And it was on the ride home from this performance in the desert that the roots of their tenth album Hidden City began to take root. Critics have hailed the band as incendiary, ground-breaking, and transcendent, but the band themselves choose to look forward…and in a lot of ways, prefer to be seen as survivors…marginalized and vulgarized, much in the same way their song subjects have been. As the festival goers milled about, packing in the field in front of the stage, Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy were building up to a crescendo, of which, when the smoke cleared, Rolling Stone would hail as, “the Messianic moment of Coachella”. When The Cult were preparing to hit the stage at Coachella in 2014, few were expecting the fury that the band delivered.
