All right! All Things Go New York day two! Citizens of Forest Hills came back from day one bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for the festival’s Hype Day. We left the wide-eyed DJ’uveniles in day one, learned that maybe we don’t need body oil for this particular sitter’s festival, brought along our bisexual boyfriends and gay man brothers and settled in for a day of high highs and one frightening low. 

Peach PRC

Sunday (1994), Alameda and Michelle kicked it off this afternoon. It was Michelle’s antepenultimate show before their just-announced indefinite hiatus, and they were down from four vocalists to three — missing a Michelle! Michelle down! 

Peach PRC’s legion of fans braving the afternoon sun was small but ardent — the floor was mostly empty, but devotees at the barricade were in full Peach regalia: merch, sequins, tattoos, multicolor ponytails and braids. Peach herself took the stage alongside a lone guitarist and a neon pink stripper pole. The spitting image of a pop idol — lithe, barefoot and draped in forest nymph netting — Peach brought a light-touched command of the stage. She glided, spun and sang into the mic like it was a hairbrush in her bedroom. Her visuals were certainly something-core: pastel and overexposed takes on natural settings, like desktop backgrounds pulled from Barbie Swan Lake. Peach is somewhat of a relic of the precise moment in which she came up: she feels hyperonline, proto-2K and brashly “fucking-my-best-friend-better-than-her-boyfriend” in the way of late-2010s lesbian pop pre-Chappellsaince. That is… she’s 2020. No matter, because she’s got bigger fish to fry: specifically, a minute-long pole dance interlude to an EDM track (awesome) and a profoundly too-loud, grating audio track befitting a late night rave, not a daylight set with tennis players hitting shots in the background (less awesome). Perhaps somewhere dark and industrial a Peach show is worth the price of admission, just not at 2pm, and not at Forest Hills. 

Griff

The legion of Taychildren grows more numerous by the day…. Griff, which feels like a misnomer for the petite, ballet-informed balladeer who once opened the Eras tour, delivers the Adele side of Taylor Swift and The 1975 side of… Taylor Swift. The former songs, which she started with, were weaker. Her set felt Gracie/Holly/Lizzy/Jensen rote until a third of the way through, when she broke her self-serious spell with a warm and fluttery direct address to the audience and instructions to let go and loosen up. She sort of followed suit for the next stretch, which delivered midtempo 2010s pop delicacies with instrumentals ripped from The 1975 and flourishes of Bleachers. Whatever she was doing, Griff had the audience’s attention: her remarkably expressive face splashed across her background screens. The most striking moment of the set, though, was one that seemed accidental: Griff caught a groove big time, winding backwards across the stage in a brief moment of what seemed like pocket-induced abandon. In that moment, she was resplendent. In her architectural tutu, slicked-back braided ponytail and prim London accent, Griff is clearly living a pristine and mass market-friendly iteration of femininity and musicianship. And it’s not bad, necessarily — her bouncy, shiny pop is inviting. But she’s a compelling stage presence who seems to have a more interesting energy bubbling beneath the surface. If only she’d take her own advice and let it out. 

Lola Young

The headline: most of the way through her set, Lola Young stopped suddenly, tried to communicate something with her pianist and fell flat on her back, out cold. Her band, and soon medics, rushed to huddle around her, get her on her feet and bring her backstage. Immediately the music stopped, lights shut down and All Things Go threw the festival background back up and played the house playlist to cue attendees that the show was over. After a few minutes of stunned silence the crowd began filtering out of the bowl, transitioning into a normal set break. Later on, Young posted on Instagram to let the audience know she was okay, and headliners Remi Wolf and Doechii both updated the crowd that she was alright. 

Young had cancelled a show the previous night, which her manager attributed to mental health reasons, and she remained visibly emotional and at times fragile during Saturday’s set. Through tears she told the crowd it had been a tough week. “Sometimes life can really make you feel like you can’t continue, but you know what, today I woke up and I made the decision to come here, and I wanted to be cool… sometimes life can throw you lemons, and you just gotta make lemonade.” 

And lemonade she made before the collapse. Young is publicly and perceptibly a woman on a mission to prove herself as more than a Tiktok artist, and to that end brought a rousing performance that was at times sturdy and at times disarmingly emotional. She invites immediate Amy Winehouse comparisons — in Tiktokified hair and makeup that mask her seriousness, then unveiling a textured voice and clearly inherent magnetism that are undeniable. Not to mention Young is the first client that Winehouse’s former manager, Nick Shymansky, has taken on since Winehouse famously refused his demand she go to rehab and the two parted ways.

The comparisons keep coming: Young’s lyrics are anguished, aching and self-destroying in the face of men who mistreat, her but she can’t help but lay herself down: for she sings “you can call me a bitch if you do it with those big brown eyes” and “I’m not a woman if I don’t have you.” Those abject lyrics, though, are tucked into groovy, jazzy, uptempo dance beats. Young had the crowd up and grooving, the perfect on-ramp to a night of high-octane headliners. By “Conceited,” during which she collapsed, she’d handily won fans. No word yet on whether Young will still perform at 5pm today as scheduled at All Things Go in Maryland. 

Remi Wolf

A born tourer with the energy of an adult camp counselor, Remi Wolf was the perfect showman to get the night back on track. She started at 7:15 as scheduled, and burst forth with her band in full Wimbledon whites, sporting sweatbands, polos, tennis skirts and rackets. Bonus points for being on theme! After opener “Cherries and Cream,” she updated the crowd: “Really quickly, I wanted to say that my friend Lola is backstage, and she’s okay. And she’s gettin’ good back there, so we’re all good, okay?” She continued, “That rustled us all up a bit, definitely shook me up. But what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna shake that shit out.” Ms. Wolf then led the crowd in three exercises — first, slapping “whatever you’ve got down there” until “flappy,” then kissing the neck of the person to your right and then vocal warmups. “Tonight, NYC, I need you fucking idiotic, dumb and stupid,” she proclaimed. “Whatever bullshit you’re carrying I need you to leave it at those doors.”

By the end of the set she’d accomplished her mission handily. Remi Wolf is the platonic ideal festival set. A la session musicians, Wolf is a festival musician. And her attitude revealed a truth of big-time performance: whereas Young before her seemed raw, earnestly emoting with the crowd; like a flower with the sun, Wolf clearly generates energy from not caring at all. She has the bombastic energy of a toddler, treating bodies as silly, wardrobe as dress-up, her band as merry fellow rugrats and life as the recess yard — a place to play. In other words, she’s the queen of her own world, one she picks up and takes along with her everywhere her tour bus stops, and one she leads with joy. 

Wolf onstage seems like a nuclear reactor, as if energy is generating inside of her and exploding forth constantly. She runs back and forth and back and forth across the stage, she high kicks, she does silly skits with the band, she plays drums, she runs QTPOC and bi flags across the stage, she riffs. “That song was about alcohol!” she chirped after “Liquor Store.” “This song is about having sex in a hotel room!” She and the band promptly lined up and held their fingers to their foreheads like bulls for “Toro.”

The moment when dancing in your bedroom when you’re so completely feeling the groove but also bursting with laughter at the silliness of what you’re doing — a Remi Wolf set is that feeling for 45 minutes. It’s a wall-to-wall time for dancing, grooving, giggling. We’re all too aware of the miseries of touring, so it’s a tiny light in the dark that it clearly makes Wolf very, very happy — which she said explicitly. Similarly, we’re all too aware of the miseries of the present day, and even of adulthood itself, so it’s a tiny brightly colored lava lamp in the dark to come see a Remi Wolf set. 

Doechii

What’s that Lady Gaga movie? With the singing? About the pool? And a guy is there… one of the Ryans? Wait. Leonar… do? No. Bradley! Bradley Cooper! And she’s an artist trying to make it and he’s old and jaded I think. What was that called again?

Oh yeah, A STAR IS BORN. Doechii’s headlining set was utterly, totally and completely starmaking. The swamp princess stomped her name onto the Hollywood walk at Forest Hills Saturday night. 

But first, she addressed recent events: “I want to acknowledge my sister Lola Young,” Doechii said. “She’s an incredible performer and she wasn’t feeling well tonight.” She led the crowd in yelling “We love you Lola!” 

It’s difficult to describe Doechii’s performance, which was her third on the “Live From The Swamp” tour, her first extended outing since her 2024 mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal burst into the mainstream, correctly scoring her the Best New Artist Grammy. That’s because the thesis is — you have to be there. 

New York got the memo: Doechii’s power transformed the crowd at All Things Go from the first set of the day. Whereas, as I wrote about day one, ATG can skew heavily and cloyingly nineteen-year-old-white-lesbian, the crowd on day two was from the jump much more visibly diverse in age, race and gender, and much bigger. By the evening sets, the audience could have been at any major festival — specifically, the coolest, most big-tent set at that festival. It’s refreshing to see ATG look just a bit more like its host city, and it was clear from the fits, merch, buzz and packed solid house at 9pm that it was all Doechii. 

On that note: All Things Go is blessedly a “filter in, filter out” festival in which most of the floor empties out after one set to get food and drink and go to the bathroom, and trickling back in before the next. Not so after Remi Wolf. For Doechii, folks were staying put, packing the floor and upper bowl brick solid for the first time all weekend. They were right to: Doechii is a show you want to be in the middle of a jumping, bumping, sweating crowd for. It’s good old fashioned hype: the cutting-edge ecstasy of thousands of people being in on an artist they know is cooler than them. (Before, of course, that artist ascends to the stratosphere and becomes obvious, gen pop).

Doechii emerged onto an escalating platform fashioned into a swamp with moss and overgrowth. Her fashion by now hardly needs mentioning, but of course she looked fabulous: an ever-so-shiny neutral corset, signature long braids, sexy-librarian glasses and kitten heels she repeatedly pulled off and then back on throughout the show. (Big day for having the dogs out!) And naturally, a long, lit joint. 

Alligator Bites, and in fact much of Doechii’s discography, is very vibey. Some tracks are insistent and charging, but the whole is mellow bedroom-R&B. This could have been a very different show, one much more like the contemporary R&B vanguard’s soulful, mellow shows. Doechii did something different: her set felt less like those shows, unlike any ATG set that came before it, and more like the best night of your life at an Atlanta club. That’s in large part thanks to Atlanta’s DJ Miss Milan, the only other person onstage, who led the crowd in yelling “WE LOVE HIP HOP! WE LOVE RAP!” from her booth, also blanketed in swamp finery. Milan thrillingly never dropped the bass, weaved one song into the next, into a sample, back into the first song and hit a “d-d-d-Doechii” sound from Alligator Bites for emphasis like a radio DJ. Doechii, meanwhile, screamed “YOU WANNA PARTY WITH ME?” and turned “HUH!” from a chill record to a raucous romp by enlisting the audience into shouting its name. She accepted a fan-made jacket from the first row, a blunt from the second (“oh you got gas? Shout out to him!”) and did the splits. 

All the while she never dropped a word, added growl and flourish to her bars, turned “Anxiety” into a hard rock headbanger and less commanded the crowd so much as roused them, conducting them into a collective ecstatic. 

The whole performance took on the excitement of the closer — “DENIAL IS A RIVER,” an easy choice for the best song of 2024 (well, a coholder of the title with Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not”). “DENIAL,” an oddball spoken track without a resolution chronicling Doechii’s years-long, fame-induced personal breakdown, was an unlikely breakout — Doechii herself found the whole of Alligator Bites, technically a mixtape, after scrapping an album project and just following her auteur’s intuition. But break out it did, nabbing late-night and awards show performances. That “d-d-d-Doechii” chopped up sound is from “DENIAL,” and Miss Milan used it to tease the audience all night. When it eventually came, “DENIAL” was great — but, surprisingly no better than the set that came before it. The thrill of Doechii’s set isn’t the dopamine hit of hearing your favorite track, it’s the hour-long jolt of holding your finger directly to an electric current.

She followed “DENIAL” up with “BOOM BAP,” but then turned around and shouted to her team, “What time is it? 9:53?” then spun back to the audience and said “I got seven minutes, y’all.” (Forest Hills curfew mentioned) “Do y’all wanna do more songs? I’m real ghetto, so I call out the song and y’all yell how much you want it. Don’t be nice, just be truthful.” The people wanted “Balloon,” her collab with Tyler the Creator. There couldn’t be a better closer. Doechii brought out her whole team, in blacks and headsets, to dance and celebrate in the rain.

And oh, yeah, it was raining… the entire show. Whereas last year’s ATG got rained on in a way that engendered outright misery, the sprinkling over Doechii’s set felt fit for a swamp, recreating the deliciously humid South, befitting the crowd melting together, a club baptism. 

Pop can get tedious. (Earlier in the day an attendee leaned into me and professed a newfound appreciation for Sabrina Carpenter.) Generational auteur Doechii, though, reminds us of the point of it all. When the performance is this electric, the rapture transcends concertgoing, transcends the market and feels something more like worship.