INDIO, California — Sabrina Carpenter returned to Coachella on Friday and made good on the promise she left behind in spring 2024, headlining the festival’s opening night at Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. The 26-year-old singer, who first closed her Coachella debut with a vow to come back as the top bill, arrived at the desert stage as the face of a festival that now has a very different kind of pop star at its center.
“I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” Carpenter told the crowd, before adding, “Actually, I can … but it’s nicer to say that, right?” She paired that confidence with a 20-plus song set list that leaned into the sleek, playful image she has built over two albums, Short n’ Sweet and Man’s Best Friend, and left out “Nonsense,” the viral closer that once helped make her a fixture in online pop culture.
Her first Coachella appearance also совпided with the release of “Espresso,” the song that became a major hit after the festival and helped push her from breakout singer to mainstream headliner in the space of two years. By Friday, she was no longer arriving as a curiosity with a buzzy single. She was arriving as the calling card for the night, and she knew exactly what that meant. Carpenter had ended her spring 2024 set with the line, “He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline,” and the return made that promise part of the performance itself.
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The show was built like a pop theater production, with elaborate on-stage world-building, cinematic videography, pre-filmed chapter breaks and complex costume changes. Carpenter emerged from a vintage car wearing a red sequin dress, then moved through a Hollywood Hills-style stage set marked SABRINAWOOD, a glossy backdrop that made the entire evening feel less like a concert than a large-scale theatrical revue. Her performance also drew a comparison to Lady Gaga’s festival-opening set a year earlier, though Carpenter’s version was more centered on her own sharpened identity as a performer who has been working in entertainment since before she was a teenager.
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That is the point of the night: Carpenter no longer needs the internet to explain her. The lyric from “Taste” — “oh I make quite an impression / five feet, to be exact,” — has become a neat summary of the persona, but Friday’s set pushed past the joke. With the hits in place, the staging locked down and the crowd already knowing the joke, Carpenter answered the question her 2024 promise raised. She did not just return to Coachella. She arrived there as a headliner who could carry the opening night on spectacle, control and the songs to match.
