A Dance-Heavy Coachella Begins in the Desert

Damon Winter/The New York TimesCoachella started under gloomy skies, high winds and scattered showers in Indio, Calif.

INDIO, Calif. — This year’s edition of the three-day Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival begins on Friday, to run through Sunday. It has changed in at least one respect that the average festival-goer will barely notice: the entire lineup will repeat one week later, with identical order and set times. Both weekends have sold out; attendance is expected at around 75,000 per weekend.

But if you live in the Los Angeles area, and if you couldn’t buy the sold-out $285 tickets to either weekend, you may feel a difference. Around and in between the concerts, Coachella bands will flood the West Coast; Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter, also promotes club shows around Los Angeles, and its April calendar shows many of the festival’s draws redirected into the area’s clubs and theaters. (If you’re nowhere near, you can live-stream many of the concerts on a dedicated Coachella YouTube channel.)

As goes the world, so goes this festival: Coachella has moved heavily toward dance music of all kinds. Giant billboards on Highway 10 approaching the festival advertised the upcoming electronic-music festivals Hard Summer and Electric Daisy Carnival, as well as the forthcoming tour stops of Avicii, the Swedish DJ who will close out Coachella on Sunday. Beyond that, across the weekend, there are sets by Swedish House Mafia, Afrojack, David Guetta, Nero, Calvin Harris, Alesso and Sebastian Ingrosso: enough for someone staying in the dance tent to pretend that indie rock, once this festival’s bread and butter, never existed.

But in other places — and as usual for Coachella, which has been a high-profile market for indie-rock tastes since it began in 1999 — there will be reunions of 1980s and ’90s groups to feed the news cycles, including Pulp, At the Drive-In, Firehose, Mazzy Star and Refused, the Swedish punk band. (None are earth-shaking, but I find myself looking forward to them all.) And if you’re looking for an index of last year’s underdog heroes of hip-hop and R&B, here you go: Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, Asap Rocky, Kendrick Lamar, Azealia Banks. All in one sweep. Not bad.

Since you asked, the main-stage headliners are Radiohead, the Black Keys, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Never before have the names in the largest type seemed so unprovocative. That feels significant. I’ll be thinking about that as I run around here (and file ArtsBeat dispatches) over the next three days.