Lorde Played the Desert Chapel, Then a Tropical Storm Cut FORM Arcosanti Short
Arizona's desert utopia Arcosanti hosted FORM Festival with Lorde, Geese, Blood Orange, and ear for two intimate days of shows — before a tropical storm forced the cancellation of the entire Sunday lineup.
A festival capped at two thousand people, with a lineup featuring Lorde, Geese, Blood Orange, Adrianne Lenker, and ear — that's the everyday contradiction of FORM Arcosanti. The 2026 edition ran two days on the basalt mesa in Arizona, with crowds watching performance after performance up close, only to wake the next morning to find the campground swallowed in mud. Sunday's planned lineup — Turnstile, Quiet Light, After, Tinashe, and more — was scrapped entirely after a tropical storm hit, with tow trucks dispatched to rescue vehicles stuck in the muck.
FORM Arcosanti takes place inside Arcosanti, the experimental town architect Paolo Soleri built in 1970 — itself an ongoing "urban laboratory" project, with homes, amphitheaters, workshops, and cafes all built into the mountainside. Festival founder Zach Tetreault discovered the site in 2014 while driving cross-country with bandmate Paul Giese, and the first edition doubled as a release show for his band Hundred Waters' album The Moon Rang Like a Bell, with three hundred people let in for free. Since then, Charli XCX, Mitski, Florence + The Machine, Beck, and Solange have all taken the stage, with the lineup growing more surprising each year.
Tetreault says the festival has no outside investors and the financial goal is simply to break even — "I still haven't managed to do that," he said in an interview on day two this year. Three-day passes run close to a thousand dollars, and artist fees fall well below market rate, but he's noticed that even the toughest agents and managers soften once they arrive. "When top agents and managers see this place, it might remind them of something from their childhood." The venue carries deeper personal meaning for him too: Paul Giese passed away two years ago, and the team scattered his ashes there during the 2024 festival.
Lorde Turned Her Set Into a "Ritual" With Cosanti Bronze Bells
Lorde closed out this year's festival. She brought just two musicians onstage, including Jim E. Stack, the lead producer behind Virgin, with Cosanti bronze bells made locally in Arcosanti displayed onstage. The set was a pared-down version she rehearsed specifically for FORM Arcosanti, the second-to-last show before wrapping up her year-long Ultrasound World Tour — she called it a "ritual." Her vocals were pushed up front in the mix, sounding raw and unguarded; her stripped-down techno rework of "Green Light" became the moment that stopped the whole crowd in its tracks.
The intimate venue made familiar names sound like entirely different artists. Blood Orange and Geese aren't unknowns, but at this scale they sounded nothing like before; ear's condensed Saturday afternoon set hit with a bass heavier and more driving than ever. Geese seemed taken over by the desert's energy, with thirty-something fans thrashing around like hyenas in the crowd. Annahstasia's low-register folk kept singing even as rain quietly seeped through the amphitheater's loose canvas canopy. This year's Spotify-sponsored Fresh Finds Stage brought in MGNA Crrrta, Sophia Stel, Gena, Searows, Mack Keane, and Dominic Fike, the latter playing a canyon stage not far from the main grounds; Sophia Stel's electropop was described as hitting like a thunderstorm, while MGNA Crrrta's Farheen Khan goofed around onstage with a bubble gun. Saturday night, cover star underscores wrapped up a chaotic, raw DJ set just before the rain hit.
Tetreault describes the festival as a "cleanse" — for himself and for many industry insiders long accustomed to the scale of Coachella and Lollapalooza. But the cost of running a small festival on an increasingly unstable planet is shifting. The same month, All Things Go NYC and Global Citizen Festival in New York, HeadTrip in Indio, California, and Oceans Calling in Ocean City, Maryland, were all forced to shut down due to extreme weather. Two days after the festival ended, Tetreault texted: "Weather is becoming a variable we have less and less control over, and honestly that's scary on a lot of levels." They never planned to cancel the whole thing, but conditions ultimately left them no choice.
Three-day passes for FORM Arcosanti 2026 ran around a thousand dollars; dates and lineup for the next edition have yet to be announced.
