The HARD Summer festival’s return to Los Angeles in 2023 was a momentous occasion for the event, its producer Insomniac, and the city well before tens of thousands of electronic dance music fans and outright ravers descended on Exposition Park during the first weekend of August.
For HARD, it was the brand’s first time back in L.A. proper—where the festival was founded in 2008—before moving to El Monte in 2014. That switch nine years ago set off a string of venue changes, to the Fairplex in Pomona in 2015, the Fontana Auto Club Speedway in 2016, the Glen Helen Amphitheater in San Bernardino in 2017, and the NOS Event Center in San Bernardino in 2021.
For Insomniac, though, bringing HARD to Expo Park was a bold exorcism of sorts. In 2010, the historic site featuring the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the then-Sports Arena (now BMO Stadium) hosted the Electric Daisy Carnival for the second consecutive year.
That year, though, proved disastrous.
A rush by scores of fans to reach the floor of the Coliseum bubbled into a stampede—one that even Will.I.Am, who was DJing at the time, couldn’t prevent with his entreaties, and that landed hundreds in local hospitals with injuries. Tragically, too, a 15-year-old girl named Sasha Rodriguez died of a drug overdose at the festival.
In response, the city suspended all remaining scheduled raves for 2010 and put planning for future such events on hold, along with instituting a series of new measures to boost safety and security.
Meanwhile, Insomniac moved its West Coast edition of EDC to Las Vegas, which proved prescient for the brand; it quickly became an annual phenomenon at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and now hosts more than half a million fans across three days each year. Naturally, then, EDC wasn’t leaving Sin City any time soon.
Enter HARD Summer as the next best bet to break the spell at Expo Park. The 2022 edition in San Bernardino, while successful in terms of artistry and attendance across an expanded three days, was plagued by a rash of phone thefts.
But while, at least anecdotally, those pickpocketing incidents followed HARD Summer to Expo Park, the return to a two-day affair offered more than a glimpse of how the scene and the site have changed in the last 13 years.
The Coliseum was as colossal a fixture as ever. But rather than serving as the main stage, as it did at EDC in 2010, it was repositioned as the home of heavy bass music, including dubstep and drum-and-bass. There, at the Green Stage, fans could stomp out to the womps of Alix Perez, Netsky, and Diesel (a.k.a. NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal) on Saturday, with the likes of Hamdi, Dirt Monkey, Blanke, and Yellow Claw going b2b with Flosstradamus—absent any concern about a crush of attendees getting stuck on the stadium’s floor or its myriad tunnels.
The same strategy held, to similarly positive effect, at BMO Stadium. Though the home of the MLS champion Los Angeles Football Club didn’t exist in 2010, it was nonetheless well-suited to hosting the most eclectic array of artists at the festival on its Purple Stage. Among the highlights, Saturday saw Australian house DJ Hayden James give way to a set on the ones and twos from the British dance music band Jungle. They, in turn, ceded the stage to a collaborative set between Diplo and BLOND:ISH, before the rapper 21 Savage closed out the night.
Day two cranked that artistic diversity to another level, from the L.A. club-turned-national phenomenon Emo Nite and singer-producer duo Gioli & Assia to the bizarrely endearing antics of Oliver Tree—who reflected on attending HARD Summer as a fan more than a decade earlier—and the genre-bending abilities of Kid Cudi on the mic.
In between those two brick-and-mortar venues, Insomniac erected three more stages, each with a distinctive blend of performers.
The HARDER Stage, like the Purple Stage, continued HARD Summer’s core cocktail of hip-hop and EDM. In addition to two Saturday b2b sets (Kayzo b2b Sullivan King, 4B b2b JST Jr.) and Sunday bangers from local products like Deorro and Knock2, this stage—which was set up in front of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and featured a private pool with cabanas in the VIP section—hosted a pair of legendary rappers in Fat Joe and Ludacris for short-but-sweet appearances.
Meanwhile, the Pink Stage, which filled the corner between the Coliseum and BMO Stadium, hosted its own array of DJs both well-known and up-and-coming, including Fleur Shore, AMEME, Boys Noize, Gorgon City, and The Martinez Brothers.
All the aforementioned selections still left plenty of top-tier production talent for the HARD Stage. Both nights were capped off by star-studded b2b pairings—Kaskade and John Summit on Saturday, Skrillex and Four Tet reprising their monumental collaboration (albeit with only a brief video appearance from Fred again…) on Sunday—with the likes of Dillon Francis, Noizu, Black Coffee, and Yung Bae in support.
The parking-lot blacktop made the HARD Stage somewhat unforgiving with the summer heat. But between the more open floor plan and the spreading of popular talent across the grounds, Insomniac all but assured that attendees at this main stage wouldn’t suffer the same injurious fate that so many did inside the Coliseum at EDC 2010.
Taken altogether, HARD Summer acquitted itself well in its return to the heart of L.A. for the first time in a decade. Between a stacked lineup, improved crowd control, and the clever incorporation of hot dog carts and other familiar staples of the city’s street food, Insomniac managed to bring rave culture back to Exposition Park en masse with equal parts local feel and universal appeal.
Moreover, HARD Summer’s Los Angeles comeback served as a reminder of the extent to which EDM has suffused the entire music world over the past 13 years (and beyond). There is scarcely a genre that hasn’t been at least touched by the precepts of electronic music. Plenty, including hip-hop and rock, have embraced this musical movement with open arms and, in turn, given themselves new life on the sonic stage.
In doing so, HARD Summer has also shown that, with some key tweaks and plenty of planning, Exposition Park can safely and successfully host “massives” like it did during the 2000s, due in no small part to the hard lessons learned years ago.
Check out a collection of image galleries below from photographers Josh Martin, Matt Winkelmeyer, Scott Hutchinson, Keiki Lani Knudsen, Skyler Greene, Gina Joy, Shea Flynn, Jason Fenmore, Jake West, and Jamal Eid.
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