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Whispers are heating up that Kendrick Lamar could be stepping into the headliner slot at next year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. According to Hits Daily Double, talk of the Compton rapper’s potential booking surfaced during offstage chatter among agents at the MTV Video Music Awards and Oasis’ recent Rose Bowl shows.
Other names floating around the headliner conversation include Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter, and Karol G, but Kendrick’s name is carrying special weight — especially given the year he’s had.
Lamar has history with the desert stage. He first performed at Coachella in 2012, right as his breakout album good kid, m.A.A.d city was turning him into a household name, and returned in 2017 in the glow of DAMN., his most commercially successful release at the time.
But Lamar has also been one of Coachella’s great what-ifs. He was offered a headliner spot for the 2025 edition, the same year Rihanna was also reportedly approached but declined. Instead, he chose to put his focus into a stadium tour behind GNX, the surprise album that not only defined his last year, but reshaped hip-hop’s commercial ceiling.
GNX broke records — 22 consecutive weeks at No. 1, the longest run ever for a rap album, and the first hip-hop release to sell over one million units in the U.S. this year. The Grand National Tour that followed pushed those numbers into real-world impact, with Kendrick’s Dallas stop pulling in $11.8 million and becoming the highest-grossing concert in history by a Black male headliner.
Even as he’s stayed largely out of the spotlight in 2025, Kendrick Lamar has quietly continued stacking milestones. Just this week, he earned an Emmy for Outstanding Music Direction for his Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show — a rare moment of visibility before the Grand National Tour resumes in Mexico City later this month.
If the rumors prove true, Coachella 2026 could be less about Lamar finally saying yes and more about timing: a return to the desert after rewriting rap’s live and recorded record books.
