it, put her thang down, flipped it, and reversed it… and she thoroughly entertained.
4. Gustavo Dudamel & the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Laufey, Natasha Bedingfield, and Cynthia Erivo
Gaga may have brought opera to Indio, but Gustavo brought an orchestra, along with a few other desert divas. Grammy-winning Icelandic jazz-pop chanteuse Laufey, whose August 2024 show with the L.A. Phil was captured for the recent concert film A Night at the Symphony: Hollywood Bowl, enchanted with “From the Start” and new single “Silver Lining,” joyously telling the lawn-sprawled crowd, “As an orchestra kid growing up, this is my dream. … This is the craziest thing ever! It makes my heart so happy.” Natasha Bedingfield’s buoyant The Hills theme “Unwritten” also worked surprisingly well rewritten as a strings-laden symphonic piece. But it was surprise guest Cynthia Erivo who truly wowed, as she followed her new single “Brick by Brick” with a golden-hour rendition of an even more iconic screen theme, 2008 Coachella headliner Prince’s “Purple Rain.” The Wicked star declared it a “Coachella moment,” and it certainly was one for the books.
5. The Go-Go’s
As the only act playing both Coachella and Goldenvoice/AEG’s new wave festival Cruel World this year, these 2021 She Rocks Awards honorees and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees bridged the Coachella generations. Their fun-in-the-sun set kicked off with a kicky “Vacation” and was heavy on hits from their history-making, boundary-breaking debut album, like “Tonite,” “Lust to Love,” “This Town,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the still-funny-after-all-these-years “Skidmarks on My Heart,” and “We Got the Beat,” the latter featuring an interpolation of “Hot to Go!” by last year’s breakout Coachella star, Chappell Roan. And while Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who’d joined the Go-Go’s for “Head Over Heels” during weekend one, didn’t show up this time, another ‘90s alt-rock legend, Dave Grohl (who’d perform later with Dudamel on the same stage), was spotted in the V.I.P. section, clearly head over heels for these punk/pop trailblazers.
6. Amyl & the Sniffers
Australia’s Amy Taylor is one of today’s most fearless rock ‘n’ roll frontwomen, on either side of the equator, and as she stormed Sunday’s Gobi Stage — rocking an ‘80s bridal/ice-skating onesie and a flawless Farrah flip, looking like the lovechild of Wendy O’Williams and Hedwig Robinson — the tent honestly was not big enough to contain her enormous personality or her garage group’s equally massive guitar squall. The Sniffers’ ferocious Cartoon Darkness track “Jerkin’” proved to be a NSFW anthem for the ages, a perfect distillation of crass pub-rock humor and female punk-rock rage, and we sang along to every dirty word.
7. Lola Young
Messy ladies ruled Coachella, from Charli to Amy, but perhaps no one captured the unapologetically undone vibe more than Lola. The alt-R&B Brit-girl had trouble adjusting to the scorching SoCal heat during Coachella weekend one, became nauseous and nervous, and infamously ran offstage to hurl into a bucket between songs — an incident she later shared on her social media. This relatable, human moment only made fans adore the “Messy” singer even more, of course, and when Young returned for a more temperate and vomit-free second weekend — humorously and hopefully posting, “If ur coming today maybe it’ll be messier. Trying to hang in there with all my power” — those fans cheered her on and twerked along in support.
8. Arca
The pioneering, Venezuela-born, Barcelona-based musician/producer/visual artist/queer icon brought all the avant-garde glamour to the desert during her long-overdue Coachella debut — rising through the stage floor for her stunning entrance, serving operatic vocals, spraying the crowd with lasers, surprise-dueting with Japanese-American superstar Hikaru Utada, and spinning in a Cirque du Soleil hoop — all the while looking immaculate and fierce in shredded-leather Rick Owens couture. Witnessing Arca’s set was like witnessing the future.
9. Beth Gibbons
Gibbons would have been the second woman to ever headline Coachella, in 2008, if her trip-hop twosome Portishead hadn’t been demoted on the main stage due to the last-minute lineup addition of Prince. But still, she made Coachella history that year, and 17 years later, the Bristol chanteuse returned to the Empire Polo Field and made history and magic again. Her instantly identifiably mournful howl echoed throughout the Gobi Tent on noirish tracks from her debut solo album, Lives Outgrown, and on a rapturously received rendition of her former duo’s “Glory Box.” It was glorious, indeed.
10. Japanese Breakfast
Poor Michelle Zauner was stuck with the arguably the worst slot of the entire weekend, competing against the Swedish machismo of “Sports” punks Viagra Boys, the nonstop party of the amusingly hungover but always-winning T-Pain, and the xennial fever dream of Yo! Gabba Gabba’s bonkers, Flavor Flav/Weird Al/Paul Williams-assisted set. But the ethereal indie-pop auteur and Crying in H Mart author still soothed the sunstroked masses during her captivating pre-sundown Saturday set, looking like a shell-hatched Aphrodite on an Outdoor Stage bedecked with trompe l’oeil ocean waves as she sweetly warbled a “millennial anthem,” Donna Lewis’s “Love You Always Forever.”
Japanese Breakfast 今週はドナ・ルイスの 「I Love You Always Forever」をカバー https://t.co/CUfp9Jm027 pic.twitter.com/5gZywc0ENm
— shimijimi (@shimijimi) April 20, 2025
