The thing about Portola that’s emerged over the festival’s three years of existence is that if you’re there, you feel like you’re in on the joke. And everyone likes being in on the joke.
Through its stylish and legit funny social channels and wry on-site messaging (“we know that music feeds your soul or whatever, but please remember to eat some actual food” implored signage), the event has developed a trait that can often feel scarce at big festivals: actual personality. Portola is your dryly funny and sort of silly, but also extremely intelligent friend with low-key style and impeccable taste in music.
“This is a festival where it’s not about spectacle, it’s about vibe,” Portola founder Danny Bell told Billboard onsite at the fest.
This appealing amalgamation of traits brought roughly 45,000 attendees a day and a motherlode of artists to third edition of Portola, which took over San Francisco’s Pier 80 this past weekend, Sept 28-29. Primarily presenting the styles of electronic music commonly grouped together as indie or alt or just non-EDM, the lineup gathered some of the scene’s biggest, buzziest and most respected artists for a show that also, like in years past, featured a powdered sugar sprinkling of pop (in the form of Rebecca Black, Natasaha Bedingfield, etc.) and a bit of hip hop.
But the emphasis was dance music, with the stature the Goldenvoice-produced festival has gained over its three years of existence emphasized by the fact that people are now flying in for it from across the U.S., Australia and Europe. Rüfüs du Sol played their only set of the year, debuting new music from their comign album and playing the hits for one of the weekend’s biggest crowds. On the mainstage, Disclosure reminded everyone that they’re simply, consistently the best, playing many of their biggest songs, bringing out a brass section for the feel-good “Tondo,” closing with the classic Flume remix of “You & Me” and giving each other a big old brotherly hug at the end. Two more of the many (many) Brits on the lineup, Chase & Status played a satisfying, tough as nails set that included their new hits (“Disconnect,” “Baddadan”) and classics like their 2008 “Eastern Jam.” (“This is for my original Chase & Status fans,” the pair’s Will Kennard announced before dropping the track.)
While often overlooked on the global circuit, San Francisco has a rich and mighty electronic history, and certainly the many locals in attendance demonstrated that the Bay Area parties hard, and also well: the crowd was loose but from our vantage point never out of control, stylish in mostly non-cliché ways and generally friendly, with none of the too cool (or too self aware) atmosphere that elsewhere can, and does, stifle the dancing.
“It’s a work hard play hard town,” says Bell. “When people here come to play, they’re out just to have a good time; there’s no agenda.”
The weather was also classically San Franciscan, with each day’s morning fog burning off for sunshine daydream afternoons that maintained enough of a chill that many attendees who didn’t bring layers were spotted buying hoodies from the merch stand. The site, an actual working shipping pier, created a built-in industrial aesthetic, with the looming crane and hulking naval ship doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of decor. The vessel even blew its horn daily, to wide applause.
These are ten of the best things we saw over the weekend.
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Jesse Ware Takes a Victory Lap
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice The U.K. underground dance goddess whipped up a church disco revival on Saturday afternoon, when her rendition of Cher’s “Believe” brought attendees literally running towards her performance on the Pier Stage, the biggest stage at Portola. Draped in gold sequins and feathers, Ware got offstage and danced her way through the audience while singing the classic, emerging from the masses clutching a bouquet of flowers and wearing a big smile. She then burned the figurative house down with a spirited, show-closing, nearly but not quite campy rendition of her 2023 disco pop joyride “Don’t Stop.”
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No One Does It Like Gesaffelstein
Call him the dark prince of electronic music or call him a petite French man in a tailored suit and shimmering mask that totally obscures his face, Gesaffelstein blew minds in his characteristic fashion with a Saturday night show on the Crane Stage.
This performance was roughly the same as the one he put on at Coachella in April, and that was absolutely fine, with the weight, power, hardness and absolute velocity of the set eliciting hard dancing from the crowd, who’d navigated a brutal set clash between the artist and Four Tet, who was simultaneously playing over in the Warehouse. Outside of Gesaffelstein’s 2013 classic “Hellifornia” and his 2024 “Hard Dreams” (from his March album, Gamma), the show was marked by not only the heaviness and The Dark Crystal meets Fraggle Rock look of the stage set up, but also an almost total absence of melody, with the artist instead delivering relentless, often jerking and increasingly loud drums and synths in deliciously pummeling fashion.
It was the kind of set that, for example, the total stranger you were standing next to during the show offered a handshake after to acknowledge the gravity of the shared experience. One likes to imagine that under that mask, the artist might have been smiling a bit about it all, too.
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Reusable Cups Made the Fest Much (Like, Much!) Cleaner
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice At the end of most any festival, the ground is littered with plastic cups emptied of their beer or cocktails and tossed onto the ground. Most of these cups end up in landfills. Not at Portola! 2024 marked the second year that the festival swapped out these plastic cups for the reusable r.Cup, which attendees could drop into a special bin after use for cleaning and eventual reuse. (Cups were also picked up by a dedicated crew during the fest.)
The cups are good for 300 uses and are already at more than 200 venues across the U.S., with the general tidiness they fostered at Portola adding to the ambience.
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Natash Bedingfield Forever. And Also For 15 Glorious Minutes.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice “The fun thing with this festival is that it’s gotta be just enough unhinged,” Portola founder Danny Bell, the SVP Talent Buyer for Goldenvoice in San Francisco, told Billboard onsite at the fest. “I’d say it’s dance music focused, and then you can go wherever from there. This audience loves pop and big songs too.”
That was abundantly clear when noughties chart queen Natasha Bedingfield performed a tight 15 minute set on the Crane Stage Saturday evening. A packed crowd assembled to see the artist — wearing heels and an animal print body suit — sing her four biggest hits, “Love Like This,” “Pocketful of Sunshine,” “These Words” and the performance closing “Unwritten,” an all-time anthem celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
“I got a call from their team asking if we’d be interested,” Bell said of how the performance came together. “They said ‘I’ve got a crazy idea for you; this might sound nuts, but I think Natasha doing her four hits at Portola would rip.’ I was like, ‘Heck yeah it would.’ It was that simple.”
Bedingfield wasn’t on the original lineup, with the team teasing her appearance on the Portola social channels in the weeks prior to the show. A September “2024 mood board” roundup of images featured a photo of “the rest is still unwritten” written in mustard on a hot dog. A video of a rat dancing in the rain soundtracked by “Unwritten” posted to the festival’s socials got 10 million views on TikTok. When the fest released its merch earlier this month, Bedingfield’s name was on it, and when set times were posted with the caption “please see your updated set times,” the only change was her addition.
“This is a very millennial crowd, they all grew up on Natasha, and ‘Unwritten’ is such a heater,” says Bell, who says the set falls in the tradition of Portola previously hosting pop queens like Nelly Furtado and Charli XCX.
“We knew it was going to be really fun moment for the fans. You’re at an electronic set and you get to see all these great shows, then in the middle of it you get to go have a singalong with your friends to Natasha Bedingfield for 15 minutes. It’s just fun being with your friends at a festival and getting to sing to one of the classic pop songs of the last 20 years. And she’s so lovely. It was just a big team win all around.”
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We Gon Jump If A.G. Made It
The British producer was pure art-school aesthetic during his Saturday night set, which found him playing tracks from his 2024 album Britpop while wearing a crewneck sweatshirt with “POP” embroidered across it. Cook of course also played selections from his work with Charli XCX, with his “Von Dutch” and “Mean Girls” edits drawing extra loud cheers.
Like much in the hyperpop genre — which Cook is credited with co-founding — a lot of what he played wasn’t necessarily immediately pleasing to the ears, with the bright, tinny, ASMR-tingly sounds challenging the ears and brain a bit before building into moments of release where what he’d been constructing the whole time became clear. A special shoutout as well to the engineer with the mustache back by the soundboard who was playing the bright, poppy visuals in tandem with the music.
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Nia Archives Reps Jungle
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice Wearing a Union Jack T-shirt that repped not only her native country but also the country of origin of the genre she rides for, Nia Archives played a set of impeccably constructed jungle, onto which she layered her own shimmering vocals. While the genre is still relatively niche in the U.S., the 25-year-old Archives is doing a lot to spread the sound to American ears, and the packed crowd was very much into it on Saturday night, with stank faces aplenty observed during her show.
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All Killer, No Filler with Braxe, Falcon & Busy P
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice Coming hot off their performances at the Paris 2024 Paralympics Games, French legends Braxe & Falcon and Busy P had a blast alongside their devoted crowd at their Sunday afternoon b2b2b. On the bill alongside their friends and fellow Frenchmen Justice and Gesaffelstein, the trio ripped through French Touch classics like Braxe and The Paradise’s “In Love With You,” played a take on Skrillex’s “Ratata” and generously dropped Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” which naturally sent many hands into the air.
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LP Giobbi Ascends On the Mainstage
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice Playing Sunday afternoon, the Oregon-born producer dropped the Robin S “Show Me Love” and Radiohead “Everything In Its Right Place,” remix we didn’t know we needed, along with loads of swirling house — including some from her forthcoming album, Dotr. The dedicated Deadhead looked to be having as much if not more fun than the massive crowd she was playing for on the mainstage, grooving along and generally emitting extremely feel-good vibes, including the moment she came out in front of the decks to applaud the audience who’d come to see her.
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Jamie xx Heats It Up
The British producer drew what, to the naked eye, looked like one of the biggest crowds of the weekend for his Saturday night show on the Pier stage. But for as big as the set was, Jamie xx and his team smartly created a feeling of intimacy through the camera work, which during the show alternated between hypnotic crowd shots and live footage of a single female dancer.
Staying trained on her for the entirety of the show without ever revealing her face, the effect was one of dancefloor closeness, with the scene evoking the packed/sweaty intimacy of The Floor, the series of club nights Jamie xx recently hosted in London, New York and Los Angeles ahead of the release of his second album, In Waves. Music from this new project naturally factored in heavily during the set, with Jamie saving heaters like the Robyn collab “Life,” the new classic “Baddies on the Floor” and the Avalanches collab “All You Children” for the close, which saw members of the audience ripping off layers of clothing as they worked up a sweat, despite the chilly wind. The show closed with Jamie’s 2015 classic “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” which remains as prescient as ever.
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Justice Is Served
Image Credit: Courtesy of Goldenvoice C’mon. Just when you thought these guys couldn’t get any better, they take the shimmering mirrorball of a show they debuted at Coachella in April and deliver a louder, longer and more aggressive version of it. Indeed, the new-ish Justice show has evolved over the last five months as the French duo has toured Europe, the U.S. and Mexico, with new bits including an expanded, red-light-bathed take on their 2007 classic “Stress,” and bits of their classics smartly woven into soaring to the point of ecstasic live productions. Also, Xavier and Gaspard wore new outfits, with the pair swaddled in gold lame and sequins that shimmered like the dazzling lights around them.
