After a tumultuous few years of cancellations, J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival announced that it will return next spring, expanding, in the process, from a one to two-day festival. The dates are Saturday, April 2 and Sunday, April 3 at Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Park. 

Dreamville was postponed in 2018, in what was supposed to be its launch year, when the looming category 4 storm Hurricane Florence pushed the festival from the fall to the spring of 2019. That inaugural festival drew 40,000 people to downtown Raleigh with a stacked lineup of performances from Cole, SZA, Big Sean, Nelly, Teyana Taylor, and Rapsody, among others. 

2020 would’ve been Dreamville’s second year, but the pandemic, of course, had other plans. 

“It’s exciting to finally be back. Ever since we wrapped our first fest, we’ve been waiting to get back to the park with our Dreamville family,” Dreamville Partner and Festival President Adam Roy said in a press release. “We had to come back bigger and better than before. With the fest moving to two days, Dreamville Festival is about to become the festival our team has always dreamt about. We want this to grow into one of the premier annual music experiences in the country.”

The lineup has not yet been announced, but tickets will be available Friday, October 1, with a presale as early as Tuesday, September 28. The festival has already announced updated precautionary measures—learning, perhaps, from other festivals like Hopscotch, which had to scramble to adjust safety measures when the Delta variant caused an uptick in cases—and will require proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test for entrance.

The festival announcement coincides with the tenth anniversary of J. Cole’s debut album, Cole World: The Sideline Story, which was released on September 27, 2011. 

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Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.