It was an embarrassment of riches at Portola 2025, with a head-spinning lineup that was bursting at the seams with legends, essential acts of the moment and a whole lot of rising stars. The weather more than cooperated, with sunshine and warm winds blowing off San Francisco Bay and onto the approximately 40,000 people gathered for each of the event’s two days.
This year marked the fourth edition of the event, which more or less adopted an if-it’s-not-broke-don’t-fix-it ethos by keeping most every stage in the same position as years past. The only major visible changes were an expanded ultra-VIP viewing area at the main stage and more lights and speakers in the festival’s massive warehouse space, which, despite being built almost entirely from metal, offered a pristine sound experience.
The Warehouse hosted some of the best sets of the weekend, with Chris Stussy delivering sophisticated yet unpretentious techno for the Sunday evening crowd and Japanese phenom Yousuke Yukimatsu playing an inventive set on Saturday night (and spotted taking photos with fans in the crowd later that evening).
Meanwhile, unstoppable Dutch star Mau P drew a massive crowd to the main stage on Saturday, and Dom Dolla did the same the night after, with the crowd and the producer alike seeming to take special pleasure when he dropped 2019’s “San Frandisco.” Peggy Gou closed out the weekend during a packed set in the warehouse, darkwave duo Boy Harsher cemented their star status with an electric Sunday night show, The Prodigy thrilled a mega-packed audience with their signature brand of hard-edged rave music and Hamdi lit up the Ship Tent (so named because it’s literally in front of a giant ship) during a hyphy golden-hour set that featured hits like his Skrillex collab “Push.”
Toward the end of the weekend, Moby summed it all up when he told the crowd that “in my heart of hearts, I am still a little rave kid, and some of the most joyful, transcendent moments of my life have been at experiences like this, surrounded by tens of thousands of people, everyone happy, everybody celebrating this sort of collectively created utopia, so I would like to dedicate this next song to everyone here who creates utopia for everyone else.”
To wit, in a weekend of much joy and many highlights, these are five of of the standout moments from the Sept. 20-21 festival.
In a lineup likely never to be repeated, Christina Aguilera’s Saturday evening show was introduced by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who nodded to the city’s recent struggles and aims at an upward trajectory. He proclaimed that “very, very quickly, we will be getting back to being the greatest city in the world, and it’s because of all of you; it’s because of our arts and it’s because of our culture.”
All-time powerhouse Christina Aguilera then put serious firepower behind Lurie’s words (both metaphorically and literally, with her set including many a pyro blast) when she sauntered onstage after him and delivered a millennial fantasy set that included her era-defining hits “Fighter,” Dirrrty,” “Ain’t No Other Man,” “Genie In a Bottle,” “What a Girl Wants” and “Lady Marmalade.”
Certainly the taste for ’90s and Y2K-era acts runs strong right now, with the Backstreet Boys blowing out their Sphere run (many T-shirts from this event were spotted among the Portola audience) and Limp Bizkit playing stadiums while opening for Metallica this past summer. With her performance, Aguilera flexed her well-known and utterly deserved position as one of the essential pop artists of the era and of all time, doing it all in an evolving outfit that started with silver chaps reminiscent of her iconic look in the 2003 video for “Dirrrty” and ultimately ending with her performing in a black leather bodysuit dripping with crystals and pearls.
Aguilera looked incredible, sounded incredible and made us feel incredible, altogether putting a huge win on the board for Portola as she filled its annual “diva” slot. While in years past these have been shorter shows, as performed by Nelly Furtado and Natasha Bedingfield, Aguilera brought a full stage production, dancers, costume changes, a band and an arsenal of hits that more than earned her her 50 ecstatic minutes on the main stage.
Often during the weekend there was a sense of going back in time, with the Portola lineup composed of ’90s titans like Underworld, Moby, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, who all put on exceptional shows that not only reminded audiences why they were essential acts of the earlier rave days, but why they remain essential. This felt deeply true on Saturday night when The Chemical Brothers closed Portola’s massive warehouse space with a 90-minute DJ set, a reprise to the pair’s headlining live show during Portola’s 2022 debut.
It was ravey as hell in the warehouse, with many people, at least in the area where we were dancing, leaving phones in pockets and locking into the music. The vibe was loose and sweaty as the duo — Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands — crossed their own decades’ worth of productions with a slew of deep cuts, bringing it all to a place both soaring and emotional as they closed with a sexy edit of Charles B’s 1988 acid house groover “Lack Of Love” that transitioned into their own 2010 classic “Swoon” and its enduring reminder to “just remember to fall in love, there’s nothing else.”
“North American Scum” is a white whale of LCD Soundsystem setlists, with the band playing the 2007 Sound of Silver banger more infrequently than fans (raises hand) might like. (LCD in fact didn’t seem to play it at all between 2011 and 2024, although they were, to be fair, also on hiatus from 2011 through 2016.)
It was thus a thrill when they let the song rip fairly early in their Saturday night mainstage set. Perhaps it was also projection, but the lyrics — “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, oh, where to begin/Well, we’re North Americans/But in the end, make the same mistakes all over again/Come on, North America” — certainly felt like commentary on the sad and confusing state of current affairs in the U.S.
In fact it requires a certain degree of dissociation, suspension of reality and/or mental gymnastics to enjoy dancing at a music festival with your friends while ICE agents roam the streets, the environment continues its collapse, mass shootings persist, public figures are assassinated, income inequality deepens and censorship takes hold over civil liberties we thought were innate. It was hard not to be amongst the crowd over the weekend and not wonder how many people had canceled their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions in the days following Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension from his show. Attending any given music festival is a major privilege, and sometimes one feels guilty about it when things outside the gates feel so despairing. And simultaneously what a welcome relief it is to just dance for awhile.
With much to mourn in America right now, James Murphy put it aptly while singing “I don’t know, I don’t know, oh where to begin.” But the beauty of an LCD set is not only that they’re one of the best live acts of a generation, but that they are thus so because their music has tremendous intellect and emotional weight. You can dance to it, and you can cry too, and a lot of people were doing both throughout the show as the group tore through essentials like “Home” and “Dance Yrself Clean” along with “Someone Great,” an anthem of love, loss and the pragmatic realities of when someone great is gone.
The song felt especially apt on Saturday given that the dance world lost a giant over the weekend, with the announcement coming earlier in the day that Keith McIver of legendary Scottish duo Optimo (Espacio) had died from brain cancer at age 57. Murphy honored McIver during the show, saying the band had lost a friend while wearing a yellow T-shirt declaring “No DFA Without Optimo,” a reference to the crucial influence the duo had on Murphy’s legendary DFA label.
The singer played the main stage for a Sunday afternoon set, timing that felt apt as her warm and breezy R&B paired with the afternoon’s blue skies and sunshine. While much harder music was happening on Portola’s other stages in this same timeframe, Lenae’s set was an apt soundtrack for settling in at the festival, with the artist performing selections from her excellent 2024 LP Bird’s Eye for a crowd that only kept growing for the duration of her show.
Lenae’s booking also emphasized the wise curation of the lineup, which balanced artists both young and legendary playing sounds both hard and soft. Lenae’s elegant performance fell into the latter style, but certainly didn’t feel like a warmup, with the Chicago-born singer holding her own and demonstrating why she was recently crowned with Billboard‘s R&B Rookie of the Year title.
At roughly 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, the line to get into Despacio bisected a large swath of the festival site, with what to the naked eye looked like hundreds and hundreds of festival attendees angling to get into the tent. And with good reason. The roving club space created and DJ’d by James Murphy and the gentlemen of Soulwax/2manyDJs (who all also had slots elsewhere on the Portola lineup over the weekend) was a heady, sweaty good time, with the area unequivocally going off anytime one popped inside.
Within Despacio, the space was so packed and so foggy that one couldn’t even see where the actual DJ booth was. No matter. People danced in clusters and alone with their eyes closed, with eyes adjusting from the sunshine outside to the inside darkness that was occasionally punctured by lights hitting the disco ball at the center of the floor, an event that caused a round of cheers every time it happened.
We’ve been inside Despacio at other festivals (it’s a regular at Coachella and will make its next appearance at Miami’s III Points on Oct. 17-18), but never have we seen it so packed and so positively writhing. Even outside the festival site, the buzz was still major, with fellow attendees gushing about it while in the TSA line at SFO and one stranger heard exclaiming “I have to tell you about this thing called Despacio!” to the person picking them up at LAX on Monday night.
