Over the weekend I found myself back in my hometown at Redondo Beach, California’s BeachLife Festival, a place where no one uttered the words “Kendrick” or “Drake” or “Beef.”
No, at BeachLife Festival, it’s all about chillin’ the hell out, man. Like Napa Valley’s Bottlerock and Long Beach’s Smoking Grooves, they’ve put the festival’s overall vibe in the title itself. You go to BeachLife to watch Sugar Ray and Steel Pulse while literally digging your toes into the sand; later on you see headliner Incubus open a song with the words “I dig my toes into the sand.” It’s a party, sure, but a muted one — you can’t mosh in flip-flops, after all.
Now in its fifth year, BeachLife has definitely leveled up since their inaugural 2019 lineup. What started as a Boomer-adjacent nostalgia fest (with a small sprinkling of Gen-X offerings) has aimed younger and younger every year; now, there’s still plenty for beach-dwelling retirees (ZZ Top, Sting, DEVO), but it’s mostly for Gen-X and older Millennial Angelenos who grew up on KROQ and have a soft spot for reggae, ska, folk, and other strands of rock’n’roll.
While the last two years of BeachLife featured a larger pivot to modern radio rock, the 2024 lineup was way more focused on great indie acts from 10 years ago: Fleet Foxes, Local Natives, Courtney Barnett, Surfer Blood, City & Colour, and Santigold were just some of the names gracing the poster this year, amidst SoCal mainstays like Pepper, the Dirty Heads, the Expendables, and the late Taylor Hawkins’ hard rock cover band, Chevy Metal.
Let’s get the unfortunate bits out of the way — just before 5:30pm on Sunday, when Fleet Foxes were minutes away from taking the stage and ZZ Top were literally in the middle of playing “La Grange,” organizers announced that the high winds were getting dangerous, and we were told to evacuate. They mentioned that it would just be for an hour and we’d then be allowed to come back in, but after an hour and 15 minutes, the festival canceled the rest of the day.
