Coachella 2026: Indie minimalists The xx come back bigger, brasher than ever

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It’s been eight years since The xx performed together as a band, but it sure didn’t feel like it when the U.K.trio took the Main stage on Friday.

For one, the members haven’t exactly disappeared.Producer/drummer Jamie xx is a festival mainstay and one of the most sophisticated, exultant DJ’s working.

Romy Madley Croft became a sapphic-nightlife sovereign in 2023 with the clubby “Mid Air,” after Sim’s own minimalist, horror-streaked “Hideous Bastard.”The band’s songs are among the most timeless of their generation of indie rock.Forward-thinking enough to reinvent the guitar-bass-drums palette for the EDM boom; yet stark and lovelorn enough to pass for Motown in another era.

Music From Coachella’s humble beginnings of a desert festival into becoming a global force in pop culture, revisit iconic moments with Daft Punk, Beyoncé, the Coachella astronaut and everything in between.Yet their return was among the most buzzed-about sets of the festival this year, a credit to how well their catalog has stood up on the merits.At their debut, they almost singlehandedly inaugurated a shift towards hyper-intimate headphone pop - it’s hard to imagine Billie Eilish sounding quite the same without them.

Yet on Friday, they bolstered that purity with the confidence, swagger and precision of the veteran rock act they’ve become.Dressed in their typical all-black palette, their faces carrying a little more gravity and composure with age, the set slipped between the ships-in-the-night duets of “Shelter” and “VCR” to the after-hours whomp of Romy’s “Enjoy Your Life.” “On Hold” best married the band’s two worlds, sample-soaked yet rock driven; “Angels” remained a peerless devotional ballad.

Music Coachella 2026’s first weekend features 18 acts L.A.Times staff can’t wait to see, from proto-punk icon Iggy Pop to emerging artist Gigi Perez.There w...