Christan Wood and her daughter Addison Wood, 18, pose for a photo at ACL Fest in Zilker Park on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
Austin City Limits Music Festival marks its 25th anniversary this year.
It’s also the first-ever ACL Fest where Gen Z — a forlorn collective of weirdly traditional, brazenly thorny and generally broke youngsters — gets to wander Zilker Park reliving its coming of age.
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Congrats my children, you are officially old enough to have your teen angst sold back to you via a $390 wristband. Like Quiet Riot touring without its original members Harlem Globetrotters-style, this will continue for the rest of your life.
Monsters of the 2010s dominate
Lorde performs at the 2014 Austin City Limits music festival on Sun., Oct. 12, 2014 at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas.
Ashley Landis/American-Statesman
Monsters of the 2010s headline the 2026 iteration of the Austin City Limits Festival. Lorde achieved pop stardom in 2013. Then there’s Charli XCX (2014), Rebecca Black (2011), Kings of Leon (2008), the xx (2009), the Chainsmokers (2016), Lykke Li (2007), Twenty One Pilots (2013), Steve Aoki (2012), Skrillex (2010) and Bleachers (2014).
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Fans dance as Bleachers performs on the Ladybird stage during day one of weekend two of ACL on Friday, Oct. 8, 2021.
Mikala Compton/American-Statesman
All of these people achieved success before COVID. The War On Drugs, the “divorced dad who Hamburger Helpers his way through the week” rock band for sad old guys, hit your Tumblr feed in 2011.
It’s not just the ACL lineup.
Western pop culture periscopes in 20-year cycles, and here we are fondly pining for digital cameras, compact discs and frosted tips. We fly Frontier to Vegas to watch the Backstreet Boys’ Sphere residency. We karaoke Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” at Ego’s — it was released in 2004 and crossed into monoculture as the theme song from MTV’s “The Hills.” (Gen Z knows it from TikTok.) She’s likewise playing ACL.
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Something else is happening, too. Blame the accelerationist nature of internet culture, where trends blossom and fade at the breakneck pace of a good Zelle scam, but stuff from 2016 is trending.
Taco Bell has a 2016 throwback menu. Macklemore is making headlines. Taylor Swift, Drake and Bruno Mars continue to own the charts. Barack Obama is still recommending books on social media. The former president? Same dude.
Who is ACL Fest 2026 really for?
Rebecca Black performs as she opens for Katy Perry’s ‘The Lifetimes Tour’ at the Moody Center Tuesday, May 20, 2025.
Mikala Compton/American-Statesman
The music offering this year chiefly caters to the Harambe generation: people born in the ‘90s, be it young millennials or elder Gen Z. The official generation cutoff is 1997, per the Pew Research Center.
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If you were born after 1991, you never recovered from Harambe, a Midwestern gorilla who achieved internet stardom after a child fell into his enclosure. Before the worst could happen, Cincinnati zookeepers had no choice but to end his life.
It was a national story that captured American hearts. Young people processed the tragedy differently. Online, he became an enduring symbol of hope and freedom, his likeness adorning countless memes.
I was born in 1985. Which means I had a business casual desk job in 2011 when Rebecca Black’s “Friday” was Microsoft Outlook’ed company-wide. The “so bad it’s jaw-droppingly captivating,” Auto-Tune-heavy YouTube video exploited a 13-year-old’s enthusiasm for creativity with low-grade, DIY production.
It was a paradigm shift. Nineties babies, the Harambes, grew up under the gun of virality.
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Fame before YouTube required industry gatekeeping. Suddenly, “Damn, Daniel,” a silly catchphrase between high schoolers uploaded to social media, put you on daytime talk show couches.
Life online warped reality. And now young people who grew up with Snapchat scandals, forever beholden to food delivery apps and makeup tutorials, have their day at Zilker. Here’s why that’s a problem.
Gen X loses as rich kids move in
Ryan Kelley of Los Angeles jumps for a photo at the Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park on Saturday October 7, 2023.
Jay Janner/American-Statesman
ACL Fest has recently leaned into pop forecasting with impeccable timing. It books rising names such as Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, Benson Boone and Chappell Roan in May; those bets turn into massive crowds come October.
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But this year, with the exception of shirtless ‘90s rockers Live, programmers have effectively boxed out anyone with an Academy camping chair.
Pearl Jam. Radiohead. Guns N’ Roses. Beck, OutKast. Those Gen-Xers played their nostalgia sets way back in 2014. We don’t want you pulling a Lionel Richie on the Beatbox stage, Marcus Mumford. Move it along.
There are no rap or country headliners at ACL, which means there are fewer blue-collar stories being told onstage.
Buzzy, twangy, country-adjacent pop star Stella Lefty is playing. Her dad is a billionaire.
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ACL belongs to the rich kids now. The lineup caters chiefly to aspirational content creators who project our city as a playland — where wealthy white people backflip off party barges.
This is not to be confused with the Carhartt-sporting rich kids who pretend to be working-class (because they have roommates). The 2026 iteration of the pop festival clearly targets the rich kids who work at Meta and mod Discords dedicated to day trading. They aspire to marry at 27 so they can make TikToks about grilling. They use words like “respectful” as it pertains to your outfit and tone. They join run clubs and tout sobriety while having dance parties at coffee shops.
Under the shadow of Willie Nelson, Austin’s whole deal since the ’60s has been about embracing outsiders and hanging out. Today, live music is being supplanted in cultural influence by autonomous taxis. For locals in their 20s, lining up at the Rolex store in the Domain for a watch drop is the new lining up at Waterloo Records for an in-store.
From 2021 to 2025, my office was at a downtown WeWork. When I’d ask young people around the co-working space who they were excited to watch at ACL, one common answer became king: “I’m mostly going for the vibes.”
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Let’s just hope the vibrations are good then — because some of the music sure isn’t.
Ramon Ramirez is a native Austinite and a regular Statesman contributor who has covered ACL Festival for the paper for 13 years.
A 2026 ACL Festival nostalgia playlist
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Twenty One Pilots – “Ride”
Rebecca Black – “Friday”
Bleachers – “Rollercoaster”
Kings Of Leon – “Use Somebody”
The Chainsmokers – “Closer”
Steve Aoki – “Pursuit Of Happiness (Extended Steve Aoki remix)”
Skrillex – “Kyoto”
Sofi Tukker – “Purple Hat”
Charli XCX – “Grins”
Rufus Du Sol – “Until the Sun Needs To Rise”
Cannons – “Fire For You”
Parcels – “Tieduprightnow”
Natasha Bedingfield – “Unwritten”
Romy (of the XX) – “Lifetime”
The XX – “Waited All Night”
Lykke Li – “No Rest For the Wicked”
Lorde – “Perfect Places”
Blood Orange – “Charcoal Baby”
Kings Of Leon – “Sex On Fire”
The War On Drugs – “Strangest Thing”