CHICAGO — Lollapalooza hit its Day 4 homestretch on Sunday in Grant Park, with the gates opening on time after rains and flooding forced a late start on Saturday.

Closing headliners are Canadian singer-songwriter Tate McRae and the British indie rock band The xx.

With seas of mud everywhere, the skies remained stubbornly misty and cool through midafternoon, and crowds slow to arrive. The Los Angeles pop duo After pulled an audience early at the Airbnb stage but there were no lines and no waiting to get close to the barricades to catch New York hip hop group Whatmore as the openers on the Bud Light stage.

Regardless, by the final day, Sunday was officially sold out, with a daily capacity of 115,000 under the festival’s current contract with the city through 2032.

Managing large audiences has been top of mind for festivals since the crowding fatalities during Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld concert in Houston.

This year, festgoer Kat Tripp of Carbondale said she has watched several artists pause their sets as messages flashed on the video screens for fans to step back, before continuing. But except for breakout artist Audrey Hobert’s Thursday set at the Allianz stage, where the crowd packed the field so tightly that the 20-year-old struggled to find a place to stand, she said navigating the festival has been easier than expected.

“We’ve just rolled up and ended up pretty close to the stage without really trying,” said Tripp. “I feel like there’s always been enough room to move around, even when there’s masses of people.”

The highlight of her weekend came Friday evening, when she danced through Charli xcx’s set by the T-Mobile stage. She barely noticed the buckets of water pouring down from the sky, and neither did the crowd around her.

“Honestly, I feel like people like a rain show. It ups the vibes in a way,” she said. “For a second, people were like ‘let me put all my important belongings away,’ but then it was awesome.”

Unlike Chappell Roan’s famous daytime set in 2024, no single music act seemed to dominate this year, with many of the nighttime headliners drawing roughly equal crowds to opposite ends of the park. It’s hard to say, between Lorde and John Summit, who pulled more people on opening day.

Though Charli xcx was the favorite on Friday, Chicago band Smashing Pumpkins also was well-attended in the wet.

Along with weather and crowds, there are other safety concerns at Lollapalooza.

Ingela Travers-Hayward has spent the past four years distributing free naloxone with her husband from a booth inside the grounds. On Sunday, a steady stream of festivalgoers stopped by for a lesson on how to administer the opioid reversal medication before walking away with plastic dispensers around their necks.

“The demographic that you get to reach at Lollapalooza are people from all walks of life,” said Travers-Hayward, 41, who founded the harm-reduction nonprofit This Must Be the Place in 2022. “But the common denominator here is everyone cares about people in a way they maybe didn’t before.”

Travers-Hayward said demand has been higher than ever this year, with her team distributing 4,000 doses by Friday night. So far, she’s heard from teenagers who administered naloxone to someone overdosing on the train ride home, and from attendees who returned to replace unused doses they picked up the year before.

Along with medical staff inside the fences, the volunteer safety organization Red Frogs has been at Lolla for the first time this year and keeping watch over young attendees as they exit.

And the attendees are looking to contribute themselves, said Ava Lange as she huddled with a group of friends deciding which set to catch next. In one hand, she gripped a large green plastic bag, part of a sustainability program that rewards festivalgoers with a T-shirt for filling it with recyclables.

“At the end of the night on Thursday, we saw how dirty all the floors were, and then we saw people cleaning up with these bags,” said Lange, 19, who planned to fill her own bag after headliner Tate McRae’s set. “The people here actually care, and nowadays, you don’t see a lot of communities like that.”

By early Sunday afternoon, the program had already rewarded 16 T-shirts.

Along the curbs of Columbus Avenue, festivalgoers washed down steaming Polish sausages with cups of fresh passion fruit juice. Others filed into the line for the festival’s new Ferris wheel, hoping for a glimpse of the Chicago skyline.

Towards the festival’s main entrance, the Clark family debated where to grab lunch. They traveled from Ohio to see some of their favorite artists, relying on scheduled check-ins throughout the day so everyone could catch their favorite sets without losing track of one another.

“It’s fun to listen to different kinds of music that I wouldn’t be listening to just on my phone,” said Evie Clark, 13. Lorde’s Thursday night performance was the sisters’ favorite set of the weekend, and both were counting down to McRae’s closing act Sunday night.

“Going with family is something that you can’t forget,” said Hadley Clark, 16.

Other festivalgoers were even younger than the Clark sisters, some catching glimpses of headliners from atop their parents’ shoulders. Unless, of course, they were dancing at Kidzapalooza, a stage reserved for child-friendly performers.

There, as the Chicago hip hop duo Q Brothers performed alongside 12-year-old freestyle rapper JJQ, the average audience member stood only a few feet tall. The surrounding lawn was dotted with padded beanbags and colorful blankets, offering a welcome refuge for children tired from trekking across Grant Park.

“Normally, you can’t take your kids to festivals,” said Carina Holzapfel, 35, who traveled with her family from Philadelphia. “This gives us the freedom to enjoy this experience with her.”

Holzapfel pointed to her daughter, Elena, who sat still while a stylist wove a neon extension into her long brown hair.

For the more musically inclined children, volunteers led drum circles and hosted workshops on rapping and beatboxing. Festival staff turned away adults who tried to enter without a child. Once inside, there were only a few rules: no crying, no hitting and no pouting.

“They get to experience what it’s like to walk thousands of steps from park to park,” said Andrea Sanchez, a Humboldt Park resident, as she watched her 2-year-old pull brightly colored discs from an oversized Connect Four game. “And once they’re tired, we come to Kidzapalooza.”

Sanchez said the family’s next stop was the T-Mobile stage, where Slovak singer-songwriter Adéla drew a tightly packed crowd for her late-afternoon set. There, crowds cheered as the former competitive ballerina twirled and whipped her neon hair through the air.

“She’s incredible,” said Kylie Schmidt, 23, as she watched. “She was hungry (to perform), and we wanted it.”

Across the way, a thumping bass line echoed from Perry’s stage, where U.K.-based DJ and producer Riordan was midway through his set. Within minutes, festivalgoers could move between Slovak pop and British electronic music.

That variety was part of the appeal for Haley Genz, an opera singer from Wisconsin. Genz and her friend, also a musician, were still talking about Olivia Dean’s performance the night before.

“As classical musicians, to see a headliner that was essentially a jazz show was insane,” said Genz, 28. “We’re just bouncing around constantly, going back and forth between pop, R&B, metal and punk,” added her friend, 28-year-old Renée Blaesing.

Another standout, Blaesing said, was Kyoto’s all-female hardcore punk quartet, Otoboke Beaver. By the end of the set, she’d already added several of their songs to her playlist, along with a few from indie rock band Momma.

It was raining when Momma took the stage Saturday, and the crowd was relatively small, Blaesing said. Even so, they brought some of the best energy she’d seen all week.

“It’s so important to go see artists that you would not usually listen to,” said Blaesing, who also traveled from Wisconsin. “Expand your worldview, expand your personage, expand everything that you believe about music.”

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