Bad Bunny, Blackpink, Frank Ocean. Those are the headliners of Coachella 2023 and the primary reason why the tens of thousands of people who will attend the festival are going; 100,000 fans reportedly showed up to just Harry Styles’ performance last year. Worth remembering, though, is that Coachella isn’t just one big show at night: There are a number of performances happening in various parts of the festival grounds throughout the three days of both weekends.
Terrific artists are booked for these time slots, too. Playing Coachella is a coveted gig, so organizers Goldenvoice invite only the best of the best, and that still applies when it comes to the smaller names on the lineup poster. In fact, key festival memories involve being unexpectedly blown away by an artist you had never heard of before, or seeing an act you only sort of knew and coming away from the experience with a different perspective.
Ugh was stuck in drafts
Register now for access to passes at https://t.co/qujCsdlTip. Presale begins Friday, 1/13 at 11am PT. Very limited Weekend 1 passes remain. For your best chance at passes, look to Weekend 2. pic.twitter.com/5zMQ4dJZHq
— Coachella (@coachella) January 10, 2023
This year’s fest goes down from April 14 to 16 and 21 to 23, but ahead of that, let’s take a look at some of the best artists who are small-font acts on the lineup, but big-font acts in our hearts.
Domi & JD Beck
This jazz duo has gotten plenty of shine over the past year. They picked up a couple Grammy nominations for this year’s ceremony (Best New Artist and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, the latter for Not Tight, their 2022 debut album). Millions got to see them on national TV when they took the Tonight Show stage in late 2022, joined by Mac DeMarco for a rendition of “Two Shrimps” (above). If you want to hear from the two directly, Uproxx interviewed them last summer, too.
Ethel Cain
Not a lot of singer-songwriters had a better 2022 than Ethel Cain. Her debut album Preacher’s Daughter was hailed by many as one of the year’s best releases and former president Barack Obama is a fan, as he put her song “American Teenager” on his year-end list of favorite songs. Uproxx’s Caitlin White previously lauded it, too, writing, “The best song on the album, ‘American Teenager’ gets closer to Khalid’s own American Teen than any listeners of the early EPs would’ve ever guessed, pinning a cheerleader, a dead teen soldier, and an unmoved Jesus into the kind of ethereal pop melody that made 1989 such a beloved record.”
The Linda Lindas
Two years ago next month, The Linda Lindas performed “Racist Sexist Boy” at a library and the video went viral. While that could have easily been just a 15-minutes moment for a lot of artists, it turned out The Linda Lindas actually had the goods to keep the spotlight fixed on them for a more extended window. They ended up landing a record deal with Epitaph and releasing their debut album, Growing Up, last summer. As for how that album was, the actions of their peers speak volumes: Sleater-Kinney recruited the band for a covers album and they booked opening gigs for Paramore and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Sudan Archives
In case you’ve somehow missed it, Sudan Archives (real name Brittney Parks) has been making some of music’s best albums for the past few years. She has two full-length releases so far — 2019’s Athena and 2022’s Natural Brown Prom Queen — and both of them were all over critical year-end lists. Sudan Archives has been all over your TV, too, with striking performances on The Tonight Show and The Late Show in recent months. If she can rock a late-night television stage as confidently as she does, you know she’ll bring it for Coachella, too.
IDK
The company you keep says a lot about you, and IDK has worked with Offset, Young Thug, The Neptunes, Swae Lee, and others, so you do the math. He linked up with Kaytranada for his latest album, last year’s Simple, a groovy 8-track effort that follows 2021’s USee4Yourself, IDK’s first album to hit the Billboard 200. IDK’s star continues to rise, so swing by his Coachella set to witness the ascent for yourself.
Pi’erre Bourne
Bourne’s Jamie Foxx-spoken producer tag helped him become a meme in 2017, but he has the goods behind the board, too. You’ve heard his work, as he’s had a strong presence on the Billboard charts with work on tracks by Drake, Travis Scott, and others. He’s quite the rapper in his own right as well, and he’s found a ton of success with the bevy of albums and mixtapes he’s dropped over the past half-decade.
¿Téo?
If you were a Disney XD viewer in the 2010s, you may remember Mateo Arias from Kickin’ It. (His brother, by the way, is Hannah Montana star Moisés Arias). These days, though, he goes by ¿Téo? and is making some real headway in the music world. He’s proven himself to be quite the artist with tracks like this year’s “A Mi Cama,” a smooth number that melds hip-hop and reggaeton influences and further cements him as one of Latin music’s most exciting up-and-comers.
Horsegirl
Uproxx’s Mia Hughes recently identified Horsegirl as a leading force bringing back sounds of the ’90s via contemporary indie rock, describing their sound as “slacker-tinged noise-rock à la Sonic Youth and Pavement.” (They’ve actually opened for Pavement, in fact.) Indeed, there’s definitely a sense of nostalgia in their work that sometimes goes further back than even the ’90s, like on the 2022 post-punk/shoegaze number “Anti-Glory.”
Soul Glo
Artists have been trying to combine rap and rock since essentially the dawn of hip-hop, and now, Philadelphia’s Soul Glo is taking a terrific crack at it. They’ve been at it for about a decade now and their 2022 album Diaspora Problems was a big moment, as it was their first release on iconic punk label Epitaph Records. Songs like “Driponomics” show off their unrelenting energy that lives in a spot between in-your-face hardcore and aggressive hip-hop.
Bakar
Uproxx shined a spotlight on Bakar last year as part of the Next Up series, which identified ten artists who are helping shape the future of music. So far, Bakar’s breakout hit is 2019’s “Hell n Back,” which topped the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart and has since been certified platinum. It’s easy to see why the song did so well, with its feel-good vibes, nostalgic-but-contemporary sound, and distinctly raspy/breathy vocals. Last year, he dropped his debut album, Nobody’s Home, which was top-40 in the UK and should set the table for his next full-length to get broader recognition.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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