Just Like Heaven 2026: Ninety-Five Degrees, Twenty Years of Nostalgia, and a Disco Ball Shaped Like a Leg

Goldenvoice’s sixth Pasadena edition put The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem on the same field, hid a full-blown dance party in the corner, and dared you to leave before curfew

Written by Eric B. Thornton

The Orion Stage after dark, the San Gabriel foothills standing in for a light rig. Photo by @jbajsel for Just Like Heaven

Last Saturday, Pasadena got rocked with style.

The indie-leaning cousin in the Goldenvoice family, Just Like Heaven festival, pulled tens of thousands of people onto the grass at Brookside at the Rose Bowl, the enormous stretch of golf course that wraps around the stadium. It was mid-nineties by early afternoon and it stayed that way for hours. Staff worked the lines handing out water. Misters ran nonstop. People came anyway, because The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem were playing the same field on the same night, and that is not a thing you skip over a weather app.

This was the festival’s sixth edition and my first time covering it, and I have to say: it’s one of the chillest festivals in LA. Not in a weather sense. Obviously.

A quick bit of history, because it matters to how the day feels. Just Like Heaven debuted in 2019 at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, built almost entirely around the idea that the blog-rock era deserved its own reunion. It landed at Brookside in 2022 and hasn’t left. This year it also slid out of its usual May slot into late August, hence the heat.

MINI-CHELLA

Let’s start with the vibe, because the vibe is the pitch.

Goldenvoice also runs Coachella, and you feel that lineage about eleven seconds after you walk in. Wide, spaced-out lawn. Scattered canopies. Fans flat on their backs in the shade, shoes off, taking a breather. The design language is unmistakable — same fencing, same VIP geometry, same font on the wayfinding. At one point a small dust devil kicked up across a patch of dry grass and I genuinely had an Indio flashback.

*The pond at Brookside became the day’s unofficial third stage: blankets, shade, and a slow crawl toward sunset. Photo: J. Mulka / Just Like Heaven*

Come through the gates and the first thing you hit is the Stardust Stage, the smaller of the two. The main stage, Orion, is nowhere in sight. It turns out it’s parked way at the back of the site, a real walk away, past the pond, past the vintage market, past the kids’ area where marionettes performed to an audience of very confused toddlers.

That walk is the best part of the layout. There’s a decorated lake ringed with people on striped blankets. There are art installations. There are activations you’ll actually stop at. And somewhere along the way you catch a thump of low end coming from a corner you can’t quite see yet, which — hold that thought. Even at more than half the size of its famous sister, the place felt full by mid-afternoon. Nobody wanted to miss the early bill: Matt and Kim, STRFKR, Tanlines, and Dayglow to name a few.

A parasol at the rail, the San Gabriels behind, and a whole crowd doing the math on shade. Photo: @jbajsel / Just Like Heaven

I wasn’t the only one making the comparison. Hours later, from the Orion stage, Julian Casablancas said it out loud: “This is better than Coachella.” Then he laughed at himself, and the crowd laughed with him in agreement.

“This is better than Coachella.”

Julian Casablancas, onstage

THE MUSIC

Two stages, twenty acts, zero real overlap headaches. Goldenvoice built the schedule so you could actually see everything you cared about, which is rarer than it should be.

Matt and Kim did what Matt and Kim have done for close to twenty years: turned a field into a block party. Matt Johnson spent most of the set standing on his keyboard rig, playing it upside down, doing something to his spine that I’d like a doctor to review. Kim Schifino never stopped grinning. It was mid-afternoon and 95 degrees and the front forty rows jumped anyway.

*Matt Johnson of Matt and Kim, defying both gravity and the heat index. Photo: Ashley Osborn / Just Like Heaven*

Dayglow pulled one of the biggest daytime crowds of the festival, Sloan Struble grinning through a clear acrylic Strat in front of a backdrop of oversized stickers — a cow, a globe, a peace sign. It’s bedroom pop scaled up to stadium proportions, and it works far better in daylight than it has any right to.

*Dayglow’s sticker-sheet backdrop and a sea of parasols on the Orion lawn. Photo: Ismael Quintanilla III / Just Like Heaven*

*Sloan Struble of Dayglow, clear acrylic Strat and all. Photo: J. Mulka / Just Like Heaven*

But the loudest crowd of the afternoon belonged to TV Girl, and honestly, the most fascinating story on the whole flyer. A band that built a stadium-sized audience on streaming and word of mouth, with essentially no radio, playing to a wall of raised phones and a crowd that knew every syllable of every hazy, sample-stitched song. Halfway through, George Clanton, who’d played his own set earlier in the day, came out for “Summer 2000 Baby,” their collaboration, and proceeded to dump a bottle of water over the head of TV Girl’s Brad Petering while they traded vocals nose to nose.

*George Clanton (right) guests during TV Girl’s set for “Summer 2000 Baby.” Photo: J. Mulka / Just Like Heaven*

*Phones up for TV Girl, the sound of a fanbase built entirely outside the old machinery. Photo: J. Mulka / Just Like Heaven*

Then the day turned. Feist took the Stardust Stage at 5:45 as the light started to go soft, and did the thing only she can do: hush a field full of sweaty people into paying attention. A set built on restraint in the middle of a day built on volume, and it landed.

The Rapture followed at 7:05, and if you want to point at the exact seam where indie rock and the dancefloor got stitched together, this is it. Dance-punk in the last of the daylight, cowbell ricocheting off the foothills, a crowd that had been conserving energy all afternoon finally spending it. That set flipped the switch on the whole evening.

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, mid-sermon on the Orion Stage. Photo: Ashley Osborn / Just Like Heaven

And right as golden hour hit, LCD Soundsystem opened Orion with “Tonite” under a giant mirror ball.

LCD Soundsystem live is its own kind of event. Murphy sings like he’s thinking out loud, and somehow it lands bigger in an open field than it ever does through a pair of headphones. “Tribulations” and “I Can Change” had the crowd moving before the sky finished going dark. “Losing My Edge” turned into a full singalong, thousands of people shouting a twenty-year-old list of band names back at the stage. Every song felt like it was building toward something instead of just filling a slot, the band tight and in no hurry. By the closers, “Dance Yrself Clean” and “All My Friends,” the whole field had become one moving crowd, and the set was over long before anyone was ready for it to be.

LCD Soundsystem, one very large mirror ball, and the last blue minute of the day. Photo: Ashley Osborn / Just Like Heaven

Chromeo took Stardust at 8:55 for the day’s slickest set. Dave 1 in a glitter blazer working the lip of the stage, P-Thugg behind him, the pair of chrome mannequin-leg keyboard stands catching every laser in the county. Twenty-plus years in, funk-lectro’s finest ambassadors remain undefeated at making a crowd move. I agree when he said they are the best Arab and Jewish band around. Music does unite.

Dave 1 and P-Thugg of Chromeo, with the famous chrome legs doing their thing. Photo: Yasi / Just Like Heaven

THE HIDDEN DANCEFLOOR

Now, back to that low end.

The unofficial third stage, the one that isn’t really on the site map, was A Club Called Rhonda, tucked into a corner of the grounds under a big white circular canopy. You won’t find it by looking. You’ll find it because the bass reaches you somewhere between the pond and the porta-potties and your feet make the decision before you do.

If you don’t know Rhonda: it started in 2008 as a monthly party in Silver Lake, thrown by Gregory Alexander and Loren Granic, who DJs as Goddollars. The premise was simple and quietly radical, a single room where their gay friends and their straight friends could actually be in the same place, dancing to the same records. Nearly two decades later the pansexual party is a genuine LA institution that has outlasted most of the rooms it lived in.

At the center of the tent, hanging from the apex of the canopy, was a mirrored figure, a disco ball in the shape of a body, all leg and hip, throwing shards of light across the crowd in every direction. It’s the single best piece of production design at the festival, and it’s in a tent that most of the people on site walked right past.

Rhonda’s mirrored disco figure, hanging dead center over the tent. Photo: Gabe Tiano / Just Like Heaven

The programming was no joke either. Junior Sanchez, the New Jersey house veteran who now runs Brobot Records, worked the decks against the tail end of the headliner sets, alongside Tommie Sunshine, Myd, and Rhonda’s own Goddollars, among others. Nobody on that checkered floor seemed to mind trading a headliner for a proper dancefloor. That’s the thing about Rhonda at a rock festival. It isn’t a novelty booking. It’s a functioning club dropped into a field, and it changes what the day is.

THE STROKES

Everyone knew what they came for. The New York legends took Orion about ten minutes past their 9:40 call, and you could feel the crowd’s patience getting thin right up until the lights dropped. Then it didn’t matter.

They opened with “Lonely in the Future,” one of four cuts they pulled from Reality Awaits, their first album in six years, produced by Rick Rubin and released in June. From there they spent the next hour dealing hits off the top of the deck. “Hard to Explain.” “Juicebox.” “Someday.” “Reptilia.” “Automatic Stop.” “The Adults Are Talking.” When “You Only Live Once” landed, the entire field sang the whole thing back, and when the song ended, Casablancas compliment the crowd on it.

But the best part of a Strokes show in 2026 is the space between the songs.

Casablancas was loose, chatty, and completely unbothered. He greeted the crowd in Japanese, the band having just played Summer Sonic in Japan the week before, then wandered through a run of anecdotes about the trip and several things that had nothing to do with Japan at all, including a good-natured dig at James Murphy for un-retiring LCD Soundsystem and touring harder than anyone.

There’s something strange and great about all of it: the guy meandering into a microphone about nothing in particular is the same guy who, four minutes later, has an entire golf course in his palm. You will never see the same Strokes show twice, and the reason isn’t the setlist.

They came back for an encore and played “Going to Babble On” live for the first time ever, then closed on “Selfless” just past eleven. Nobody moved for a while after.

SEE YOU IN THE FIELD

Six editions in, Just Like Heaven has stopped being a nostalgia gimmick and turned into something more useful: a one-day argument that the early-aughts indie canon is still load-bearing. The August move is the one open question. The heat was real, and staff earned their keep keeping people watered and upright. But the trade-off, a proper twilight, a night that runs past eleven, golden hour landing exactly on LCD Soundsystem, is hard to argue with. Get the shade right next year and it’s a fair deal.

And Goldenvoice isn’t done with this patch of grass. On November 7, Moby headlines Brookside alongside Underworld, with Fcukers, Nia Archives, and DJ Holographic, one of only two Moby shows on this continent right now. If Rhonda’s corner tent was the best-kept secret of August, November is Goldenvoice saying the quiet part out loud: this field is a dancefloor now.

See you out there. Bring water.