While live music has cautiously been creeping back into our lives over the past month or so, the return of Lollapalooza, for better and for worse, feels like a return to normalcy, with the weekend-long Chicago festival carrying on its chaotic programming with little precaution aside from the occasional mask guidelines posted around the city’s Grant Park. With Lori Lightfoot’s invitation to carry on as usual in spite of rising concerns over the Delta variant nearly as controversial as the festival’s inclusion of “Limp Bizkit” in large font on its 2021 poster, the immediate future of other festivals of equal caliber sure feels a lot less certain than DaBaby’s lack of attendance at those events after this weekend.
As always, though, Lolla lent itself to showcasing some of the moment’s best (and most photogenic) stars across all genres of music, with Tyler, the Creator, Megan Thee Stallion, Young Thug, Playboi Carti, JPEGMAFIA, and Rico Nasty holding things down for rap, and Foo Fighters, Modest Mouse, Brittany Howard, Black Pumas, and Orville Peck keeping a wide variety of rock covered. See our full photo coverage of the event below—including a trip to the Toyota Music Den—and click here to see our artist portraits from the festival.
