A one-day festival is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. With so many acts overlapping, time is precious. Prioritizing gets much more difficult at a festival like Los Angeles’ Just Like Heaven, which features a bevy of indie bands whose best known albums came from the early 2000s to roughly 2017. If you liked one of these acts, at any point in time, you’ll probably want to see the others, too.
Now five years since its first edition, Just Like Heaven 2024 featured two distinct paths of indie. There was the Ben Gibbard strain: With The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie respectively concluding their dedications to Give Up and Transatlanticism, the fest programmed for similar tastes with the likes of Alvvays, The War on Drugs, Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Warpaint.
And then on the other hand, Phoenix — who headlined the inaugural edition — brought its own strain of synth-inflected indie. If you wanted to see Phoenix, there was a good chance you’d also want to catch Two Door Cinema Club, Passion Pit, Miike Snow, Phantogram, and Washed Out. The overlap between these two groups is strong, and out of the three post-pandemic Just Like Heaven lineups, this year had one of the more wide-ranging sonic selections.
The bands themselves were celebrating the occasion on Saturday, happy to still be around all these years laters with groups that they came up alongside. “In France, we don’t have high school reunions,” Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars said during their set. “So this is kind of like ours.” Matching the “all grown up” vibe at the festival was the assumption that attendees have a lot more money now than they used to, which may be true — still, the exorbitant ~$700 Clubhouse tier of passes offered an entire slab of private access in front of the stage, meaning that getting a perfect, close-up view of a treasured act wasn’t very likely. So, we stood mostly from afar and took it all in.
As a Zillennial who came of age in the MySpace-to-Facebook realm, I had long wanted to try out Just Like Heaven — “formative years” and all that. But upon arriving, it hit me: Barring the electrifying early performances of the reunited CSS and Gossip, every single act I saw at Just Like Heaven 2024 I had seen before at a music festival, be it Coachella or Outside Lands or Lollapalooza.
These days, though, the big, multi-genre festivals are mostly ignoring these established indie acts, relegating them to the genre-specific nostalgia blasts like Just Like Heaven. It’s a sign of indie rock’s minimized cultural dominance, especially when it comes to Gen-Z and festival-going teens — as expected, I spotted maybe five people under the age of 20 at this festival that weren’t with their parents. But Just Like Heaven knows that it’s not trying to meet the moment. It’s trying to take you back to the myriad of moments that these bands had over the last 25 years.
At times, this was a strange point of tension. Death Cab for Cutie opted to stick to the Transatlantacism play-through instead of a career-spanning setlist. They were booked as a package deal with Ben Gibbard’s other band, Postal Service, and it’s pointless to knock a band for wanting to celebrate an album as remarkable as Transatlanticism 21 years later. But given how incredible Ben Gibbard sounded on Saturday, it would have been nice to hear some of the songs from 2022’s Asphalt Meadows, which they’ve toured minimally. Or even Thank You for Today’s “I Dreamt We Spoke Again,” or Kintsugi’s “Black Sun,” and so on. 10 albums in, Death Cab’s catalog is not quite immaculate, but they have reached transcendent heights on every album since Transatlanticism — and of all bands from this era, they have a sampler-worthy selection. That being said, what a spell Gibbard and co. conjure on “Transatlanticism,” each steadfast refrain of “I need you so much closer” landing with swelling, blistered emotion.
Death Cab for Cutie, photo by Ashley Osborn