Ready to sweat it out with 99,000 of your closest friends again? Not to worry if you’re not quite there yet: Coachella just announced its next festival dates, and it turns out you’ll still have another year to prep.
Coachella will make its return over two weekends in 2022, from April 15 to 17 and April 22 to 24. Stagecoach typically follows the weekend after, but as of publication, promoter Goldenvoice has yet to announce 2022 dates for the country fest.
See you in the desert 🌵 Coachella returns April 15-17 & 22-24, 2022. Register now to access the 2022 advance sale beginning Friday, June 4 at 10am PT.https://t.co/qujCsdCWkp pic.twitter.com/0PzCZYrbB6
— Coachella (@coachella) June 1, 2021
It’s usually around this time each year that Coachella announces dates and presale info for the next year’s edition, and though this April’s event was canceled we’ve already settled back into that timing groove: Registration is open now for presale, which opens June 4 at 10am. Tickets start at $449 before fees, a notable increase over previous years; after presale, that base price ticks up as high as $499. VIP, meanwhile, will set you back upwards of $929 before fees.
Coachella’s April 2020 edition was initially postponed to October of that year. Eventually, though, those dates were scrapped, too, as well as the fest’s April 2021 dates. Frank Ocean, Rage Against the Machine and Travis Scott were the original 2020 headliners, but who knows who we’ll see on the lineup in 2022.
Until today’s announcement, we’d certainly wondered whether the fest would stage something later in the year or just skip it altogether (though a fall Coachella may feel odd, that’s actually when the inaugural 1999 outing was held). Though Goldenvoice could always surprise us with an autumn fest in Indio a la 2016’s Desert Trip, the recent announcement of Head in the Clouds at the Rose Bowl in November suggests that the promoter is leaning more towards the sort of niche, genre-focused L.A.-area fests it’s staged in recent years, similar to Just Like Heaven, Smokin’ Grooves and Once Upon a Time in the LBC (as well as Lovers & Friends and Cruel World, which were both scrapped in 2020 due to the pandemic).
On June 15, California will drop the sorts of capacity limits and gathering rules that would make staging a music fest a logistical (and, you know, until recently a public health) nightmare. Instead, the only rule in place for the rest of the year for outdoor events with over 10,000 people is that it’s “strongly recommended” (but not required) that all attendees be vaccinated or present a negative Covid-19 test result.