8 Moments That Changed My Brain Chemistry at Lollapalooza
I don’t know how to explain what four days in Grant Park does to a person’s nervous system, but I am not the same guy who walked in on Thursday. Somewhere between watching Charli XCX drink from a water fountain, and the hours I spent sinking in the mud waiting for the next act while a man near me reapplied glitter to his face, something in my brain quietly rewired itself. This isn’t a best-sets list. These are the moments I’ll be telling people about at parties for the next year, whether they asked or not.
- 5 Seconds of Summer Covered ‘Teenage Dream’ and I Remembered Nostalgia Isn’t a Trend, It’s here to stay
Lollapalooza felt unusually interested in the past this year — not nostalgic, exactly, more like the whole festival was caught between what pop used to be, what it is now, and whatever it’s turning into next. 5 Seconds of Summer, formed in Sydney back in 2011, was built for this moment better than almost anyone on the bill. They played their new stuff. Then they played the songs like “She Looks So Perfect” that I remember from the radio on my way to swim practice in 2014 — twelve years ago, a sentence I cannot fathom typing.
Nostalgia is HUGE right now, whether anyone says it out loud or not. Everyone complains that culture is stuck in the past. I’d argue we’re not stuck so much as living in a permanent cultural present, where your childhood, last summer, and yesterday’s TikTok can all exist on the same playlist. The internet has made everything retrievable. Nothing really leaves. Songs don’t get retired. They ferment.
What really got me was when they covered Katy Perry’s, “Teenage Dream.” I didn’t know I still had it memorized word for word, and suddenly I wasn’t in a field in Chicago, I was back in my room on my grandfather’s funky-screened computer, door closed, dancing on the bed like nobody could see me — because back then, nobody could. Early YouTube, before the ads showed up, when the app icon was still a boxy brown television.
It was deeply embarrassing how fast my brain produced every lyric. A boy band playing a Katy Perry cover at 4pm on a Thursday shouldn’t have that kind of power over a grown adult with a press badge. And yet.
2. Charli XCX convinced me I had been listening to her new music incorrectly
I’d seen Charli XCX on the Brat tour in New York, so I already knew she could perform. But this was different: her first time playing Music, Fashion, Film live. And I’ll admit it — on my $21 pair of wired earbuds, the album hadn’t fully landed. Turns out, I could not be more wrong.
Live, it made immediate sense. Four tiers of stage. Heels somehow surviving a rain-soaked catwalk. Fireballs shooting off the sides.
Photo Credits Henry Redcliffe
A full band, a platoon of dancers, multiple outfit changes, and Charli working the stage hard enough to make the weather feel complicit. Some albums are not meant for a laptop speaker or a pair of headphones held together by hope. They’re meant to be heard live, with instruments and speakers and pyrotactics.
Photo Credits – Henry Redcliffe
Halfway through “House,” as thousands of us yelled, “I wanna die in this house,” the sky opened on cue. Rain poured. I pulled on my poncho and screamed the words with a few thousand newly soaked strangers while fire breathed off the stage behind her. Audrey Hobert live tweeted that Charli was “controlling the weather.” Watching this, I believed her: God is a woman and she and Charli are on some text-chain.
If Charli’s proven anything with this era, it’s that she and her team understand worldbuilding better than almost anyone in pop right now — not just a good song and a good outfit, but an entire weather system, a lighting rig, a stage built in tiers like an altar. And that’s the thing about seeing an album live before you’ve fully made up your mind about it: you don’t just watch the show, you overwrite the studio version with it. I can’t put my earbuds back in and hear Music, Fashion, Film the way I heard it two weeks ago.
Photo Credits Henry Redcliffe
Every track now comes with fire attached. The album didn’t change. My understanding of it did. And unfortunately for my $21 earbuds, there is now fire attached to every song.
3. Zara Larsson Is Somehow Family-Friendly and the Hottest Person on Earth at the Same Time
Zara Larsson is having her moment right now. Everyone was there — parents, kids who were barely waist-high, high schoolers, adults. I didn’t even know kids were allowed at this festival, but they were there, excited to party with their parents. “Lush” came out 9 years ago, which is wild to think about, and people are still showing up in full force for her.
Photo Credits Greg Noire
She’s family-friendly but also just undeniably magnetic. There was glitter, the dancers were incredible, and the whole performance felt completely her own. I was blushing the entire time — I have no idea what that means, but she was performing straight into my soul. That’s how you know the choreography, the music, and the vocals (especially on “Midnight Sun”) were firing on all cylinders.
There’s a pop-girl resurgence happening right now, sure. But watching one woman command a nine-year-old and a thirty-year-old with the same three minutes of “Midnight Sun” made it feel like more than a trend cycle. This is the era of the pop star who can headline your kid’s birthday party and also ruin your whole week. For one soaked, glittery afternoon, we were all just living in her world.
4. MUNA Went From an 11am Slot in 2016 to a Sea of Hands on Sunday
MUNA’s first Lolla set was a sleepy 11am slot back in 2016. This time they closed out Sunday to a crowd stacked so deep I couldn’t see the edges of it. I didn’t know half the songs, and it didn’t matter — everyone had their hands up for “Mary Jane” like it was scripture. That’s the actual magic of a festival that’s been running this long: you get to watch the same artist’s stage get bigger every single year, a slow-motion flex nobody has to say out loud. All weekend, artists kept reminiscing about the last time they played Lollapalooza: Lorde on a tiny stage, Olivia Dean on a much smaller one.
At Lolla, growth leaves a trail. The stage an artist once played is still there, holding space for whoever is just beginning — while they stand somewhere else, on a much bigger one.
5. Audrey Hobert Solved Pop Music’s Relatability Problem With One Ladder
Somewhere between Audrey Hobert climbing a ladder with a fake nose and an absurdly long trench coat during “I like to touch people” and belting the chorus to “Phoebe” to a crowd singing every word back at her, I thought: maybe hating pop doesn’t make you deep.
Photo Credits Pooneh Ghana
Pop stars have gotten so enormous that the old “girl next door” fantasy can feel almost impossible. The Taylor Swift of the “You Belong With Me” era was still theoretically someone you could be. Audrey Hobert understands that girl on the bleachers. In her set she explores themes about feeling ugly, guys ranking her amongst other prettier girls in school and just ignoring all that. All weekend, in the press lounge, everyone in the industry seems to be excited about her refreshing voice in the music industry right now.
She just feels like a real person who somehow ended up with a giant stage, a ladder, and thousands of people screaming her lyrics back at her. Maybe that’s what pop has been missing. Not relatability, exactly, but recognition: the feeling that the person onstage could still be someone you know. Audrey Hobert gets it. And if understanding why a giant, ridiculous, emotionally transparent pop song works isn’t intelligence, I’m not sure what is.
6. Slayyyter Got Bumped to a Bigger Stage and Is Growing so Rapidly
There was a point when Lollapalooza had to move Slayyyter to a bigger stage because she had simply gotten too big for the stage she was originally scheduled to play. This is how quickly some careers are moving now. It reminded me of Chappell Roan breaking Lollapalooza and Gov Ball in 2024 — that strange festival moment when an artist’s popularity suddenly exceeds the physical infrastructure built around them.
Photo Credits Charles Reagan
The mud and rain did not stop people from filling the field, and Slayyyter absolutely owned it. Her live band was pounding, the wind was whipping through her hair, and she knew exactly how to command the Bud Light stage. “Daddy AF” sounded completely insane in the best possible way.
Her new album Worst Girl in America is basically banger after banger, and somewhere between the mud, the rain and thousands of people screaming along, I realized I had become a devout Slayyyter fan. Sometimes the festival tells you who is getting big. Sometimes the festival has to physically move the stage because of it.
7. Sienna Spiro Was Too Big for Her Stage and I Watched Her Through a Stranger’s Phone
If Lollapalooza is a cross-section of the music industry, then TikTok was obviously going to be there. Sienna Spiro’s set was the most absurd example. She was so clearly too big for the tiny stage she had been given that people were climbing trees to see her. There wasn’t even a monitor where I was standing.
Photo Credits Nathan Zucker
For part of the set, I was watching her performance through someone else’s phone. Which is, objectively, insane. But it also made me think about what happens when a song escapes the phone. So many of the songs across the festival were TikTok sounds. Songs we have heard over and over while scrolling were suddenly being performed by actual people, in front of actual crowds, with actual musicians.
And they sound different. There is something about hearing a song you’ve been repeatedly fed by an algorithm suddenly become physical. The bass hits your chest. People dance. The singer is sweating. The crowd knows every word. You remember that the song was made by a person.
Maybe that is the strange gift of a festival in the TikTok era: it takes music that has become disposable through repetition and makes you experience it as music again.
8. The surprise collaborations reminded me why festivals can never be replicated
Photo Credits Ismael Quintanilla III
This might be the most obvious one, but it’s also what I kept thinking about after I left. Lollapalooza is full of moments that simply cannot happen at another concert. Lorde brought out Charli XCX for “Girl, so confusing.” Olivia Rodrigo appeared with The Smashing Pumpkins. Sombr brought out Calum from 5 Seconds of Summer. Olivia Dean brought out Sam Fender. The specifics almost don’t matter.
Photo Credits Charles Reagan
What matters is the half-second when someone walks onstage and the crowd realizes what’s happening before the artist says a word. Then 60,000 people lose their minds at once.
Photo Credits Chad Wadsworth
You can see Charli again. You can see Lorde again. You can hear these songs a hundred times. But you cannot recreate the exact accident of two artists being in the same city, on the same lineup, on the same night, and deciding, for whatever reason, to share a stage.
That’s what festivals are uniquely good at: surprise.
All photos by Glenn Paul unless otherwise credited.