Green Day, Lady Gaga, Post Malone, Charli XCX, The Go-Go's, Amyl, and the Sniffers are on the desert fest's most diverse bill in years.

Coachella 2025's roster was recently released, and it appears tailor-made to put the "festivals are dead" myth to bed, with one of the most exciting and diverse lineups in the desert festival's history.

Lady Gaga, Green Day, and Post Malone headline each night, but the event also has huge pop performers like Charli XCX, Megan thee Stallion, and Los Angeles rag cover boy Benson Boone in subsidiary slots, as well as legacy dance music superstars Missy Elliot, Basement Jaxx, and Kraftwerk.

There's also some renowned punk (The Misfits and The Circe Jerks) and new wave (The Go-Go's), the latter of which overlaps with Goldenvoice/AEG's other major festival, Cruel World. While pop newcomers like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter had breakout Coachella moments last year, 2025 could be a chance for new rock bands like Amyl and the Sniffers, JEL, and Together Pangea to gain new followers.

Today's news follows rumors about who would play the festival that began to circulate yesterday following Post Malone's social media post about his 2025 touring plan (April 13 and 20 suggested he'd be in "Indio, CA"). Then, earlier today, Rolling Stone announced that Green Day would join Malone as festival headliners, with Travis Scott appearing as a special guest. TMZ reported that Lady Gaga would also headline soon after.

Gaga previously headlined in 2017, after Beyonce was forced to cancel due to her pregnancy. Scott played as a second-tier headliner in 2017, however owing to COVID cancellations, his main stage headlining moment was not scheduled for 2020. The horrific murders of ten concertgoers at his Astroworld Fest in Houston, Texas, the next year, in 2021, were undoubtedly a deterrent to a Coachella appearance, but apparently not anymore.

This will be Green Day's first Coachella performance, and following their electrifying performance at SoFi Stadium earlier this year, their inclusion on the list symbolizes a return to the festival's beginnings as a big, badass rock n' roll circus, which many of the supporting artists appear to highlight. 

Malone mirrors Coachella's more modern curation, prioritizing new pop and hip-hop above rock and classic alternative performers in recent years. He also has many duets and collaborators to choose from for "surprise guests," which has been an almost formulaic aspect of previous Indio gatherings. Last year's shocks were Olivia Rodrigo and No Doubt, Lana Del Ray with Billie Eilish, and 21 Savage with Doja Cat, to name a few.

Though naysayers have questioned the popularity of music festivals in general in the wake of cancellations (Desert Daze, Pitchfork Music Festival) due to low ticket sales, and a recent Bloomberg report that declared "Coachella has become a victim of its own success" after both Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar allegedly passed on playing it, it appears that those concerns were overblown. 

Coachella 2025's all-encompassing approach to genre and era in terms of musicians and stages appears to be exactly what was required to change things up.