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3 hours ago
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Throughout the Strokes’ main stage set on Saturday evening, you could see them: fans, many of them women, unaffected by the New York indie rockers as they pushed forward through the crowd to stake out spots hours in advance for the night’s closer, Justin Bieber. “I know why you’re here … JUSTIN BIEBER!” the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas joked, sort of, between songs. “We’re happy to lube you up for him.”
Perhaps Casablancas picked up on an anxious energy from the crowd: the chance to see Bieber in a Coachella primetime slot seemed at once inevitable and improbable. Save a stripped-down Grammys performance and two very selective LA warm-up shows, the 32-year-old pop star had not performed publicly in over four years, since cancelling his 2022 Justice World Tour amid a host of health issues. Maybe it’s because vulnerability is an established element of a performer who, for years, appeared dead behind the eyes in public, or the fact that Bieber recently ditched the managerial framework that guided his rocky career, or the lingering sting of Frank Ocean’s disastrous headliner set in 2023, when a generationally beloved artist with little recent performance experience cracked under the pressure: few Coachella headliner sets have generated this much buzz – Saturday broke Coachella’s single-day ticket record – and perhaps this much parasocial concern.
Thus there was palpable relief when Bieber showed up nearly on time for his 11.35pm red-eye slot, coyly shrouded in a pink hoodie and large shades but hitting every mellifluous note of All I Can Take, a relatively groovy track off his 2025 album Swag, followed by a rendition of Swag II standout Speed Demon so buttery I felt a frisson of joy. Bieber’s relative reclusiveness and seeming fragility, remarkable for one of the most-streamed artists in the world, is such that the sight of him alone on stage, surfing the gossamer synths of Swag’s career-rejuvenating production, triggers a protective instinct as well as wonder; nothing, not even a relatively self-indulgent run of all new tracks with no choreography and recessive set design, feels guaranteed.
He must know it counts for a lot, for this comeback set, a real test if there has ever been one for a very famous person’s live credibility, banked near entirely on Bieber’s slyly formidable instrument. If, just 24 hours earlier, Sabrina Carpenter made good on the headliner promise with a wildly ambitious, maximalist extravaganza, Bieber presented its foil: a minimalist set with just the singer, his mic and his laptop livestream, the cavernous main stage turned into his metaphorical Swag-era bedroom. Depending on your level of fandom, the stripped-down vision, with minimal audience asides, read as either radically vulnerable or disappointingly self-interested from reportedly the highest-paid Coachella headliner of all time. (The double standard for effort for female and male pop headliners is … striking.) Haloed by prismatic videography and cocooned by a singular gray mound that appeared a bit like a skate park (or perhaps like his wife Hailey’s viral lip-gloss phone case), Bieber performed the most modest of concert stripteases – over the course of his 90-minute set, he shed the shades and the hood but little of his hard-earned armor, saving a full look into his eyes for near halfway through. Few pop stars can make a single smile, flashed almost entirely for the new collaborators who joined him on stage, feel like a victory.
As one of the world’s most famous late millennials, a generational icon who bled on the edge of both monocultural and viral fame, Bieber commands, from some, an immense well of generous goodwill. His abject plaintiveness for the Prince-inflected Go Baby – sat on the ground, elbows on knees and eyes closed – managed to briefly make the 100,000-person experience feel small, exposed, as if asking the crowd to take him as himself. But audience momentum is a fickle thing; the Swag double albums have their handful of genuine highlights, but 11 clipped, gauzy, bedroom R&B-style tracks is a heavy ask to open a comeback set. Bieber, an instinctive and compelling performer despite it all, seemed to sense this – “I think you guys need some energy,” he said before launching into the propulsive track Stay with The Kid Laroi that jolted the crowd back to life and reminded just how much ache Bieber’s voice can conjure even in a compressed feature. But he immediately flat-lined again with a six-song Swag acoustic moment that, while beautifully sung, leaned too heavily into his preacher’s instinct; I too love the music festival, but not even Justin Bieber is going to convince me to chant: “Coachella, Hallelujah.”
The highlight was always going to be how Bieber grappled with the past that so clearly still weighs on the present, the painful public growth that still colors his stunning voice (if this set proved one thing, it’s that I would listen to him sing the phone book, though I will always hope for better). Evincing a sense of humor we so rarely get to see, Bieber took the crowd down a YouTube rabbit hole, searching on his laptop for the music videos for such hits as Sorry, breakout single Baby (!), Beauty and the Beat (!!) and All That Matters (!!!). To palpable audience shock, he harmonized along with his younger, less ripened voice, and showed clips of him running into a glass door as a mega-famous child and, for some reason, the Deez Nuts video. The effect was both frustrating – would it really kill him to do more than one verse of 2015 anthem Where Are U Now? – and endearing; many tears were shed to the image of the man singing back to his 13-year-old self, a precocious child busking in Ontario to Neyo’s So Sick.
The nostalgia wormhole perhaps closed a loop, though it did not scratch the itch for a more comprehensive career assessment. The past, it seems, is still an uncomfortable coat to be worn, though at least now with some cheek. Bieber seemed much more at home back in the Swag cycle and with a stable of collaborators – Dijon (for Devotion), Tems (I Think You’re Special), Wizkid (Essence) and Mk.gee, all of whom seemed to be doing Bieber a favor, anointing him as a genuine creative with artistic vision, than vice versa. The latter lent his guitar fireworks to a blooming finale of Daisies, Swag’s most radio-friendly and least snoozy track, appropriately accompanied by real fireworks. Note-perfect to the finish, Bieber appeared triumphant – it might not have been all that we wanted to hear, but for better and for worse, he said what he needed to say.
