It was the tale of two pop titans on the first two days of Coachella 2026.
Sabrina Carpenter's headlining slot on Friday (4/10) was the antithesis to Justin Bieber's equally-anticipated closer on Saturday (4/11) in every way possible.
Sabrina's stage, production, use of video screens, and even costumes were intricate, epic, and elaborate (and for some, overdone to the point of being unnecessary), while JB's was minimal and subdued.
This came into play when critics and fans on social media analyzed the two extremely different performances because while some pointed out that Justin played a lot of music from his two most-recent LPs (2025's Swag and Swag II) which dropped last year, Sabrina also played a lot of music from her 2025 release, Man's Best Friend.
Of the 34 tracks Biebs performed on Saturday, 59% were from one of the Swag records. And out of the 20 cuts Sabrina rolled out on the main stage on Friday, 55% were from her 6x nominated album.
For the most part Sabrina did a good job of mixing her new songs (of which 11 of the 13 on the deluxe version of Man's Best Friend comes from) with her 2024 breakout LP, Short N' Sweet.
2022's emails i can't send made up for the other two tunes on her setlist. Only “Never Getting Laid” and “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry” from MBF were not performed at Coachella. Could weekend two mean a live debut of “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”?
The four songs Sabrina live debuted Saturday were "Such a Funny Way," "Sugar Talking," "We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night," and "When Did You Get Hot?"
It was before the live debut of "We Almost Broke Up..." where the 26-year-old former Disney Channel star got into a little hot water on social media. After hearing someone in the crowd do a Zaghrouta ululation, which women in the Middle East and North Africa often do at weddings, asked if someone was yodeling. Miraculously among the crowd of tens of thousands, the fan could be heard saying it was from her culture, to which Carpenter said it was weird and she didn't like it.
After fans took issue with the singer's reaction and educated her online as to what specifically it was, she replied via Twitter
"my apologies i didn’t see this person with my eyes and couldn’t hear clearly. my reaction was pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended. could have handled it better! now i know what a Zaghrouta is!," she tweeted, adding, "I welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out."
The show was totally different than her previous tours. No one got arrested (despite a fearless prediction) and she didn't ask the capacity crowd if they "ever tried it like this?"
She did have several Hollywood actors perform as part of the narrative of Sabrinawood.
Sam Elliott kicked it off in a black-and-white film intro that opened the set. Susan Sarandon starred in a long scene as an older version of Sabrina.
According to Variety, perhaps it was longer than expected. "Sources on the ground at Coachella indicated that the monologue was originally supposed to be shorter, and that Sarandon was asked to stretch to cover a changeover that was taking longer than intended. That hasn’t been confirmed, and there was nothing about Carpenter’s subsequent costuming that looked like it should have taken seven minutes to pull off, by itself," Variety's Chris Willman wrote.
Will Ferrell delivered some comedy in a power-outage bit as an electrician who joked that he thought he was booked for Stagecoach.
Samuel L. Jackson contributed a pre-recorded voice over, and Corey Fogelmanis appeared in one of the filmed Sabrinawood interludes.
And despite the set being a bit uneven and obviously new to the star and those around her, she ended with a bang.
She got into the back seat of one of the classic cars on the polo grounds and it elevated her up in the air and transformed into a glorious water fountain, adding to the suggestive nature of the performance.
Quite a surprising ending compared to Bieber's fireworks finale.
Sabrina headlines Coachella again on Saturday.
Get tickets on her website where you can also get on her mailing list.
