A muddy Grant Park served as the backdrop to dozens of dynamic performances during the festival’s last two days.
A muddy Grant Park served as the backdrop to dozens of dynamic performances during the festival’s last two days.
Despite heavy overnight showers and city-wide flood warnings leading to festival doors being delayed until 3 p.m., fans poured into Grant Park on Saturday to keep dancing at Lollapalooza.
Dynamic pop acts Olivia Dean and Jennie headlined, ultimately rewarding audience members’ endurance with hit-filled — and miss-filled — performances.
Sunday celebrated the festival’s grand finale, as headliners Tate McRae and The xx brought all their energy to close the weekend in flamboyant fashion, marking the end of Lolla’s 2026 run.
Saturday, Aug. 1
Drawing lines of fans and rapping about even more lines of coke, duo Clipse cemented their status as hip hop mainstays on the Bud Light stage Saturday afternoon.
Brothers Pusha T and Malice’s setlist spanned their 30-year-long discography, performing classics like “Keys Open Doors” to new bangers like “Ace Trumpets.”
Despite being decades deep into their career, the pair performed with a youthful hunger, articulating each lyric with pinpoint precision, all with a delivery full of infectious charisma. This driving sense of urgency was felt no stronger than on Pusha’s opening verse on “So Be It,” where he rapped entirely acapella before the beat returned right in place on the chorus.
At the adjacent Tito’s Handmade Vodka stage, St. Louis electronic duo Frost Children geared up for their eardrum-obliterating set.
Out of a blinding wall of white strobe lights, siblings Angel and Lulu Prost broke through with an unbridled energy, their platinum blonde and orange hair, respectively, shaking furiously to the beat.
The crowd, seemingly comprised almost entirely of drunk and high teenagers, treated the performance like a religious rite, practically worshiping the soundwaves that blared from the speakers.
When combined with the pouring rain, songs like “ELECTRIC” sent the crowd into an electrocuted frenzy, the mosh pit turning into a slip and slide of raindrops and sweat.
For their final song, Frost Children brought out Lucy Bedroque — whose set earlier in the day was cancelled due to the weather delay — to even greater screams and “holy shit”s from the crowd.
At the T-Mobile stage, fans precariously packed on islands of woodchips amidst seas of mud to see Tumblr legends The Neighbourhood for their evening show. Despite being fresh off a February album release, their set was full of fan favorites, rewarding the poncho-clad, mud-covered masses.
The band opened with “Greetings From California,” played in full for the first time since 2019, and also played rarity “Flawless” for the first time since 2014. A slew of hits followed, including “You Get Me So High,” “R.I.P 2 My Youth” and, of course, “Daddy Issues.”
“Thank you for sticking it out with us,” frontman Jesse Rutherford, sporting a Chicago Bulls jersey, told the drenched crowd.
As a final appreciative gift, the band performed their biggest hit “Sweater Weather” twice, and even the audience waiting at the Allianz stage sang along.
The Allianz audience in question were avian aficionados awaiting no other than alt-rock saviors, Geese.
Donning an unbothered demeanor, Geese frontman Cameron Winter led his flock through an angsty, forlorn bill.
“Thank you to United Airlines for losing our guitars, losing all faith in my life,” Winter deadpanned, using lyrics from “2122” to describe the situation.
While this DGAF persona sometimes proved comical, at points it came off a tad grating and disingenuous.
However, chaos ensued when a black hole-like moshpit opened during the group’s closer, “Trinidad,” with mud staining everything in sight while fans screamed along to the song’s equally barbaric chorus, “There’s a bomb in my car!”
At the Bud Light stage, BLACKPINK soloist JENNIE brought her well-honed K-pop performance background to cap off the night.
Adorned in a crown of white feathers, the singer took to the stage with a troop of dancers who unfortunately seemed more energetic than her. Occasionally spinning around or twerking, the extent of her stage activity was mostly limited to dramatically walking up and down a set of stairs.
Only having one album and a few collaboration singles out, JENNIE’s set was riddled with interludes that only served as minor outfit changes. She also included four unreleased songs played back to back, which started exciting but quickly became tedious.
Unlike most K-pop acts, JENNIE was noticeably singing live, but with every riff or high note was a line strangely off-key or off-beat. Her set was also seemingly plagued by mixing errors throughout, causing some speakers to be completely overblown.
Despite an underwhelming showing, both JENNIE and the crowd delivered all the hype necessary for “like JENNIE,” as her biggest hit closed the set in explosive fashion.
Closing out the T-Mobile stage was English singer Olivia Dean, fresh off of her Best New Artist Grammy win.
Performing in front of a crowd of 97,000, Dean’s brass-filled set pleased die-hard fans and casual listeners alike with viral hits like “So Easy (To Fall in Love)” and deeper cuts like “Dive,” all set inside a stage that looked like a blossoming flower.
Late into her set, Dean brought out fellow Brit Sam Fender to perform their record-breaking duet “Rein Me In” to a ground-quaking response.
Finishing her set with “Man I Need,” she bid Chicago good night with an unwipeable smile under a flurry of fireworks, ending her first-ever American headlining set with a literal bang.
Sunday, Aug. 2
Upcoming pop it-girl ADÉLA brought a sizable crowd for her midday T-Mobile stage set Sunday, with many fans sporting pink T-shirts to match the performer’s iconic hot pink hair.
Opening with recent viral single “KGB,” the Slovak singer instantly captured the audience with impressive live vocals and even more extraordinary dancing. With only a hot pink barre as a prop and a few dancers at her side, ADÉLA outperformed nearly every other act of the day, the audience matching her enthusiasm throughout.
The most remarkable moment of the set came halfway during a ballet interlude for “DeathByDevotion,” featuring ADÉLA and a backup dancer doing an array of stunning contortions, leaps and turns.
She maintained her momentum to the end, triumphantly closing with pop bangers “SexOnTheBeat” and “SUPERSCAR,” adding extensive dance sequences to both, capping off a festival high point.
In the style of a 1920s speakeasy, purple velvet and strings of silver diamonds provided the backdrop for Amber Mark and her band, who were outfitted in full tuxedos while she wore a shimmering flapper-inspired dress.
Unfortunately — to no fault of her own — Mark’s set was riddled with auditory difficulties.
“You haven’t seen this, this is the first time you’re seeing this,” Mark joked, returning to the stage to sing her opener, “Let Me Love You,” after the first of many technical mishaps.
She didn’t let these hiccups stop her, maintaining the luxury aesthetic with her smooth, versatile voice and a natural knack for crowd work.
By the end of her set, she’d kicked off her heels and started dancing around the stage in celebration. Free from the hurdles that plagued the beginning, she let loose and performed “What It Is” with bountiful bliss.
An even more bombastic energy could be found with Monaleo at the Airbnb stage, where the self-proclaimed “Pink Pimpcess” took Lolla by storm, complete with a pink corset and a bedazzled microphone.
Accompanied by backup dancers and hypeman Yobi Yobz, Monaleo invited the audience into her rose-colored world, where Black excellence and self-expression reign supreme.
Over the course of her 45-minute set, the Houston rapper stayed true to her confident self with explosive energy, confronting sex-crazed men on “We Not Humping” and bringing out the Black American Heritage Flag during “Sexy Soulaan.”
The highlight of her set was the bass-booming “Suck It Up,” where an unabashed Monaleo rapped about her success as her backup dancers had a staged dance-off on either side of her, culminating in the trio breaking into their own choreographed routine — all in perfect sync.
Closing out the day at the Allianz stage was K-pop girl group Aespa, known for their chart-topping experimental electropop. Fans and festivalgoers alike appeared disappointed by their placing on the side stage, which was clearly too small for the crowd they amassed.
Opening with back-to-back bangers “Black Mamba” and “Next Level,” Aespa immediately enraptured the massive crowd with extraordinary live vocals and powerful dancing, defying the limitations of the stage size.
The highlight of their set came during B-side “Switchblade,” which featured a cameo from collaborator Ty Dolla $ign. The crowd jumped and screamed at their command, enjoying the track’s first live performance.
The group capped off their monumental set with the revelrous dance-pop tracks “Whiplash” and most recent single “Lemonade,” keeping the crowd dancing and screaming along to the end.
In a fitting close to an eventful and chaotic weekend, The xx were the final act to grace the Bud Light stage.
Their performance marked their return to a Lolla stage after a nine-year gap. Luckily, Chicago fans haven’t missed much, as the London-based band hasn’t released an album since 2017 and hadn’t played a live show since 2018 up until earlier this year.
While other artists may have encouraged fans to get as hyped as possible, The xx instead allowed the audience to get lulled into their oneiric haze, matching the day’s clouded sky. The voices of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, paired with the beats of Jaime xx, floated above the crowd like a trio of birds playing tag in the sky.
Throughout their set, they played a multitude of tracks from across their catalogue, including the upbeat “Crystalised,” the hypnotic, beat-driven “Shelter,” and for their closer, the inversely named “Intro.”
For much of the set, the trio performed in front of bright, ever-changing lights, leaving themselves nothing more than shadowed silhouettes, furthermore adding to the elusive nature of their show.
The last act at the T-Mobile stage was Tate McRae, known for her dynamic performances and high-level production — both of which were regrettably missing from her headlining performance.
The set was bloated by four interludes, either videos of her posing for a camera or simply audio of her vocalizing, which broke up the set for no apparent reason other than a singular outfit change from jeans to a skirt.
McRae’s limited discography offered little of the diversity expected from a headline set, and with the lack of dancing, there remained nothing to make up for it. Being predominantly known for her dancing, her singing was predictably wanting, but lacked even the regular high notes and riffs added for her live shows.
The crowd was nonetheless engaged, singing along to the more well-known songs and cheering vigorously throughout, although there may have been more phone video recording than movement.
She ended the festival with more of a whimper than a bang in a remixed edition of “Sports car.” While the crowd seemingly adored the final song, the performance was still underwhelming — especially as a festival closer.
Although it may have ended weaker than it started, Lollapalooza, like its fans, endured through extreme acts and extreme weather to make 2026 one of its most memorable years yet.
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