Alex called out to the Austin crowd before a single beat dropped: ‘If you’re out here with your best friends like we are, let me see you right now.’ Tens of thousands of hands went up across the ACL grounds, and the Chainsmokers had their answer before the first chorus hit. There is something particular about watching a DJ duo turn a festival field into a living room singalong, and on weekend two of Austin City Limits 2026, Alex Pall and Drew Taggart did exactly that, leaning hard into the crowd-as-collaborator dynamic that has defined their live show for years.
Old songs, loud rooms, and a running argument with DJ culture
About midway through the set, Alex made his position on setlist curation clear. ‘You know what I hate? When the DJ’s like, oh, you guys want to hear some new stuff. F that. Play the old stuff.’ The crowd responded with the kind of noise that settles a debate. What followed was a run through the catalogue that covered ‘Paris,’ ‘Closer,’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down,’ and ‘Something Just Like This,’ each song handed back to the audience the moment it reached its chorus. Drew stepped out from behind the booth for ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and pointed the microphone into the field: ‘I don’t sing this song. You guys sing this song.’ He was not wrong. The words came back loud enough to hear on the far edges of the grounds.
The setlist did make room for newer material, though Alex introduced one track with a concession that felt genuine rather than promotional: ‘You guys got to be nice. Like, new old stuff.’ The crowd gave it the benefit of the doubt. A song about Texas summers landed with particular warmth given the setting, the late-October heat still present enough to make the lyric feel literal rather than nostalgic.
Weekend two, a Texas crowd, and a cowboy song nobody expected
One of the sharper left turns of the night came when the duo dropped into a song built around the line ‘she’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s just stepping around the room.’ Alex called it directly: ‘Texas, you better sing this song.’ The crowd obliged without hesitation, and the moment had the quality of a local inside joke being told to exactly the right room. Alex acknowledged the particular energy of a second weekend crowd afterward, telling the field: ‘I get it. I won’t forget.’
The closing stretch leaned into the duo’s biggest moments, with ‘Something Just Like This’ capping the set in the way the song almost always does, its opening verse about Achilles and Superman delivered almost entirely by the crowd while Alex held the microphone out and watched. He introduced it with two words: ‘2016 forever.’
The moment the selfie song became a stadium-size joke
The duo also made time for a selfie-culture interlude that nobody announced and everyone recognized. Alex addressed the crowd mid-set with mock urgency: ‘I need my tens right now. Where the f my tens at? But first, let me take a selfie.’ The line landed as comedy, but it also worked as a release valve between the heavier emotional pulls of the slower songs. The Chainsmokers have always understood that a festival set is not a concert; it is a negotiation between artist and crowd about how much feeling the room can hold at once.
The shoutout that arrived without ceremony
Alex paused before one song to acknowledge that the crowd for weekend two was larger than weekend one: ‘I think there’s more people here than last weekend. I don’t know what’s going on.’ He also gave a brief, unannounced shoutout to a performer named fun, calling him ‘our guy’ and asking the field to cheer one more time for an earlier set that had clearly left an impression on the duo.
By the time the final chorus of ‘Something Just Like This’ wound down and the ACL grounds began to empty, the mood in the field matched what Alex had promised at the start: a night spent in a crowd that felt, for a few hours, less like a festival and more like a room full of people who all happened to know the same songs.
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