While you were busy listening to Father John Misty or Fleet Foxes or whatever, Electric Zoo, the EDM music festival on Randall’s Island, became a goddamn New York City institution. Now in its tenth year and completely sold out all weekend long, EZoo once again saw a massive and markedly diverse crowd of shufflers, head bangers, and generally beaded-up and nearly naked folks going nuts to more than 110 acts on five stages.
Sunday was the finale of the three-day festival, with headliners Ekali, Alesso, Gryfifin, and Tiesto ending a glorious, sweaty summer day in style. But while the all-star parade of DJs all weekend was impressive, more than at any other area festival–and there are a lot of them these days, though EZoo is the most venerable–it’s the fans that really make this event unique. These kids are amazing, and their degree of joyous engagement with the music, for hours and hours, is… probably due to drugs, sure, but also a blast to behold.
Like all festivals (and everything else) these days, there was a carefully curated roster of food vendors on hand this past weekend–Big Mozz x Cookie DO, Wowfulls, San Matteo Pizza, Tramezzini, John’s Juice, among many others–as well as plenty of booze and free water stations. Unlike other festivals, EZoo remains free of those corporate-sponsored Insta-bait installations and “worlds,” so everyone is more likely to run around and dance and snap pictures with each other rather than wait on line to take a selfie inside a building.