The 2025 lineup for California’s Just Like Heaven music festival has been announced. Vampire Weekend will headline, sharing the bill with TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, Empire of the Sun, and, most notably, a reunion of Jenny Lewis’ beloved emo band Rilo Kiley, who haven’t played a show together since 2008. The one-day festival will take place on May 10 at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Scroll down to see the full poster.
Formed in 1998, in Silverlake, California, Rilo Kiley first found notoriety when “The Frug,” a song from their self-titled EP that picked up play on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Fans quickly fell in love with Lewis’ unfiltered and witty songwriting, and the band released its full-length debut album, Take Offs and Landings, in 2001. By then, the core lineup of Lewis, her songwriting partner and guitarist Blake Sennett, bassist Pierre de Reeder, and drummer Jason Boesel had solidified, and Rilo Kiley would release three more studio albums over the course of the 2000s: 2002’s The Execution of All Things, 2004’s More Adventurous, and 2007’s Under the Blacklight. While they played their last live shows to date on their Under the Blacklight tour, Rilo Kiley didn’t officially announce their breakup until 2013. Lewis, in particular, has cultivated a successful solo career in the intervening years, releasing the studio albums The Voyager (2014), On the Line (2019), and Joy’all (2023).
In a statement about the reunion, Rilo Kiley said, “We are so very excited to come back together for Just Like Heaven in Pasadena, California—Los Angeles. As a band, we began here, and we feel so fortunate to return among so many artists and friends, to this community we hold so dear, in such a beautiful and meaningful place.”
Other acts playing Just Like Heaven 2025 include the Drums, Courtney Barnett, Toro y Moi, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Grouplove, and Slowdive, the latter of whom are listed as “very special guests.”
Revisit the 2019 feature “Jenny Lewis Escapes the Void.”