david byrne

Surprise! The 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival lineup is out and it’s topped by pop stars.

Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G will headline the twin weekends of the festival, which return to the Empire Polo Club in Indio April 10-12 and 17-19, 2026.

Other notable acts include elder statesmen such as Iggy Pop, David Byrne and Devo, rock acts including the Strokes and Turnstile, pop star Addison Rae, Laufey, EDM superstar Kaskade, rapper Young Thug and dozens of others.

The bottom of the festival poster also announces something called “The Bunker Debut of Radiohead Kid A Mnesia.” The British rock band Radiohead recently announced European tour dates.

Also at the bottom of the poster, which has become a place for the festival to announce special engagements, is the world premiere of Anyma’s “Æden.” Anyma, the project of producer and artist Matteo Miller, was the first electronic act to headline Sphere in Las Vegas.

At the top of the poster for Friday, listed between the XX and Disclosure is an act called Nine Inch Noize. German producer Boys Noize joined Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails’ on the band’s recent tour and also labeled a live collaboration as Nine Inch Noize System on Instagram.

Since its inception in 1999, Coachella has included a diverse range of musical styles, but also less-than-expected acts, such as the colorful monsters of the show Yo Gabba Gabba! and the L.A. Phil earlier this year. For 2026, another beloved L.A. institution is on the bill: Bob Baker Marionettes, of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, are listed on the poster for Friday.

Coachella has given a spotlight to some of the world’s biggest K-pop and J-pop acts in recent years and in 2026 acts including Bigbang, Fujii Kaze, and Taemin.

The 2026 edition is also a makeup show of sorts for FKA Twigs, who had to cancel her 2025 North American tour, including stops at Coachella, due to visa issues. Promoter Goldenvoice has traditionally released the festival’s lineup in January, three months or so before the event.

Tickets start at $649 for a three-day pass for Weekend 1 and $549 for Weekend 2. (If you buy a 4-pack of tickets you can save $10 per pass.) VIP passes for Weekend 1 start at $1,299 and are $1,199 for Weekend 2.

New for 2026 is a group camping option, which allows people who want to camp together to arrive at different times. There’s a 10-spot minimum and a 20-spot maximum. Each camping spot is $160.

Passes go on sale to the general public at 11 a.m. Pacific on Friday, Sept. 19 at www.coachella.com.

See the full Coachella 2026 lineup.

When an author decides to tackle the story of a popular and important band like Talking Heads, the contours of which are familiar to many of its fans, the remit should be to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that provide a more full-bodied narrative and ultimately bring the band into sharper relief than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has almost completely ignored this directive in “Burning Down the House,” his new Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, full of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that provide little illumination but plenty of needless bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and is not the biography that this great and important band deserves.

As fans of the Heads already know, three of the four members met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-’70s, children of privilege with artsy aspirations and not much direction. David Byrne came from Baltimore by way of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler in conceptualist experiments with photography and a veteran of various mediocre cover bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to join one such band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and the daughter of a decorated Navy vice admiral, played bass. They were an anti-jam band and pro-avant; the first decent song they came up with was a shambolic version of what became “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif in the song’s bridge.

For the emergent Heads, timing was everything. When Frantz signed the lease on a spacious loft on Chrystie Street in East Village in October 1974, he had unwittingly found the practice space where the three musicians would hone their craft. The loft was also a short walk to CBGB, soon to become the proving ground of New York’s punk revolution and the Heads’ primary live performance venue at the start of their career.

In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Kitchen, an arts collective space in Soho, and it showed them a new way to approach their music. Richman, “who dressed like a kid that everyone laughed at in high school,” influenced the band’s preppy visual template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Within a year of moving to the city, Talking Heads had found its look, sound and favored club. When Frantz bumped into Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks in a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired about keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s number, Harrison joined the band and the classic Talking Heads lineup was complete.

What followed was a contract with Seymour Stein’s label Sire and the band’s collaboration with producer Brian Eno, beginning with its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the time the band released 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain in Light,” Eno’s role had expanded beyond his production duties. He was now writing songs with Byrne, which created friction within the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged on songwriting credits (the album listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” rather than the individual band members), it created a rift that never healed, even as the band was selling millions of copies of its follow-up “Speaking in Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme concert film “Stop Making Sense.” The final act was recriminatory, as Byrne commanded an ever greater share of the spotlight while the other members quietly seethed. The band’s final album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Talking Heads dissolved in 1991, after Byrne removed himself from the lineup to explore outside projects.

Author Jonathan Gould

(Richard Edelman)

Gould does a serviceable job of telling the Heads’ story in a book that arrives 50 years after the band’s first gig at CBGB. Curiously, for someone who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s late ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards many of the key players in that scene with derision bordering on contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a prime architect of New York punk, as a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry.” Patti Smith’s music “verged on a parody of beat poetry,” while the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a band that made New York punk possible, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould is also careless with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s band displays a “willful lack” of commercial instinct, the Heads assert a “willful conventionality” to their stage appearance, Johnny Ramone is a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and so on.

It’s hard to fathom how a biographer intent on cracking the code of one of rock’s seminal bands can do so with so much contempt for the culture that spawned it. An inquiring fan might want to go to Will Hermes’ 2011 book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” for a more nuanced and knowledgeable portrait of the creative ferment that made the Heads possible. As for a biography of Talking Heads, we are still left with a lacuna that Gould has unfortunately not filled.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Fans of Talking Heads and David Byrne can rejoice, as the 73-year-old singer announced his first new album in seven years and tour.

The album “Who Is the Sky?” will hit streaming services and shelves on Sept. 5. Soon after, Byrne will kick off the North American leg of his tour, which features two shows in November at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. In 2026, he’ll touch down in New Zealand before moving on to Australia and Europe.

The 12-song album is led by the single “Everybody Laughs,” released Tuesday alongside a music video directed by multimedia artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo.

“Someone I know said, ‘David, you use the word “everybody” a lot.’ I suppose I do that to give an anthropological view of life in New York as we know it,” Byrne said in a press release.

“Everybody lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps and stares at the ceiling. Everybody’s wearing everybody else’s shoes, which not everybody does, but I have done. I tried to sing about these things that could be seen as negative in a way balanced by an uplifting feeling from the groove and the melody, especially at the end, when St. Vincent and I are doing a lot of hollering and singing together,” he added. “Music can do that — hold opposites simultaneously.”

New York-based ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra arranged the album. It also includes collaborations with the aforementioned St. Vincent, Hayley Williams, and the Smile drummer Tom Skinner. Byrne’s last album was 2018’s “American Utopia,” which eventually took the Broadway stage and in 2020 became a concert film directed by Spike Lee.

But it wasn’t a Byrne tour that fans were expecting.

Talking Heads, for which Byrne served as lead singer between 1975 and 1991, released a teaser on June 2, including their song “Psycho Killer.” Some even noticed that the date included in the short clip, June 5, is an important one in the band’s history.

“The band played their first gig as Talking Heads — opening for the Ramones at the CBGB club — on June 5, 1975,” one fan commented.

Instead of a tour announcement, fans received a music video for the song, highlighted by the appearance of Irish actor Saoirse Ronan.

“They waited until Saoirse Ronan was born to make the video,” another fan joked. “Very professional.”