Travis Scott performs at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 12, 2025 in Indio, California.
Kevin Mazur/Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Coachella
Minutes before Travis Scott’s Coachella headlining set on Saturday, a rumor circulated in my section of the crowd. The rapper, two teenagers breathlessly told me, had spent $12 million of his own money on the performance.
This wasn’t immediately verifiable. But Travis had, hours prior to taking the mainstage, hyped up his set on social media with a screenshot of lyrics from a new collab with Playboi Carti: “Ain’t no budget, I’m buggin’, David [Stromberg, the artist’s longtime manager] say, ‘You spent twelve million on the stage just to rage.’” That post added fuel to fans’ excitement about a set Travis said would be the start of a “new chapter,” and button-mashed about on Instagram: “IM DOING THE MOST TURNTNEED INCLUDED GAVSBSVDVDHHDHDHDH.”
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Travis was excited — nothing new there — and confident that by bringing his artistic vision, and by sparing no expense, he could thrill Coachella’s attendees. He has the catalog, too: a buffet of well-known hits and festival-sized bangers. Instead, Travis under-delivered. He started 15 minutes late, repeatedly clipped off promising songs and ended without a satisfying climax. The 60-piece marching band that Travis brought onstage was a good idea, but the execution didn’t land. And while celebrity guests are never a must, Travis is a gluey node in rap’s web. He played tracks that feature Carti, Young Thug, SZA and Future; appearances by any would have warmed up the tepid sections of the crowd.
I only heard chatter about what happened elsewhere, but my area surely had a plausible claim to being the audience’s liveliest. The mosh pit opened up when Travis’ first notes played and rarely closed — amid the maw, ragers often held up a fan in a wheelchair, who grinned giddily. Still, I watched the section grow sparser as people trickled away, and a couple of guys complained repeatedly about the quietness of the speakers. (Charli XCX and Green Day performed before Travis on Saturday and each brought more volume, by my estimation.)
There was a truly grim moment, as well. Travis would have headlined Coachella in 2022, had his calamitous Astroworld set not left 10 people dead and hundreds injured in a crowd crush the previous November. Goldenvoice did the right thing by listening to a 55,000-signature petition to drop Travis from that billing. A charitable reading says that bringing Travis back now was an act of conciliatory forgiveness. Sad, then, that Travis gave “STARGAZING” multiple verses on Saturday, including the line, “it ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries.” It’s ugly and patently false; everyone walked away safe from my hard-rocking section come night’s end.
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Travis Scott performs at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 12, 2025 in Indio, California.
Kevin Mazur/Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Coachella
Don’t let anyone tell you, though, that Travis’ performance was all bad. The rapper, who goes by the nickname “La Flame,” sizzled with charisma at both the crowd’s front and in a pyrotechnic-ringed circle deeper back. He seemed way less reliant on backing tracks than at an Oakland show I attended in 2023.
Several production stunts were huge winners. During “Skyfall,” he walked straight down a wall, then was lifted skyward and spent chunks of “Upper Echelon” and “STARGAZING” watching over a batch of rising and falling dancers held by ropes. He looked like a spider playing with its prey. His outfit was excellent: football-style shoulder pads, biker gear, maybe the sickest glasses in rap history. The brutalist stage design was a satisfying imposition of the artist’s will, and it looked truly epic in the livestream drone footage, but the sense of scale didn’t translate for fans on the polo field.
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And Travis’ run of cut-short hits at the end of his set was stupefyingly good. I think if he moved this sequence up — and extended every single track in it — the crowd would have been more engaged throughout. “NO BYSTANDERS,” went into “FE!N,” which he played twice before piling on “SICKO MODE,” “Antidote” and “goosebumps” in rapid succession. Crowd, finally, pleased.
But then he wrapped up the set, breaking the 1 a.m. curfew by a couple of minutes, with a tap of the band for “TELEKINESIS” and a series of long, classic Travis hums. Fireworks exploded into the Indio night, but there weren’t really cheers to match them. When the lights came up, I didn’t find myself amid anything like Lady Gaga’s shell-shocked crowd the night prior, or like the mass joy of Charli’s hard-dancing crowd earlier Saturday. More of a shrug. A high-energy shrug, but not the “MOST TURNT… GAVSBSVDVDHHDHDHDH” I’d come in hoping for.
