Charli XCX Joins The Strokes for 'Take It or Leave It' at Outside Lands 2026

Charli XCX walked on stage during The Strokes' headlining set at Outside Lands in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Saturday night, joining the band to perform 'Take It or Leave It', the closing track of their 2001 debut album Is This It?. The appearance was unannounced. Rolling Stone reported the moment on 9 August 2026.

Julian Casablancas introduced her to the crowd as "a special little guest. A big guest. A superstar." Charli XCX had headlined the festival herself the previous night, Friday 7 August, making the cameo a return to the same stage roughly 24 hours later. NME also confirmed the performance.

The two artists have shared a stage before. Casablancas appeared on a reworking of 'Mean Girls' for Charli XCX's remix album Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat, a companion project that revisited tracks from her 2024 album Brat with guest collaborators. Their Outside Lands duet drew on a different catalogue entirely: 'Take It or Leave It' is pure Strokes, a garage-rock album closer that has nothing to do with Charli XCX's own material. She sang it alongside the band rather than reshaping it.

Outside Lands 2026 ran across the weekend of 7–9 August at Golden Gate Park, with Charli XCX, Rüfüs Du Sol and The Strokes as the three headliners, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The lineup also included The xx, Turnstile, Geese, Clipse, Empire of the Sun and PinkPantheress, the latter also performing at the festival across the weekend, as Riff Magazine noted. Performances were livestreamed on Prime Video from Friday 7 August, per Yahoo Entertainment.

The festival-circuit crossover does not end in San Francisco. Charli XCX is next scheduled to headline the UK's Reading and Leeds festivals, while The Strokes are booked for the Summer Sonic festivals in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. Whether the collaboration travels beyond Outside Lands has not been announced.

For fans who caught the livestream or the fan footage circulating online, the appeal was straightforward: two artists from very different corners of the 21st-century pop landscape, sharing a song neither of them wrote for the other, and making it work on a Saturday night in a park.