3 Coachella Performances This Year That Prove Rock Is Far From Dead

Rock music has supposedly been dead or dying for a very long time. Yet still, we discover new acts blowing our minds with voices, guitars, bass, drums, and occasionally keyboards. But who needs a band?

We can now completely remove humans from the experience altogether and just prompt AI to produce slop, I mean, a song, in mere seconds. But what it cannot do is emulate the unpredictable and beautiful chaos of a rock band. Which is to say, the perfectly imperfect essence of being human.

I think it’s why rock musicians gave the most dynamic performances at this year’s Coachella. If rock is indeed dead, then no one told Jack White, Geese, or The Strokes.

Jack White

Broadcast in black and white from the Mojave stage, Jack White and his band delivered an unhinged performance of punk, blues, and garage rock. Since The White Stripes disbanded in 2011, White has become an elder statesman of rock and roll. Though his garage rock duo now resides in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, White’s best work is not at all behind him. “That’s How I’m Feeling” and “Old Scratch Blues” sound every bit as ferocious as “Icky Thump”, “Ball And Biscuit”, and “Seven Nation Army”. This is the kind of set likely to launch countless new bands.

Geese

If you’ve heard the hype surrounding Geese and you watched the band casually stroll onto the Gobi stage in broad daylight, you might not think they look much like rock and roll saviors. However, you might think again by the time Cameron Winter leads his band through the mad blues of “2122”, from Geese’s critically acclaimed 2023 album, 3D Country. But even that song seems tame compared to the set closer, “Trinidad”, which contains the following hook: “There’s a bomb in my car!” The song opens the latest Geese LP, Getting Killed, but the only thing getting killed here is the notion that rock is dead.

The Strokes

When The Strokes took to the main stage, bassist Nikolai Fraiture talked about how the festival appearance fulfilled the band’s lifelong dream of opening for Justin Bieber. It was the kind of slacker irony that defined The Strokes when they landed amid the garage rock and post-punk revival in the early 2000s. But the New York band has done little slacking since “Last Nite” arrived. Their Coachella set featured bangers like “Hard To Explain”, “Someday”, “Juicebox”, and “Reptilia”. It’s an impressive run of songs proving how The Strokes changed the sound of rock music to such a degree that even the world’s biggest pop stars took notice.

Photo by Barry Brecheisen/WireImage