NEWS
Desert Air 2021
Courtesy of Desert Air 2021As temperatures in Palm Springs dipped into the mid-40s this past weekend, the dancing taking place in the desert enclave served to create both pleasure and warmth.
This cold streak in the typically balmy SoCal city wasn’t the only novelty of the weekend, with the 4,000 revelers in attendance on Friday and Saturday night (Dec. 10-11) gathering not on a traditional dance floor, but the tarmac of the Palm Springs Air Museum. Here, vintage World War II airbirds outfitted with ravey lights loomed overhead, while techno, disco, house and more boomed through the massive sound system.
The occasion was the inaugural edition of Desert Air, a new festival from the founders of Splash House, the Palm Springs summer pool party/house music bash that launched in 2013 at the height of the EDM boom as an alternative to the era’s prevailing big room sound.
As house music has since become the prevailing genre, the goals of Desert Air were two-fold: With a lineup featuring underground stars like DJ Koze, Dixon, Peggy Gou, Moodymann, Channel Tres, Jayda G, TSHA, along with a mix of rising techno and house artists, the event was intended to again innovate the type of electronic music available to audiences in Southern California, with a shift towards more Euro-centric talent that doesn’t often hit Los Angeles or its adjacent Vegas party hub, particularly during the busy summer season.
“For a lot of these artists — Peggy Gou and DJ Koze and Dixon — these are types of artists that are pretty in demand in Europe and really hard to attract to the states and to California for a pool party music festival,” Splash House and Desert Air Founder Tyler McLean tells Billboard. “We felt like doing something in winter at the Air Museum gave us a cool opportunity to to delve a little more in this underground lane of programing.”
This show was also meant to expand the Splash House audience, a goal it also hit, with 90 percent of Desert Air attendees reporting having never been to a Splash House pool party. Daytime Desert Air activities like a bike ride/architecture tour, yoga and wine tastings at Palm Springs’ charming Dead Or Alive Wine Bar were also designed to attract a more mature crowd as interested in exploring the laidback refinement of Palm Springs as much as the dark edges of a banging techno track.
“The lineup is a little more sonically mature and appeals to a bit of an older demographic,” says McLean, a Palm Springs native who’s been throwing parties since grade school. Goldenvoice, a titan in the area via its marquee festival Coachella, serves as McLean’s partner on Splash House and Desert Air, with the Goldenvoice team helping assemble the lineup of some of the more prestigious names on the global electronic circuit.
The other star of the show was the Air Museum. While Splash House has been hosting afterparties here for years, Desert Air was the first festival to take place entirely at the venue. “It has just naturally grown into such an incredible piece of Splash House, and something everyone always spoke about as being one of their favorite pieces of of that event,” says McLean. “But it was always an afterparty, and there’s only so much you can do with that.”
Desert Air fully embraced its venue, turning sprawling hangars populated with fighter jets into bars and VIP lounges. Many attendees seemed as interested in exploring exhibits like “On This Day in World War II” as they were in the music, and some of the veterans from the Air Museum community were seen tapping their feet to obscure house edits. The Museum exhibits and flies aircraft from World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, with daytime Desert Air activities also including pleasure cruises on these vintage machines.
McLean says the novelty of this venue helped bring in big name acts, who played as flights took off overhead from the adjacent Palm Springs airport. Desert Air attendees arrived dressed for the weather and ready to party, with the crowd filling up the tarmac after gates opened just before sunset. The fest ended each night at a the very mature hour of 12:30 a.m., the latest that amplified music can be played outdoors according to a city ordinance.
The weekend’s highlights were many, with white hot L.A. artist Channel Tres bringing live flair to an otherwise all electronic festival, the esteemed Dixon delivering heavy Berlin vibes and Steve Martinez of the Martinez Brothers playing an often joyous house set all by himself. (Before the show, the veteran New York duo announced that only Chris Martinez would be at Desert Air, as Steve was quarantining after being exposed to Covid-19.) The underground thrust of the show was emphasized over both days, when Shazam-ing any given set returned obscure results.
Saturday night was slightly chillier than Friday, with attendees arriving in faux furs, flight suits and vintage skiwear then getting down to music from rising star TSHA and an impeccable set from the always impeccable Detroit icon Moodymann, who spent ample time on the mic giving an inspirational speech about the importance of believing in yourself. He was followed by favorite DJ Koze, who opened with his 2018 favorite “Pick Up.” Berlin-based star Peggy Gou, who’d traveled 24 hours to get to Palm Springs, took the stage in a Big Lebowski hoodie to play a deeply cool, but also energetic and often playful set featuring classics like Basement Jaxx’s “Fly Life Extra.” As the night went on it was cold enough to see your breath, but if anyone onstage was freezing, no one let on.
“We couldn’t do any heaters on stage because the airplane behind it is full of oil,” says McLean, “but all the artists were tough enough to really enjoy the experience regardless.”
NEWS
Stormzy has shared that he is returning with renewed strength after a period of being “crippled by sadness” in 2025, while also pushing back against accusations that he was “selling out” following his collaboration with McDonald’s.
The collaboration was initially revealed early last year, when the UK rapper partnered with the fast food brand to launch the first Famous Order meal across the UK and Ireland. Fans were able to order his go to meal, and a selection of merchandise was released through the McDonald’s app at the same time.
The partnership sparked criticism from some quarters due to McDonald’s perceived support of Israel, with detractors arguing that the deal appeared to contradict Stormzy’s stated values. The artist, whose real name is Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr., has previously spoken publicly in support of Palestine and performed at a benefit concert in January 2024 to help raise funds for humanitarian aid.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement had earlier backed an international boycott of McDonald’s after franchises in Israel distributed thousands of free meals to Israeli forces in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack.
Around the time the collaboration was announced, fans also noticed that the rapper had deleted a social media post from October 2023 in which he voiced his support for Palestine.
Stormzy later addressed what he described as a “twisted narrative” suggesting the post was removed because of the McDonald’s partnership. He clarified that the deletion was part of a wider clean up of his social media account, during which he removed numerous older posts.
“In that post I spoke about #FreePalestine, oppression and injustice and my stance on this has not changed,” he wrote at the time. “The brands I work with can’t tell me what to do and don’t tell me what to do otherwise I wouldn’t work with them.”
Now, Stormzy has shared another reflective message to usher in 2026, explaining that the previous year had been a deeply transformative chapter in his life, marked by his efforts to push through feeling “crippled by sadness”.
Opening the lengthy message, Stormzy described facing “a few unexpected twists and turns” at the beginning of 2025, experiences that he said strengthened his resilience and “put the final nail in the coffin of my desire to be understood”.
Reflecting on the reaction to the McDonald’s deal, he noted that “a lot of you [questioned] both my character and my integrity”, adding that a younger version of himself would have felt “compelled to quickly explain himself, and let you know that there is no world in which he would ever trade his humanity for cash”.
He explained that he no longer feels that pressure, saying he “couldn’t give a single fuck to explain that fact” because he does not “need to explain anything to anybody”.
Opening up further about the challenges he faced throughout the year, the ‘Hide & Seek’ rapper said he was determined not to allow “2025 have me on the backfoot, so I came out the first quarter with one hand down my trousers and my middle finger up”.
“Then towards the end of the summer I found myself crippled by sadness and I was struggling again,” he continued, adding that his faith and close circle of friends helped him find the strength to keep going.
“I was tested physically, spiritually, professionally and creatively. I had no choice but to reassess every detail of my life,” the post later shared. “So yes it’s been painful and at times I hated it but as the year ends and I reflect I can say that I am so so so so grateful for it.”
Looking ahead, he said that he has “gained a lot of clarity around who I am as a man and who I am as an artist, and in 2026 I want to honour that clarity with execution”.
He finished by revealing that he plans to step back from social media and confirmed that work is still ongoing on his fourth studio album.
Around the period of the McDonald’s controversy, the company’s CEO Chris Kempczinski stated that the brand had not taken sides in the conflict, describing the boycotts as “disheartening and ill founded” and attributing them to “misinformation”.
Elsewhere in Stormzy news, the London artist was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University last summer in recognition of the Stormzy Scholarship to Cambridge.
The scholarship programme began in 2018 and committed to funding two Black British students each year. With additional backing from HSBC UK, the scheme expanded to support 10 students annually, resulting in 56 students having their tuition fees and living costs fully covered.
