Alex Pall stood at the edge of the Perry Stage at Lollapalooza Chicago and said what both he and Drew Taggart had been carrying for a decade: ‘I’ve been waiting 10 years for this moment.’ For a duo that first called this stage their ‘I made it’ moment back in 2015, returning to headline it in 2026 was never going to be a routine festival slot. It was a reckoning with how far they had come, and a genuine attempt to top one of the best nights of their careers.
A stage built overnight with four forklifts
The production crew had been working through the night before the show. A production manager on site confirmed that the new stage rig had literally been hung for the first time just hours earlier, requiring four forklifts and work that ran until 5 in the morning. ‘This is, I believe, one of the largest, if not the largest production the Perry Stage has ever seen,’ he said, adding that they had ‘absolutely maxed it out.’ By the time The Chainsmokers walked out, the structure above them had been standing for less than a day.
Backstage, the mood before the set was a mix of genuine excitement and sleep-deprivation. Someone let slip something marked ‘top secret,’ prompting laughter and the kind of loose banter that comes from years on the road together. Taggart compared the energy to children, specifically referencing a chaotic Fred Again show as a benchmark for joyful, untamed crowd behavior.
Seven years in the making, played live for the first time
The most striking moment of the night came mid-set, when Taggart addressed the crowd directly. ‘We got a song that’s been floating around the internet for like 7 years that we did with the Chicago artist called Juice WRLD,’ he said. ‘We never played it on stage, so we’re just going to play it now.’ The crowd’s response suggested plenty of people already knew every word. Premiering an unreleased collaboration with the late Chicago rapper, on a stage in his hometown, was the kind of gesture that lands differently than a standard festival surprise.
The rest of the set leaned hard into the catalog that built them, including the full-crowd sing-along to ‘Say You Will Never Let Me Go’ and a dedicated call-back to 2015, when Taggart asked Chicago for ‘all the 2015 energy you still got left inside you.’ The Perry Stage gave it back.
After the final song, Taggart emerged from the crowd energy still clearly running through him, scanning for someone specific. ‘Where’s my fiance? I got Mari. That’s my wife,’ he said, finding her in the chaos. ‘Amiga, I love you.’ Then, to no one in particular: ‘That was so fun.’
The production manager who hadn’t slept
Somewhere behind the stage, the same production manager who had overseen the overnight rig build was still on site when the last note hit. He had described himself before the show as ‘super excited’ and ‘super tired’ in the same breath.
The Perry Stage, at maximum capacity and maximum production scale, had held until morning once already. It held again.
