After strong winds forced the cancellation of his Coachella 2026 weekend one performance last Friday (April 17) Anyma returned for weekend two on a much stiller night that allowed for the world debut of his new show, ÆDEN.
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Starting a bit late at approximately 12:15 a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning, the producer walked onstage dressed in all white, with the massive screen running the entire length of the festival’s mainstage switching on behind him. While this screen would host a varied cast of characters during the performance, it was first populated by dozens of digitally rendered columns that crumbled to the ground before rising again.
Also rising was Anyma himself, with the platform on which he stood elevating and lowering at various points of the show, a cool effect that in moments made the producer appear to be floating, to positioned in the center of a swirl of fire and at the nexus of many other onscreen special effects.
The show soon introduced a character resembling Michelangelo’s David, who busted down the columns while robot-like elements showed from under his stone artifice. The performance would go on to incorporate other such characters from the worlds of ancient art and mythology, including a Medusa-like creature, the snakes emanating from her head hissing in time with the beat, a pair of spinning characters whose muscular bodies appeared to be rendered from tree roots, a female demon and eventually, an angel — but more on that later.
The interplay of the ancient and modern art is a core concept of the Anyma universe, and one that those who saw his End of Genesys residency at Sphere Las Vegas in late 2024 and early 2025 will well recognize. Along with all the new imagery, ÆDEN reintroduced visuals familiar to those who saw the Sphere show, with the bugging eyeballs from the “Voices In My Head” segment from Sphere (and the song’s corresponding video) showing up during this same song at Coachella, but with the eyes now rendered in black and eventually appearing to drip black blood.
As it was at Sphere, Ellie Goulding also made an appearance, with the vocalist’s image cast on the screen during her 2025 Anyma collab “Hypnotized.” But while at Sphere her face essentially shape-shifted, at Coachella she was made to look like a marble statue, in keeping with the show’s ancient art themes.
Typically at Coachella, the special guests show up for weekend one and then pack up and go home, but — perhaps because they didn’t get the chance to perform last weekend due to the cancellation — Anyma brought out a hos of guests including Muse‘s Matt Bellamy and Swae Lee. The biggest guest was also the one most people would have guessed was coming, LISA. Anyma and the K-Pop superstar released their collaborative single “Bad Angel” on April 8, and this show at Coachella saw them performing it publicly together for the first time.
LISA came onstage in a shimmery, diaphanous dress while imagery of her as the titular angel appeared on the screen behind her. As she walked down the stage’s runway, she declared that she’s “pretty pretty bad” for an angel, with those watching the performance via the livestream on YouTube at this point seeing a towering LISA hologram in the sky above her. For those of us in the crowd no such hologram materialized, but to be in such close proximity to the singer appeared to be thrilling enough for the people in the crowd whose hands were genuinely shaking as she walked by.
The final moments of the show featured an appearance by Joji, who came out to sing “Beautiful,” his Anyma collaboration released earlier this month. As Joji sang to the crowd out on the catwalk, a version of him rendered in stone appeared on the screen, once again juxtaposing new and old, human and digital, with “Beautiful” serving as the show’s closer.
All in, ÆDEN functioned as an expansion of the significant world-building Anyma has already accomplished, bringing in concepts of ancient art and culture and colliding them with the cutting-edge technology required to create a show of this size and scope. Presenting this show on the Coachella mainstage is certainly a win for Anyma, with having Anyma on the mainstage of one of the world’s biggest music festivals also marking a win for dance music itself.
