Photos by Jake Hicks & North Coast Content Team

The Chicago music festival circuit is one that is internationally renowned, holding festivals such as Lollapalooza, Spring Awakening, and Riot Fest. These extraordinary large festivals sometimes block out Chicago’s true gems that should be sought out. One of those gems is North Coast Fest.

North Coast Music Festival returned to Chicago’s Union Park for its ninth annual installment over Labor Day Weekend. It is an event that takes great pride in its diverse lineup as well as it’s local cultural highlights. This years lineup included headliners Miguel and Axwell Λ Ingrosso on Friday, DJ Snake and the Revivalists on Saturday, and Jamiroquai and Yellow Claw to end the fest on Sunday. Below these headliners on the lineup we see performances from Smokepurpp, Juice Wrld, Lil Skies, Lil Xan, Comethazine, and many more rising hip hop stars. Along with these artists the showcase of local restaurants and visual performers was said to be in full force.

Day one started like most 3 day festivals, and was relatively empty. The main stages did not suffer noticeably, but the two smaller stages were barren throughout the day. Juice Wrld was the first act to generate your typical festival style hype, and Smokepurpp followed with the same. Almost immediately after Smokepurpp’s set concluded severe weather hit the festival hard, forcing organizers to cancel the rest of the day including the highly anticipated headliners

Day two started the same as the first with small crowds, and low energy. The day was already off to a rough start considering gates were delayed multiple hours due to Friday’s rainstorm. This bad energy started to change as night came and acts like Landon Cube and RL Grime got to play. The second day had a much more underground vibe as popular Chicago brand Lyrical Lemonade was responsible for partial lineup curation. This included artists like Lil Gnar and Comethazine with Lil Skies as its main highlight. Day two looked like it was going good and was on track to make up for the previous day’s disaster. Then tragedy struck again. Press was informed Lil Skies as well as Lil Xan both backed out of the festival for unspecified reasons. Soon following the festival was cancelled for the day again due to severe weather leaving the second round of headliners unable to perform.

There was a lot riding on the festivals final day after the mess of Friday and Saturday. The promoter did right by fans allowing those who had purchased single day tickets on the previous day entry into the final day of the fest. This very smart decision resulted in huge crowds, and lots of energy. After a full day of satisfying local act performances the festival closed with back to back sets from Moontaxi, Mura Mursa, Yellow Claw, and finally Jamiroqui.

Although severe weather forced the festival to cancel many acts on Friday and Saturday, some exciting artists still got the chance to perform. Despite all of the negatives of the weekend, the takeaway was still very clear. North Coast Music Festival is a unique and important part of Chicago’s festival ecosystem and it is here to stay.