Coachella Announces 2012 Lineup; Expands to Two Weekends

Coachella fans, your wait is over: the lineup was announced last night for the festival's 2012 edition. For the first time ever, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will be held over two consecutive weekends, April 12th to the 15th and April 20th to the 22th. What's more, the lineups are exactly the same for each weekend (all bands playing on the first Friday are playing on the second Friday. etc.).

You'll see the full lineup in the poster below, and some of it in this post below the poster. (Since the poster photo here is small, see the Coachella site and click on the poster graphic at the lower left corner to see a larger version.) Check out the Coachella 2012 lineup in alphabetical order, with social media links for performers, on the festival's lineup page.

Coachella 2012 has a strong lineup each day.

Headliners for Coachella 2012 will be the Black Keys on Friday, Radiohead on Saturday, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on Sunday. And the rest of the lineup is quite strong, too. Here's a brief look at some of the acts performing:

Friday: The Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Pulp, Refused, Arctic Monkeys, Mazzy Star, Afrojack, Explosions in the Sky, M83, Amon Tobin, Cat Power, Jimmy Cliff, Girls, and The Horrors.

Saturday: Radiohead, Bon Iver, the Shins, David Guetta, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Kaskade, Miike Snow, Jeff Mangum, Sebatian Ingrosso, Andrew Bird, Feist, Firehose, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, St. Vincent, SDTRKT, Kasabian, and Buzzcocks.

Sunday: Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, At the Drive-In, Justice, Florence and the Machine, AVICII, La Roux, Beirut, The Weeknd, Girl Talk, the Hives, DJ Shadow, Wild Flag, and Calvin Harris.

And those are just the acts listed on the top three of the six or seven lines on the Coachella poster. Other highly popular performers include groups that have headlines arena shows or have had well-reviewed albums that showed up on many "best-of" lists in 2011.

This includes Texas psychedelic rockers the Black Angels, the quirky Tune-Yards, British pop-folk singer Laura Marling, and the all-female Mexican garage-rock group Le Butcherettes, whose album "Sin Sin Sin" was named best of the year by Jim DeRogatis of the "Sound Opinions" music podcast.

It's not unusual for defunct bands to herald their return at big festivals, such as Rage Against the Machine did at Coachella a few years back. This year the much-admired post-hardcore band At the Drive-In, which split up more than a decade ago, announced its return with a new Twitter account (@AtTheDriveIn_).

Coachella is held at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, California. Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time.