Summerfest 2021 Festival Stage Headliners for Week Three:
Diplo - September 16
Ludacris - September 16
Masked Wolf - September 16
Bleachers - September 17
GA Tickets available here for the weekend, individual days, or the whole festival.
Diplo
Thomas Wesley Pentz, better known as Diplo, is one of the most dynamic forces in music today. The Grammy-winning artist is as much an international brand as he is a musician/DJ/producer. Year after year, he’s proven himself to be a ubiquitous cultural figure, consistently bridging high and low, mainstream and underground, with remarkable tact and reverence.
A decade since its inception, Diplo’s original group Major Lazer continues to influence the sound of modern music. Most recently, Diplo’s Major Lazer unveiled “Que Calor,” featuring J Balvin and Dominican dembow pioneer El Alfa, alongside a brand new video to critical acclaim. The new track follows summer release “Make It Hot,” which features Brazilian superstar Anitta from Major Lazer’s forthcoming and highly-anticipated fourth album. This summer Major Lazer was also featured on Beyonce’s The Lion King: The Gift soundtrack alongside Shatta Wale on “ALREADY”. This all comes off the heels of history making singles “Lean On” and “Cold Water,” which have both surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. Their fourth album is forthcoming.
Earlier this year Diplo unveiled a new country project, Thomas Wesley, and released its first track, “So Long,” featuring Nashville superstar Cam, which Rolling Stone praised as “an impressively graceful dip into country.” The release was followed by a performance at Stagecoach Festival where at the first ever Stagecoach Late Night, he welcomed Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus for the live debut of “Old Town Road,” and promptly shared his remix of the viral hit. Wesley then unveiled a second track called, “Heartless” which was accompanied by a music video featuring Platinum artist, songwriter Morgan Wallen. This was the second of several forthcoming collaborations due to appear on Diplo’s country EP coming later this year.
Ludacris
Recording artist, actor, philanthropist, restaurateur…just a few of the befitting titles for Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, who first gained worldwide acclaim more than 10 years ago with his debut album, Back for the First Time (2000). Ever since, his unrivaled lyrical prowess, dynamic performances and timeless hits including “Stand Up,” “Get Back,”, “Number One Spot,” “Money Maker,” and “My Chick Bad,” have solidified him as one of music’s best entertainers and led to the sale of more than 20 million albums domestically. With the 2013 release of LUDAVERSAL, fans can look forward to more great music from Ludacris.
In addition to immense commercial success, Ludacris' consistent output of stellar music has garnered the admiration of his peers, as well as numerous awards and honors including three Grammys.
Masked Wolf
Transforming from a mild-mannered man by day into an unrestrained beast in the studio, Masked Wolf (aka, Harry Michael) has unassumingly established himself as a powerful, passionate, and primal hip-hop force. After graduating from school, the Sydney, Australia native tirelessly worked in sales to fund recording. He even took out a loan to build a home studio as he cut hundreds of songs and logged thousands of hours in the lab. In 2018, he dropped his independent debut “Speed Racer.” It gathered millions of streams and turned heads across Australia. Following “Night Rider” and “Water Walkin,” he unveiled “Astronaut in the Ocean.” Awash in airy guitar, jagged 808s, neon keys, and deft wordplay, he submerged himself in honest lyricism, facing depression head-on. That one-two-punch of a recognizable riff and chantable chorus organically caught fire online. It quickly incited 350,000-plus Tik Tok videos, spanning everything from footage of U.S. military Blackhawk chopper crews to welders and ice fisherman (far from your typical Tik Tok fare!). Meanwhile, Kansas City Chief Super Bowl champ quarterback Patrick Mahomes even incorporated the tune into an Instagram post, fueling its explosion in early 2021. Amassing streams in the hundreds of millions and counting , the buzzing rapper and singer unleashes a torrent of personal truths and emotions on his 2021 debut for Elektra Records and more to come.
Bleachers
After building a devoted fan-base through a year and a half of non-stop touring behind his band Bleachers’ well-received debut album Strange Desire, Jack Antonoff was spending time in studios in Los Angeles and Atlanta spit-balling ideas for a second album when he had a powerful realization. It struck him, as he was sitting in hip-hop producers Organized Noize’s studio in Atlanta, that the records that meant so much to him growing up— are rooted in a specific place. “They came from somewhere!” he says excitedly. “There’s an energy there and the artist is telling a story of how they were raised. It's a sound from a city, and they’re planting a flag in that city and saying, ‘This is what it's like to live here.’"
The New Jersey-born, New York-based Antonoff knew he needed to go home to the East Coast and build a studio. “It’s like you have to go sit in your bedroom and hear the music on the speakers you heard Graceland on the first time,” he says. “You gotta listen through the speakers you heard Smashing Pumpkins on the radio the first time. I had to get back to that space. So I did. I grabbed all this shit from my childhood bedroom in New Jersey and built a studio in my apartment in New York and I literally didn't leave it. I thought, ‘This album is going to sound like New York and New Jersey and the actual space I grew up in, in the most specific way. And that, to me, is the most I can offer.”
As far as what Antonoff feels like people need from him as artist, he says: “I feel like they just need me to somehow capture the lightning in a bottle of what it’s like to be me, to grow up with loss, and then to try to move through the world within that. All I’ve wanted to do my whole life with my work is just take another step closer to myself.”