Lollapalooza hit its Day 4 homestretch on Sunday in Grant Park, with the gates opening on time after rains and flooding forced a late start on Saturday.
Closing day headliners are Canadian singer-songwriter Tate McRae and the British indie rock band The xx.
With seas of mud everywhere, the skies remained stubbornly misty and cool through midafternoon, with crowds slow to arrive. The Los Angeles pop duo After still pulled an audience early at the Airbnb stage but there were no lines, no waiting to get close to the barricades to catch New York hip hop group Whatmore as the openers on the Bud Light stage.
Regardless, by the final day, Sunday was officially sold out, with a daily capacity of 115,000 under the festival’s current contract with the city through 2032.
Managing large audiences has been top of mind for festivals since crowding fatalities during Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld concert in Houston.
This year, festgoer Kat Tripp of Carbondale said she has watched several artists pause their sets for fans to step back as messages flashed on the video screens, before continuing. But except for breakout artist Audrey Hobert’s Thursday set at the Allianz stage, where the crowd packed the field so tightly that the 20-year-old struggled to find a place to stand, she said navigating the festival has been easier than expected.
“We’ve just rolled up and ended up pretty close to the stage without really trying,” said Tripp. “I feel like there’s always been enough room to move around, even when there’s masses of people.”
The highlight of her weekend came Friday evening, when she danced through Charli xcx’s set by the T-Mobile stage. She barely noticed the buckets of water pouring down from the sky, and neither did the crowd around her.
“Honestly, I feel like people like a rain show. It ups the vibes in a way,” she said. “For a second, people were like ‘let me put all my important belongings away,’ but then it was awesome.”
Unlike Chappell Roan’s famous daytime set in 2024, no single music act seemed to dominate this year, with many of the nighttime headliners drawing roughly equal crowds to opposite ends of the park. It’s hard to say, between Lorde and John Summit, who pulled more people on opening day.
Though Charli xcx was the favorite on Friday, Chicago band Smashing Pumpkins also was well-attended in the wet.
Along with weather and crowds, there are other safety concerns at Lollapalooza.
Ingela Travers-Hayward has spent the past four years distributing free naloxone with her husband from a booth inside the grounds. On Sunday, a steady stream of festivalgoers stopped by for a lesson on how to administer the opioid reversal medication before walking away with plastic dispensers around their necks.
“The demographic that you get to reach at Lollapalooza are people from all walks of life,” said Travers-Hayward, 41, who founded the harm-reduction nonprofit This Must Be the Place in 2022. “But the common denominator here is everyone cares about people in a way they maybe didn’t before.”
Travers-Hayward said demand has been higher than ever this year, with her team distributing 4,000 doses by Friday night. So far, she’s heard from teenagers who administered naloxone to someone overdosing on the train ride home, and from attendees who returned to replace unused doses they picked up the year before.
Along with medical staff inside the fences, the volunteer safety organization Red Frogs has been at Lolla and keeping watch over young attendees as they exit for the first time this year.
And the attendees are looking to contribute themselves, said Ava Lange, as she huddled with a group of friends deciding which set to catch next. In one hand, she gripped a large green plastic bag, part of a sustainability program that rewards festivalgoers with a T-shirt for filling it with recyclables.
“At the end of the night on Thursday, we saw how dirty all the floors were, and then we saw people cleaning up with these bags,” said Lange, 19, who planned to fill her own bag after headliner Tate McRae’s set. “The people here actually care, and nowadays, you don’t see a lot of communities like that.”
By early Sunday afternoon, the program had already rewarded 16 T-shirts.
Along the curbs of Columbus Avenue, festivalgoers washed down steaming Polish sausages with cups of fresh passion fruit juice. Others filed into the line for the festival’s new Ferris wheel, hoping for a glimpse of the Chicago skyline.
Towards the festival’s main entrance, the Clark family debated where to grab lunch. They traveled from Ohio to see some of their favorite artists, relying on scheduled check-ins throughout the day so everyone could catch their favorite sets without losing track of one another.
“It’s fun to listen to different kinds of music that I wouldn’t be listening to just on my phone,” said Evie Clark, 13. Lorde’s Thursday night performance was the sisters’ favorite set of the weekend, and both were counting down to McRae’s closing act Sunday night.
“Going with family is something that you can’t forget,” said Hadley Clark, 16.
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