Sasquatch, Washington State’s scenic music festival which takes place at the Columbia River Gorge in late spring, has officially announced its lineup on the heels of last week’s announcement of the Coachella Music Festival lineup in California.
The major music festival will take place over memorial day weekend 2016, and will feature headliners The Cure (back for the second time since 2009), Florence and the Machine, Disclosure, and Diplo’s project Major Lazer.
A throwback to the stacked-deck Sasquatch lineups of its past (remember the 2005 performance by Kanye West, anyone?), this year’s lineup is a definite rung up from the relatively static list of artists who played the festival in 2015. That said, the list of headliners is almost an afterthought this year when compared to the massive number of great supporting acts also booked at Sasquatch in 2016.
On the beat-music front there’s plenty of hip artists taking the stage, with electronic musicians such as Grimes, Chet Faker, and M83 playing, as well as a solid mix of hip-hop acts like A$AP Rocky, Vic Mensa, Odisee, and Big Grams (a duo collaboration between Outkast’s Big Boi and New York beat maker Phantogram).
As is typical of Sasquatch, the majority of the festival lineup is devoted to indie rock both new and old, with longtime cult musicians like Yo La Tengo and Sufjan Stevens joining a trio of late 2000s slacker rock icons in Mac Demarco, Ty Segall, and Kurt Vile. The solid lineup is comprised of perhaps the most-hyped newish performers of this year’s festival.
Otherwise, many of the bands from Coachella and Sasquatch will overlap this year, with musicians like Unknown Mortal Orchestra, BØRNS, Nathanial Rateliff and the Night Sweats, as well as many electronic groups hitting both festivals.
The large amount of overlap between the two festivals means two things: There is probably not a reason to attend more than one of them, and it might be a good time to check out a new one if you always go to the other, provided your fate isn’t decided by being a huge Cure fan for Sasquath, or Guns N’ Roses fan for Coachella. And of course Coachella has LCD Sound Systems, too. You know what, maybe you should just go to both.
