By the fourth year you’d think one would have the foresight to pack some goddamn sunscreen. I didn’t, though, because I was flagrantly ignoring what has come to be familiar: Portola Festival is located atop the same sprawling asphaltic plane in San Francisco’s South Bay as it always has been. And, as has been the case since 2022, tens of thousands of festival-goers (this year, approximately 90,000 over the course of the weekend) flock to Pier 80 for the buzzy Goldenvoice techno fest, all attendees operating under the expectation that there are languorous hours to be spent under the sun and at least thirty-five miles to walk over the course of the weekend. There’s boatloads of money to be Apple Paid in exchange for RedBulls or sweatshirts or nachos, and sets to miss because one is lingering for far too long on a particularly energetic dancefloor, and long lost friends with whom one will exchange sidelong glances and no verbal hellos, and time to be spent regretting the skimpier outfit choice after the afternoon sun tucks itself into the crest of the coastal mountains.

At Portola, these sorts of obstacles are routine. If you’re a real Portolahead, you do things like, for example, forget to bring sunscreen for the fourth year in a row—because even though you’re well aware of the actualities of the festival, the logistical inconveniences of attending one of the most magnificently large parties in the Bay Area are, on a yearly basis, entirely eclipsed by how incredible the music is, how potent and clean the sound feels when it washes over your body, the way you feel buoyed by the stranger you dance with, chest to chest, in the Ship Tent. In the case of Portola Festival, detail becomes ancillary to bodily experience. I’m too easily enamored by the way a polyrhythm bubbles out from a speaker on one side of the pier and vibrates the concrete beneath my rubber soles to fixate on sunscreen application. Thank God for the medical tent and for the kindness of strangers. 

And this year’s iteration of Portola Festival surmounted other years by far: with a lineup offering a seductive mix of legacy acts (Moby, Underworld, Christina Aguilera, Blessed Madonna, The Chemical Brothers) and fresher faces (1tbsp, DJ Gigola, Kumo 99), alongside tenured festival favorites (Dom Dolla, Peggy Gou, Mau P), the event delivered on its regular promise: if one can arrive at Pier 80 ready to dance, Portola will await with a selection of dance music from every decade and genre and taste. 

The unquestionable standout of this year, though, was egalitarian dance space Despacio. Created by James Murphy (frontman of this year’s headliner, LCD Soundsystem) alongside Soulwax and sound designer John Klett, Despacio is heralded as both a “sound system” and a “dance experience” taken to various festival locales across the globe. It’s a separate tent, tucked in the periphery of the campus, where seven McIntosh-powered amplifiers/speaker stacks blast slower, groovier vinyl tracks to the crowd inside, all of whom are made to face each other. There is a singular line outside (I pass someone brandishing a VIP wristband and a guard tells them, “Everyone’s the same in Despacio, buddy”). Inside, a disco ball and some lasers occasionally alight the faces of the crowd, but mostly, people sway in complete and utter darkness, their eyes having to soften to the rigid black of the tent. It’s a sensate experience, one I’ve never been made to feel even in the darkest of the late-night warehouse haunts. Despacio commands sensorial attention and forces one to reckon with the limits of their own body and their expectations of other bodies. It was, I believe, the most apropos addition to this year’s lineup. Upon exiting, I heard a nearby partygoer compare her time inside to taking a nap, not because she was exhausted but because it consumed her sense of time and “washed” her brain. 

Other standouts: Arca, who made a triumphant return after her (equally fabulous!) appearance in Portola’s first year; Hamdi, Tunisian artist who had the crowd in the Ship Tent so swollen that it was not difficult to imagine he’d climb up to a later spot in the evening next year. Blood Orange, who performed to nary a dry eye as the clouds entombed themselves in a sort of Sunday evening amber; and, a personal favorite, Rico Nasty—a rapper and singer with an effervescent stage presence that had a crowd of thousands thanking God they didn’t have to smack a bitch that day.

Any conversation about Portola would be remiss, though, without mention of the ever-sprawling afters event series. It’s something unique (and quite respectable, given the festival’s increasingly unattainable two-day price point and stratified VIP system) about Portola— those who can’t make the full day, or can make the full day but just want a little bit more, exit Pier 80 by 11pm and subsequently disperse to venues throughout the city of San Francisco for official afterparties helmed by various performers from the weekend. It’s a nod to the DIY ethos of the city, and to the DIY ethos at the heart of the festival itself, endeavoring to make the party just a tad more accessible to those who want to revel in it, too.

After all, dance music—techno and house and trance and disco and hyphy and everything that could possibly eek into the bones and musculature of the listener and animate them with some sort of rhythm—is about feeling. Portola wants its festival goers to feel really, really good. Portola wants to make San Francisco feel really, really good. In its fourth year, Portola has burgeoned into a tangible institution; one with longevity and weight. You can really feel yourself in its clutches now, as your legs ache from dancing and you’re nursing a preventable sunburn, but there’s no end in the foreseeable future. You just have to let yourself feel it and let yourself love the feeling.