San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival turned 18 years old this August 7th! That’s old enough to vote but 3 years out from being able to buy a drink at Beer Lands, Wine Lands or Cocktail Magic, or an edible at Grass Lands. For a festival of this scale to be operating for this long puts it in league with such lauded American fests as Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits (24 years), Coachella (27 years), or even Lollapalooza, founded 35 years ago in 1991. What continues to set it apart is the unparalleled location of Golden Gate Park’s historic Polo Field and Hellman Hollow, paired with the ease of access and convenience of its city surroundings. As Lollapalooza expands into offering South American iterations, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Outside Lands and the Berkeley based independent concert production company, Another Planet Entertainment, who puts it on.
The one constant with Outside Lands is that they are always changing. They pioneered the sale of legal cannabis in 2019, the first major festival to do so. In 2023 they added the DOLORES stage run by internationally renowned SF club OASIS (who recently survived a seven month closure when philanthropists made a multi-million dollar donation allowing founder D’Arcy Drollinger to purchase the location as a permanent home). The DOLORES stage offers dozens of drag performances along with DJ sets. Last year in 2025, the Duboce Triangle stage made its debut. It sits in McLaren Pass, a Eucalyptus shrouded gem between the two major stage areas, offering a variety of intimate performances, and surprise guests like soul star Leon Bridges on Sunday. This year one of the new features included how tickets are purchased. Previously they offered a lower “Eager Beaver” tier to those who logged on first. This year that was replaced by a “Loyalty Presale” which permitted anyone who had bought tickets from the site in the last four years to get access to the lowest tier first. And for the first time, this included the ability to access that lowest tier after the lineup had already been released.
As far as innovations within the festival, there were, as usual, many. My personal favorite was McLaren Vintage. Each day, a dozen local vintage shops set up stalls for festival goers to peruse. This is especially useful for visiting attendees unaware of local celebrity Karl the Fog’s predilection for showing up for the later sets. All of the classic features that make it unique were of course still present. There’s the Outside Lands City Hall where you can get married on site. There’s the Taste of the Bay which provides food options from over one hundred different local restaurants. There’s AIR, OSL’s Artists in Residence series which commissions visual art all around the grounds. There was also the new pop up barber shop, The Barb, offering $50 hair cuts next to the DOLORES stage.
This year there was no shortage of classic festival moments. Cameron Winter, frontman of the band Geese, played the Glee cast version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” off his iPhone into the microphone. Immediately after at the same stage, the smaller Sutro stage, an equally buzzy american indie band, Turnstile, had the crowd forming no fewer than seven separate mosh pits simultaneously at one point. Northern California group Rainbow Girls returned to put on their annual open mic set. Local DJ Starfari returned to his Sierra Nevada tent with several bumpin DJ sets per day. And legendary indie band Death Cab For Cutie continued the great new concept of having a headliner also open the festival with a noon set, a role occupied by Vampire Weekend last year.
Set Reviews:
The Strokes - Saturday August 8th - Lands Ends Stage - 8:35pm
Two weeks before Outside Lands, The Strokes dropped their eagerly anticipated 7th LP, 25 years to the month of their landmark debut. With time being a flat circle and all, the reactions have been predictable. Appearing recently on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin (the legendary zenmaster who produced their last two albums), guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. summed up the par for the course criticisms: “Time gives you perspective… people would always talk about either a sound or Julian’s vocals and in saying something negative about it, blow off the songwriting… ‘Well, you’re cool, but you’re lo-fi.’ Or, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but his vocals are distorted.’ Just like now, ‘Yeah, cool new song, but it’s got a vocoder on it.’”
The anti-autotune discourse has been inescapable, often being the entire emphasis of a review. It’s fitting then that critical darling Charli XCX, who famously only sings with autotune, was headlining the night before. Her smash hit from 2024, Brat, (which featured Julian on the “Mean Girls” remix) received a 95 on metacritic, whereas The Strokes consistently score poorly with the press. One place they don’t struggle? With the fans. Their most popular song by a mile is from 2020’s The New Abnormal (“The Adults Are Talking”), and through their entire quarter century career, they have maintained headliner status. One minor exception was playing right before Justin Bieber's record setting artist fee set at Coachella, where The Strokes opened minds with a montage of American war crimes, set to the tune of their song “Oblivius.” At that set, and several others on this tour, Albert donned a Lou Reed t-shirt, a group many young fans discovered through The Strokes back in the early 2000s. Brian Eno said famously of the Velvet Underground “The first album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
Many of their close peers like the Arctic Monkeys and The Killers attribute their formation to The Strokes. I can only imagine that many young fans will continue to form bands as The Strokes are discovered by each successive generation. I bet a lot of them, seeing that Lou Reed shirt, or seeing John Cale on Charli XCX’s album covers and track listings this summer, will be open minded enough to hear a song as experimental and brash as “Heroin,” and fall in love with the whole VU catalog. And one would just hope that many of the old guard occupying critical roles at establishment publications can open up their minds enough to rock bands having the audacity to sing with autotune, and still appreciate the sustained excellence of songwriting that we should all hope to last for another quarter century or two.
Taking the Lands End stage promptly at 8:35pm, The Strokes got right down to business, playing early classics like “Hard to Explain,” “Someday,” and “Juicebox” all within the first few songs. For the diehards, they also played two off the new album, both “Going Shopping” and “Dine N’Dash,” early on, the latter being dedicated to “all the guys.” The biggest moment of the night, and possibly the entire festival, came mid-set when Charli XCX was introduced. She had stuck around San Francisco for a fan Q&A at the famed Amoeba Records near Haight Ashbury on Saturday afternoon. Having recently released new albums on the same day, Julian joked that it was a “great battle,” but she had "defeated them.” They sang the Is This It closer “Take It Or Leave It,” in a rare moment of the band bringing on a guest vocalist (an honor only a handful have had, including Jarvis Cocker, Eddie Vedder and Jack White). More classics like “Last Nite” and “Reptilia,” followed, whipping the crowd into a frenzy, along with a few more rare cuts like “Threat of Joy” and “Life is Simple in the Moonlight.” When they returned after a brief exit to close out with “You Only Live Once,” hardly a single attendee had left early to the exit, a true testament to their continued pull.
JADE - Sunday August 9th - Lands End Stage - 3:45pm
In 2012, Jade Thirlwall had her first major breakthrough as an artist. As a co-writer, she sent a single to the top of the U.K. charts with her X-Factor winning trio Little Mix. 10 years and 75 million records sold later, the group would go on indefinite hiatus in 2022 with a farewell tour. After a few years writing for other artists (notably the K-pop group Twice), the newly monikered JADE immediately established herself as the next great Pop auteur with her jaw-dropping debut single “Angel Of My Dreams.” It shot to the top ten of the U.K. charts and had critics and new fans alike swooning over the ingenious mix of psychotic tempo and vocal effect changes with her ironclad mastery of traditional hook writing. One flawless single after the next followed with “Fantasy,” “FUFN (Fuck You For Now),” and “Plastic Box,” until in September 2025 she finally ended the hysterical anticipation and dropped That’s Showbiz Baby!, the uncontested album of the year of many. The veritable onslaught of coolest of cool collaborators came calling, from PinkPantheress to Channel Tres to LE SERRAFIM to Lily Allen. So what comes next for this ascendant superstar? On to global domination with a world tour.
JADE appeared from a cloud of smoke, dressed in black adidas football shorts and a neon green number 10 jersey. She made it through all of the singles that led up to her album release over the course of the performance. She also went through a medley of her Little Mix hits, starting with the bouncy “Wasabi.” She received a loud cheer when reaching out to connect with her LGBTQ fans, as San Francisco of course has long been famous for its association with the community. She lamented her short stay in the city, quipping that she “didn’t even have time to make it out to the gay clubs!” The final two songs proved the most impactful, with “Church” prompting many concert goers to go litterally “down on your knees” before jumping up at the command, “let me be your church (I want you to fuck it up)!” And her biggest song was saved for last, the modern classic, “Angel of My Dreams,” closing out what was a clear highlight of the weekend. One question remained as the smoke cleared over the Lands End stage, thinking about her football kit as she sauntered off, I wondered: If the Three Lions might never bring home a Euro, shouldn’t they at least get JADE to bring home a Eurovision?
