Female Headliners Praised
Major coverage gave top marks to Coachella’s female headliners, with The Guardian awarding five‑star reviews to Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, Lady Gaga and newly included Sabrina Carpenter. That critical praise featured across festival weekend roundups (x.com).
Coachella’s recent run of women-led headline sets has drawn some of the festival’s strongest mainstream reviews, with Sabrina Carpenter joining a list that already included Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Doja Cat and Lady Gaga. (theguardian.com) The newest entry came on April 11, 2026, when The Guardian gave Carpenter’s Coachella headlining debut five stars after a set built around theatrical staging and celebrity cameos including Will Ferrell and Susan Sarandon. Variety’s review from the same night also framed Carpenter’s performance as a full-scale headliner turn, not a mid-bill crossover moment. (theguardian.com) (variety.com) That praise lands after Coachella 2025 booked Lady Gaga, Green Day, Post Malone and Travis Scott at the top of the poster for the festival’s April 11-13 and April 18-20 weekends in Indio, California. Gaga’s Friday-night 2025 set was widely singled out in post-festival coverage, with Rolling Stone calling it a major statement performance and Newsweek noting The Guardian’s five-star review. (goldenvoice.com) (rollingstone.com) (newsweek.com) The pattern stretches back across several festival cycles. Beyoncé’s 2018 performance was treated as a historic Coachella benchmark after she became the festival’s first Black woman headliner, while Billie Eilish’s 2022 set made her the youngest solo headliner in the event’s history at age 20. (time.com) (billboard.com) Doja Cat added another first in 2024 when she closed Sunday night as Coachella’s first female rapper headliner, and coverage after weekend one described her set as one of the festival’s defining performances. Sabrina Carpenter’s rise from a 2024 daytime Coachella slot, where she launched “Espresso,” to a 2026 headline slot shows how quickly the festival’s billing can shift when a pop act breaks through. (newsbreak.com) (nme.com) (abcnews.com) Coachella has not always looked like this at the top of the bill. The festival began in 1999, and its headliner history was long dominated by rock bands and male solo acts before pop stars such as Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Doja Cat and Carpenter became central to its biggest nights. (yahoo.com) (goldenvoice.com) The reviews do not mean every year has been female-led across the whole poster. Coachella 2025 still split its marquee billing among Gaga, Green Day, Post Malone and Travis Scott, which shows that women’s headline dominance in criticism has not always matched the gender balance of the official top line. (rollingstone.com) (goldenvoice.com) What the recent coverage does show is a stable critical arc: from Beyoncé’s 2018 history-making set to Carpenter’s 2026 debut, Coachella’s most celebrated headline performances have repeatedly come from women working at full arena scale in the desert. (time.com) (theguardian.com)
