As predicted, Swedish House Mafia and the Weeknd will replace Kanye West at Coachella on Sunday night for the two-weekend festival.
They will perform in the festival-closing Sunday night slot, joining Harry Styles (Friday) and Billie Eilish (Saturday) as Coachella’s 2022 headliners, taking place on the weekends of April 15-17 and April 22-24. West was announced as a headliner in January but pulled out on Monday.
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“I’m so looking forward to this moment with Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd finishing out the Sunday night slot this year,” said Paul Tollett, president/CEO of Coachella promoter Goldenvoice. “Coachella has a special relationship with Abel and I’m so thankful to have this upcoming performance with these iconic artists all on the same stage.”
The Weeknd headlined the festival in 2018 and made his first high-profile concert appearance there in 2012.
Although many media outlets reported that the Weeknd would take the slot himself, that was never a realistic proposition: For the past several months he’s been immersed in the HBO series “The Idol” — which he is co-writing, co-directing and stars in — and his own stadium tour doesn’t start until July. Other names thrown into the week’s frenzied prediction mix after West’s cancelation include Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Silk Sonic (featuring Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak) and Tyler, the Creator.
The move means that the top three Sunday night performers — SHM, the Weeknd and Doja Cat — are all managed by SalXCo.
When the 2022 Coachella lineup was announced back in early January, Swedish House Mafia had rare, almost unprecedented placement in the hierarchy of the festival’s all-important official poster: in a headliner-sized font, but at the bottom of the lineup, and with no specific date listed.
A few days later, Variety unspooled several hundred words speculating about what that might mean, one possibility of which was that the festival was hedging its bets in case headliner Kanye West — who’d pulled out of a previous Coachella lineup literally days before it was announced — pulled out again, which is exactly what happened on Monday.
It is important to note that not just anyone can pull off a headlining set at North America’s biggest and most popular music festival. The gold standard, of course, is Beyonce’s 2018 “Homecoming” set, a visually and musically electrifying spectacle that made waves all across the world.
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