Festival season is in full swing, and Redondo Beach is calling.
Let’s be real: if you spent the last two weekends either surviving Coachella or glued to the livestream from your couch, which is basically Coachella for people with good taste and rent money, you probably need a palette cleanser. Something a little less Empire Polo Club, a little more Pacific Ocean. Something that doesn’t require you to pre-game in a parking lot four miles from the actual festival just to claim a square foot of real estate in front of the main stage.
Enter BeachLife Festival, now heading into its seventh year, returning to the Redondo Beach waterfront May 1–3, 2026. We covered it last year, where Lenny Kravitz, Alanis Morissette, and Sublime kept the 35,000-strong crowd locked in, the Beach Boys jammed with John Stamos in tow (yes, that actually happened, and yes, it was as gloriously unhinged as it sounds). The compact waterfront scale of the whole thing made it feel less like a festival and more like the best neighborhood block party you’ve ever accidentally stumbled into.
This year’s lineup leans harder into legacy, Duran Duran, The Offspring, James Taylor and His All-Star Band, headlines the three day music festival that will make the weekend genuinely interesting beyond pure nostalgia. And beyond the four main stages, there’s a fifth experience worth knowing about before you build your schedule: the SpeakEasy Stage, presented by STōK Cold Brew Coffee, conceived by BeachLife Creative Director and Pennywise frontman Jim Lindberg as an intimate, stripped-down space where South Bay punk royalty performs reimagined acoustic sets, and where a popup art gallery from the Punk Rock & Paintbrushes collective (featuring works from Chad Smith, Chali 2na, Jackie Wasserman, and others) runs alongside it all weekend. That’s a very FRANK151 corner of the festival, and we’ll get to it.
Whether you’re driving down from LA for a single day or committing to the full three, here are the eight acts you need to be standing in front of.
DURAN DURAN — Friday, May 1
Before MTV became a reality television network that occasionally remembered it once played music, there were music videos, and Duran Duran essentially wrote the rulebook for what that format could be. The Birmingham quintet didn’t just record songs; they built cinematic worlds around them, frame by frame, at a time when most bands were still pointing a camera at themselves in a rehearsal room and calling it a day. “Rio,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Come Undone,” “Ordinary World“, the catalog is so deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of the 1980s that you’ve almost certainly heard their songs in a context you’ve long since forgotten about. Headlining Friday night, this is the kind of nostalgia act that actually earns the word legendary, because the songs hold up without the asterisk. Generation X is going to flood Redondo Beach for this one, which means Friday’s crowd will be, frankly, one of the more entertaining things to watch all weekend.
THE CHAINSMOKERS — Friday, May 1
Performing in the slot directly before Duran Duran, which is either inspired counter-programming or a very pointed scheduling joke (probably both). The New York City electronic duo of Alex Pall and Andrew Taggart broke through with their 2014 track “#SELFIE”, a song that was simultaneously maddening, inescapable, and weirdly self-aware, before pivoting into genuine mainstream crossover territory with “Something Just Like This,” their 2017 collaboration with Coldplay that you have definitely heard at a wedding. The Millennial and Gen Z contingent showing up early for The Chainsmokers will stick around for Duran Duran and quietly be amazed. The Gen X contingent arriving for Duran Duran will reluctantly start moving during The Chainsmokers set and absolutely refuse to admit it. Everyone wins.
MIKE WATT — Saturday, May 2 — SpeakEasy Stage
Here’s the one for the people paying attention. Mike Watt isn’t playing the main stage, he’s playing the SpeakEasy Stage, the intimate stripped-down acoustic room that Pennywise frontman and BeachLife Creative Director Jim Lindberg specifically built to honor the South Bay’s punk lineage. And that context matters enormously, because Watt is the lineage. The San Pedro co-founder of the Minutemen , one of the most singular and politically alive bands to ever come out of Southern California, represents exactly the DIY spirit that Lindberg was trying to preserve when he created the SpeakEasy in the first place.
THE OFFSPRING — Saturday, May 2
Before they were selling out arenas worldwide and racking up one of the best-selling punk catalogs in history, Dexter Holland and Noodles were skate-punk kids from Garden Grove, which feels contextually perfect for a festival held on a beach thirty miles up the coast. Headlining Saturday, their setlist will cover enough ground to feel like a full guided tour of 1990s adolescent rebellion: “Come Out and Play,” “Self Esteem,” “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” and “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)“. Saturday’s Redondo Beach is going to feel like a genuine South Bay punk homecoming in the best possible way.
JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS — Saturday, May 2
Some people use the word icon so loosely it loses all shape. Joan Jett actually earned it the hard way, repeatedly, over decades. The co-founder of the Runaways at sixteen, the architect of “Bad Reputation” and “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” before most artists find their footing, Jett has built a career on a deceptively simple principle: play hard, don’t apologize, and never let anyone tell you who you’re supposed to be. Some legacies deserve to be witnessed live. This is one of them.
SLIGHTLY STOOPID — Saturday, May 2
The Ocean Beach, San Diego duo of Miles Doughty and Kyle McDonald have been making their particular strain of reggae-punk-hip-hop fusion since they were teenagers, a fact made considerably more remarkable when you consider that they were discovered and personally signed by Sublime’s Bradley Nowell, who put out their debut album in 1996 on his own label before his death later that year. Nearly three decades on, they’ve built a self-sustaining orbit of deeply loyal fans who show up without being told twice.
SHERYL CROW — Sunday, May 3
Nine Grammy Awards. A catalog that spans “All I Wanna Do” to “If It Makes You Happy” to “Soak Up the Sun” delivered with a consistency that most of her contemporaries can only gesture toward from a distance. Crow’s career has survived genre shifts, industry upheaval, and the full collapse of the album era, but she’s still one of the most compelling live performers working in American rock. Her Sunday set at BeachLife is the kind of set that will make you feel, like you completely understand why you drove to Redondo Beach in the first place, and how the 90s was a rather peaceful time.
MY MORNING JACKET — Sunday, May 3
Jim James and company are one of those American rock bands that serious music people have loved for two decades while general audiences have been catching up at their own pace, and in a festival context, they tend to take up considerably more space than their billing suggests. Their catalog stretches from the cathedral reverb and gothic Americana of their early records through the more expansive, psychedelic rock they’ve settled into in recent years. Sunday afternoon on the Redondo Beach waterfront is close to the ideal setting for that.
BeachLife Festival runs May 1–3, 2026, at the Redondo Beach waterfront. The festival is all ages — children six and under are free with a ticketed adult — and doors open at noon each day. Single day passes start at $169; 3-day GA passes from $409. The SpeakEasy Stage, the Punk Rock & Paintbrushes art gallery, four main stages, acclaimed chef dining at the California Surf Club, and the full food and beverage program are all on-site.
Tickets and full details at beachlifefestival.com.
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