Drew and Alex had never played a festival like Lost Lands before, and it showed in the best possible way. Midway through a set that swung from euphoric anthems to chest-rattling bass drops, Drew stopped the music long enough to get honest with the crowd: ‘Bro, I’m not going to lie. This is insane. We’ve never seen anything like this. Holy… I’m nervous right now.’ The confession drew a roar louder than the drops themselves. Lost Lands is a bass-music institution, the kind of place where Excision’s loyal army of headbangers shows up prepared to be punished by low frequencies, and The Chainsmokers, two pop-adjacent production veterans, had just earned the room.
The set opened with the floaty, dream-pop warmth of ‘Roses,’ its ‘I’ll be your daydream, I’ll be your favorite things’ hook drifting over a crowd that was already surging. But Drew and Alex wasted no time introducing themselves. ‘My name is Drew. This is Alex for the Chainsmokers. Let’s get it,’ Drew announced, then dropped directly into the first of several crowd-participation moments built around relentless back-to-back energy. They leaned hard on the urgency of the room from the first minute.
When ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ hit different in a bass-music crowd
The set’s emotional core arrived when the duo built through ‘Don’t Let Me Down,’ its vocal hook stretching across the open festival air: ‘I think I’m losing my mind now. It’s in my head. Darling, I hope that you’ll be here when I need you the most.’ The song has always carried a thread of genuine desperation underneath its polish, and inside the Lost Lands atmosphere that quality landed harder than it might at a more polished pop setting. The crowd sang back every word without being asked.
They kept moving through a run that included ‘Paris,’ complete with its full lyric about staying in the city to escape your parents and the couple that goes down together if they go down at all, and ‘Something Just Like This,’ where Drew called for ‘all the 2017 energy from the front to the back.’ A Kanye West interlude drew a sharp reaction, and at one point Alex shouted to the crowd to ‘put the base down’ before a drop that seemed to surprise even the production crew. The shout-out to the Excision team came with real gratitude: ‘I never thought we’d have this opportunity to be here. You guys are awesome.’
Closing on their hardest song
Before the closing run, Drew told the crowd plainly: ‘Now for our hardest song.’ What followed was ‘Closer,’ the duo’s most recognizable record, built around the backseat of a Rover someone cannot afford and a tattoo on a shoulder and a mattress stolen from a roommate, and a decade later it still functioned exactly as designed. The crowd finished lines before they arrived. Someone near the stage shouted a request for ‘that Blink-182 song we beat to death,’ and the duo obliged, lacing the reference into the performance without missing a step.
The moment Drew stopped and stared
Just before one of the set’s biggest build-and-release sequences, Drew went quiet for a second and simply looked out at the crowd. He did not say anything after that.
The ‘Roses’ opening had promised a certain kind of night, one that would be beautiful and maybe a little nostalgic. What Lost Lands delivered on top of that was something nobody in the crowd predicted: two producers from a different corner of electronic music discovering, in real time, that the room they were playing was bigger than any room they had been in before.
