2000s-Era Indie Bands Share One Stage in Los Angeles Today. The Company That Set It Up Also Built Coachella. — Woody Magazine, Aug. 22, 2026
2000s-Era Indie Bands Share One Stage in Los Angeles Today. The Company That Set It Up Also Built Coachella.
The Strokes released a new album a month ago. Today they play under a sign that says "2000s." The bands didn't get old. The promoter started selling tickets by birth year.
- Today's festival is run by the company behind Coachella. When Coachella chased a younger crowd and dropped its 2000s-era bands, the same company gave those bands a separate date and called them back.
- On the same patch of Southern California grass, the company seats its audiences by age. Teenagers and twentysomethings in April, the 1980s new-wave crowd in May for several years running, and today, the 2000s generation.
- Tonight's headliner, The Strokes, put out a new record in July and headlined in San Francisco two weeks ago. Today, the same band plays as a "throwback act." Funny how that works.
This afternoon, on a golf course beside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, two stages go up. The Strokes. LCD Soundsystem. Feist. The Rapture. Chromeo. STRFKR. Somewhere down the list you stop reading and start recognizing names. That's my old iPod. Time Out Los Angeles said as much: a lineup partly pulled from the one you carried in college. The festival is called Just Like Heaven, after the Cure song. This is its sixth edition.
We all have a ready explanation for a bill like this. The bands got old. The Strokes released their debut in 2001, which makes this year twenty-five. A band that age isn't going to own the radio again, so it rounds up the people who remember the songs and plays them back. Fair enough. There's a name for this kind of tour: the oldies circuit, the tour a once-famous act runs on memory. We look at this lineup and feel a small ache. Our bands are on the circuit now.
The same company's calendar
The ache fades when we look at who is putting the show on. The promoter is Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles concert company that created Coachella in 1999 and now sits inside AEG Presents. Coachella ran again this April, two weekends in the desert, with Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G at the top of the poster. Both weekends sold out three days after tickets went on sale. Four months later, the company that built that festival is staging a one-day show in Southern California with nothing but 2000s indie bands on it.
When the festival debuted in 2019, the Los Angeles music site buzzbands.la noticed something about the top of the bill. The four biggest names, Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT and Beach House, had each played Coachella three times. buzzbands put it this way: Coachella had moved that generation into its rear-view mirror to follow the crowd coming up behind. Where did the people who loved those bands go? Nowhere. They got older, started earning more, and lost the stamina for three nights in the desert. Goldenvoice didn't let them go. It gave them a date of their own.
That first edition was planned as a single day in a park by the Long Beach harbor. The May 4 show sold out almost as soon as tickets went live, so the promoter added May 3 in front of it, same bands, same running order, two days straight. Stereogum described the result as the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival restaged on the coast and sold twice. A reporter for buzzbands.la asked a thirtysomething in the crowd how it felt. "Suddenly, I feel cool again."
The department-store directory
Walk into a department store and the first thing you read is the floor directory. Juniors on two. Women's contemporary on three. Golf apparel upstairs. Same building, same company, same escalator, and every floor filled with people of a different age. When a floor stops drawing the young crowd, the store doesn't throw its customers out. It builds the floor they'll ride up to.
Goldenvoice's Southern California calendar reads like that directory. April in the Indio desert belongs to the generation that first heard these songs on TikTok. The weekend after, on the same polo field, Stagecoach takes the country audience. On the Pasadena golf course, from 2022 through 2025, a show called Cruel World went up every May: New Order, Duran Duran, Siouxsie, Nick Cave. That was the floor for people who grew up on 1980s new wave and goth. There's been no announcement of a Cruel World this year. Instead, in August, the same grass gets a 2000s floor. Different birth years, same lawn.
Seen this way, the reunions look different too. In 2019 The Rapture got back together for this festival and one Brooklyn show. In 2025 Rilo Kiley played its first show in seventeen years here. The band didn't decide to reunite and then go looking for a stage. The stage came first. A date, a lawn and an audience were already set, and the slot needed a name. The band stepped into it.
The Strokes' year
"Still, no band, no show." True. But follow The Strokes through 2026 and you can see which side of the arrangement they're on. April: both weekends of Coachella. August 8: headlining Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Today: Pasadena. Three California festivals, two of them Goldenvoice productions. Outside Lands is run by a different company.
One more thing belongs in that account. On July 24 The Strokes released Reality Awaits, their first album since 2020. This is not a band living on its back catalog. They folded new songs into the Outside Lands set, and Charli xcx, who put out her own album the same day, walked on to sing a 2001 track with them. Two weeks later, the same band plays a stage labeled "2000s indie." Same band, same new record, same month. At Coachella they're working musicians. At Outside Lands they're the headliner. Today they're a memory.
The price list tells you who the slot is for. General admission started at $209 and now sits at $249. VIP is $459. The Clubhouse tier, which buys air-conditioned restrooms and a spot in front of the stage, is $699. For a one-day festival that's steep. But the person paying it listened to these songs in a dorm room in 2009. Now they're pushing forty, with a job and a car. They prepay $45 for parking, arrive mid-afternoon, and are home after the 11 p.m. curfew. They can't do three nights camping in the desert anymore. They can do $699 for one day. Goldenvoice built the festival to that measurement.
Who makes whom old
So our first explanation, that the bands got old and started selling nostalgia, has the order backwards. The band is releasing new music and headlining in other cities. The band didn't file itself under "2000s." The audience reached a certain age, a date appeared that was aimed at that age's wallet, and the band was booked into the date. The oldies circuit doesn't start when a band gets old. It starts when its fans start earning, and a promoter notices.
That probably isn't true of music alone. We call some films "classics" and some dishes "the taste of childhood." It's worth asking, now and then, who attached the label. Often the thing hasn't changed at all. Only the sign on it has. And the people who hang the sign are usually the ones selling the thing, not the ones who made it.
At 11 tonight, when Pasadena's curfew falls, The Strokes will finish their set. The crowd goes home. The band moves on to the next city. The lawn empties, and next year's date gets written down. The band didn't get old. The slot was there first.
- Source ↗ Goldenvoice, official festival calendar (Coachella, Stagecoach, Cruel World, Just Like Heaven)
- Source ↗ Just Like Heaven 2026, official site
- Source ↗ Vice, 2026 lineup and ticket tiers (Apr. 2, 2026)
- Source ↗ UncoverLA, current prices, parking and curfew (Aug. 18, 2026)
- Source ↗ buzzbands.la, 2019 review and the Coachella-appearance count
- Source ↗ Stereogum, 2019 festival review
- Source ↗ Patch Long Beach, second day added after sellout (Feb. 2019)
- Source ↗ Time Out Los Angeles, 2026 preview
- Source ↗ Variety, Outside Lands 2026 headliners (Mar. 3, 2026)
- Source ↗ San Francisco Chronicle, The Strokes at Outside Lands (Aug. 9, 2026)
- Source ↗ Pasadena Now, Cruel World 2025 (Oct. 2024)
- TheWrap, Coachella 2026 sellout (Sept. 2025) (link unverified)
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