Earlier this week, Uproxx recapped the best surprise performances from Weekend 1 of Coachella 2024. Grimes took the stage at Sahara on Saturday, April 13, and her set was also full of surprises — just not in a good way.
What Happened During Grimes’ Coachella 2024 Set?
According to Variety‘s Jem Aswad, nothing was amiss during the first half of Grimes’ set, but “things began breaking down during the second.” Aswad relayed, “She tried explaining the problems had to do with the programming of the tracks on her mixing desk, but her frustration was evident and she shouted and shrieked into the mic as things broke down several times. But by even the most charitable metric, it was a disaster.”
Early Sunday morning, April 14, Grimes posted an extremely long explanation of her “technical issues” on X (formerly Twitter), as seen below:
“I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself – to save time this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm’s and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc.
I had a bad feeling beforehand not having run everything thru the cdjs myself and tho I flagged it I wasn’t insistent. the big lesson for me was a mix of 1 if u want it done right, do it yrself 2 be a c*nt even if ppl feel bad 3 probably pretend it’s fine and engage w the crowd rather than spend a whole show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when ur meant to be entertaining.
I will personally organize all the files next week. I will not let such a thing happen again.
I’ve spent months on this show, making music and visuals, and admittedly am not in the best mood atm
But, yeh – next week will be flawless, everything will run thru my hands. Some good lessons learned. Bless y’all. The cdjs were showing me bpms like 370 so I couldn’t even mix manually by ear and the front monitors were off so it was literally sonic chaos on my end trying to guess how stuff was sounding for u guys
Plz forgive me! Love, always.”
I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself – to save time this was one of the first times I've outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm's and letting…
— 𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ (@Grimezsz) April 14, 2024
As Grimes said, there will be a chance at redemption at Coachella 2024 Weekend 2. Coachella revealed the full schedule of set times, and Grimes will be in the same slot: 7:10 p.m. PST at Sahara.