“I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” Sabrina Carpenter proclaimed partway through her performance doing exactly that on Friday night (Apr. 10) of the festival’s first weekend. “I mean… I can a little bit. But it sounds nicer to say that.”
Probably more than a little bit: Carpenter actually predicted this almost exactly two years earlier, when she closed out her debut performance at the festival with the “Nonsense” outro proclamation: “Coachella, see you back here when I headline.” At the time, with Carpenter a rising hitmaker but still hardly a superstar, the prediction might’ve felt outlandish — or at the very least slightly ahead of schedule — but thanks in large part to a song she released the same weekend, she was about to be fast-tracked to pop’s A-list, where she has only become more established in the days since.
In fact, if there was one major takeaway from Carpenter’s headlining set this Friday, it’s just what a robust catalog of hits she’s built in such a short period of time. The only songs older than “Espresso” that she performed were a couple Emails I Can’t Send-era favorites: the likely “Drivers License” rejoinder “Because I Liked a Boy” and the radio-blessed deluxe cut “Feather.” Still, it didn’t feel like a thin setlist for a headliner — her two most recent albums have just that many hits between them, and even most of the Man’s Best Friend deep cuts she played sounded single-ier than ever on Saturday, with beefed-up, extra-discofied arrangements, not to mention plenty of time to grow on fans since their mid-2025 release.
Carpenter has simply put in the work over those two years to not only produce the songs worthy of fleshing out a pop star resumé, but to continue to expand the world around them, with music videos and live performances and even in-song callbacks that deepen their impacts. And Friday night’s headlining show was one of her best examples of that yet, finding new ways to play with her established hits both sonically and visually, and adding to her own iconography in the process. Most notably, Friday marked the introduction of the no-doubt eternal “SABRINAWOOD,” her take on the famous Hollywood sign that appeared displayed on stage for most of the performance.
Classic Hollywood and its eternal glamour seemed to be a fixation of Carpenter’s for the majority of her performance, with the grooves and general sweep of disco serving as its other twin pillar. But Carpetner’s adoption of these long-past cultural touchstones never felt overly retro; even “SABRINAWOOD” not just suggested her general takeover of Southern California this week but snuck in an another boner joke to a memorable performance of her already dangerously frisky “When Did You Get Hot?” And moreover, by this point she projects as such a larger-than-life pop figure that 2020s top 40 stardom sometimes doesn’t really feel big enough for her anyway. Tellingly, no musical guest stars interfered with Carpenter’s one-woman show, though a handful of big-name actors — most notably Susan Sarandon and Will Ferrell — did offer quick (or sometimes not so quick) diversions for her many set and costume changes.
Also telling: No “Nonsense” at all in this set, with the breakout hit marking the only major song of her past three years to not make an appearance. Perhaps when you call a shot like Sabrina did with her prior Coachella “Nonsense,” the proper thing to do is to not push your luck a second time. (It sounds nicer to say that, anyway.)
Here were the seven most memorable (non-“SABRINAWOOD”) moments from Carpenter’s winning headline performance:
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