Lollapalooza opened Thursday in Grant Park for its annual four days of crowds and music, with a lineup through Sunday heavy on female artists — Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter are both end-of-day headliners, with Gracie Abrams and Clairo also among the early crowd favorites.
Official headliners for Day 1 were Tyler, the Creator and Luke Combs, who closed out the night on the T-Mobile and Bud Light stages, respectively. Combs made Lollapalooza history as the Chicago festival’s first-ever country music festival closer.
At the main gates at Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive, concertgoers got up with the sun to be first in the entrance chutes before the festival opened at 11 a.m.
Siblings Jacob Fuentes and Sofia Pogue traveled from Texas; this was the first concert ever for Sofia, 13, they said. Tyler, the Creator is her favorite artist. “I like a lot of music but I feel like I like (Tyler’s) the most,” she said.
“I was going to come anyway for Twice,” Fuentes said, “and then I told her about it, and then she’s like, ‘Oh, Tyler’s also coming.’ So I was like, ‘I guess I’ll also buy you a ticket.'”
Twice will be Lollapalooza’s first all-girl K-pop headliner on Saturday and is just one of a number of K-pop bands on a bill that also includes BOYNEXTDOOR, KickFlip, Xdinary Heroes and Wave to Earth. (The artist J-Hope was the first K-pop act to headline Lolla in 2022.)
Tyler, the Creator was recently in Chicago on his “Chromakopia” tour, playing two nights at the United Center in early July.
Country music on the bill
Jake Vaughn, 24, and Cosette Zielinski, 20, were in line before the gates opened for their first Lollapalooza experience. Zielinski, a Chicago native, made a homecoming from Cedar Lake, Indiana, while Vaughn came in from Kankakee. She wore a brown cowboy hat; his baseball cap said “America: We grow beer.”
They were there to see Combs. The North Carolina native grew to national acclaim with the 2017 hit song “Beautiful Crazy” and has since become a Goliath in the country music scene. His presence at Lollapalooza drew a crowd clad in cowboy hats and boots who showed up to prove that the Midwest has a thriving country fanbase.
“The best (country) fans, I think,” Vaughn said, “people think it’s Nashville, it’s not. It’s Southern Illinois.”
Vaughn introduced Zielinski to country music when they started dating a year and half ago — he sang Combs’ cover of “Dive” to her on their first date. She was “very anti-country music” before she met Vaughn; Combs is their favorite artist as a couple.
Mark Guarino, the author of the 2023 book “Country & Midwestern,” spoke with the Tribune before the festival. Chicago has heavily influenced country music, he said, despite common conceptions that the genre was born exclusively out of the South. Throughout the 20th century, Southerners from Appalachia and the Upper South migrated to Chicago for work opportunities and brought their music with them.
“Chicago’s always been a place where musicians have come and collaborated and experimented and influenced where country music was going,” Guarino said.
Concertgoer Aubrey Fransen came from Lexington, Kentucky, and her sisters Kierstin Fransen and Phoebe Johnson from in Cincinnati, Ohio. They met up together for a five-hour drive to see all four days of the festival.
They made bracelets with all the different artists that they planned on seeing, including Mark Amber, Role Model, Alex Warren and Combs. They were dressed in cowgirl attire with skirts and cowboy boots.
Their love of music was inherited from their parents when they were young, the sisters said. Their mom played music and their dad was in a band in college.
“We used to have Friday night dance parties at home, and my dad would put on an ABBA Gold record and we would all just dance around,” Johnson said. “It’s been something that brought us together.”
Karley Sweer, 19, a student at DePaul University, never liked country music when she was growing up in Litchfield Park, Arizona, where it dominated the music scene. But when she moved to Chicago for college, she realized she loved the genre.
“It’s a taste of home,” she said.
Sweer took on the first day of Lollapalooza in cowboy boots, with a ribbon tied in her brown hair. She was most excited to see Combs as well as Willow Avalon, a country singer new on the scene, who will perform Sunday afternoon.
Chicago’s Ratboys get their debut
The Chicago indie-rock band Ratboys performed Thursday afternoon on the Bud Light stage.
The band’s singer-songwriter, Julia Steiner, said playing the festival has been on their bucket list for a long time.
“Lollapalooza is like, obviously, one of the largest festivals in America, but in Chicago it has sort of this larger-than-life reputation,” Steiner said. “It’s exciting to be part of the party and get to play one of the big stages at the fest too, it’s pretty surreal.”
During their 45-minute set, the band opened with “Making Noise for the Ones You Love” and other songs from their most recent album “The Window.” They also played “Light Night Mountains All That,” a song from an upcoming album, set to be released early next year, according to Steiner.
The band’s electric energy came through with their drumming and guitars — an energy shared by their crowd, which swayed along with the music. In between songs, some fans yelled “Ratboy summer.”
“The Window,” released in 2023, pays homage to Steiner’s late grandmother. In 2020, her grandmother was battling Parkinson’s disease and her grandfather said his last words to her through her nursing home window.
Steiner’s mother told her the story and was quickly overcome with sadness.
“I wrote it down in the moment. I don’t know, it felt very compelling and like something I wanted to remember,” Steiner said. “And writing down that story kind of became the basis for the lyrics a few weeks later.”
Steiner and Dave Sagan, Ratboys’ co-founder and drummer, met at Notre Dame. Sean Neumann (bass) joined the band in 2016 and Marcus Nuccio (drums) joined in 2017. Steiner graduated with an English degree, but had no plans to take music seriously, even though the passion was always there.
“I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t enjoy listening to music and singing,” Steiner said.
For the older fans
By the Bud Light stage Thursday afternoon, Surrey Walton, 55, of Oak Park, said he’s been to 19 Lollapalooza festivals — every one in Chicago except for one.
“This is the most country day I’ve seen at Lollapalooza,” he said, standing outside the Bud Lite stage as girls milled around in cowboy boots. In his lemon-print button-up and wide-brim hat, Walton didn’t quite fit the country theme, or the festival’s overwhelmingly young demographic.
Out on the festival’s main avenue of Columbus Drive, Jeff Norgle said Thursday that he had always wanted to attend Lollapalooza, so after 60 years of living in the Chicago area, he finally did. He went with his friend Leo Flynn, also 60, with whom he grew up in Elmhurst. Flynn just lost his parents, but being at a music festival on Chicago’s lakefront with an old friend made him feel better.
“Music heals and lifts the soul,” Flynn said.
Jason, 52, and Greg Herr, 56, have been to almost every Lollpalooza in Chicago. The brothers live in the city so they’re attending all four days. At Jason Herr’s favorite Lollapalooza, in 1992, he saw Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the movement away from more alternative music doesn’t discourage him or his brother from attending. They love live music — and are excited for Korn and Cage the Elephant — but also appreciate Lollapalooza as a chance to get outside and enjoy summer.
Notably, in the midst of a season with back-to-back 90 degree days, Lollapalooza kicked off with temperatures in the low 70s — but with a haze in the sky that concealed high-rises just outside of the lakefront park. Air quality alerts were issued Thursday due to wildfire smoke across Illinois.
By afternoon, Chicago’s air was ranked worst in the world out of 125 cities, according to Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.
Crowds for Gracie Abrams
In the evening, Abrams drew an audience to the T-Mobile stage that stretched nearly the whole length of the field to the Lakeshore stage. After completing the rest of her set list, Abrams reminded the crowd that, last time she performed at Lollapalooza, in 2022, she covered Swedish singer Robyn’s hit single “Dancing On My Own.”
This time, she brought out Robyn to sing it with her. Abrams introduced “the queen herself” to a jaw-dropped audience and the two pop stars performed Abrams’ favorite song as a duet — then impressed fans even more by mashing it with Abrams’ fan favorite “Close to You.”
