Alabama Shakes: Live From Surly Brewing Co.

Eight years of silence, broken in one night in Minneapolis — and this week, that night comes to Live Jam.

New Music Fridays presents a new live release every Friday night, and tonight’s hand-picked show is a genuinely historic one. Alabama Shakes’ set, recorded live at Surly Brewing Co.’s Festival Field in Minneapolis on August 28, 2026, marks the band’s official reunion show after an eight-year hiatus and the launch night of their full 2026 tour — a return long enough in the making that plenty of fans had quietly given up on ever seeing it happen.

The timing wasn’t left to chance. The date lined up exactly with the release of I Must Be Dreaming, the band’s first new album in eleven years, out via Island Records, meaning the Minneapolis crowd heard brand-new material performed live before most of the world had gotten through a first listen. The show was livestreamed globally for free on YouTube and nugs.net, turning a single amphitheater set into a shared moment for a fanbase that had waited the better part of a decade for it. Minneapolis made the night official too, with the city declaring August 28, 2026, “Alabama Shakes Day.”

What tonight’s broadcast actually captures, though, is a band whose shape has visibly shifted since the hiatus began. Opener Hannah Cohen set the tone before an emotionally raw set from the band itself, and Brittany Howard’s vocals carried the night almost entirely, with founding members Heath Fogg and Zac Cockrell positioned further back in the mix alongside three backing vocalists and three touring musicians filling out the sound. Former drummer Steve Johnson sat this one out due to ongoing personal legal matters, with a touring drummer stepping in for the night — a reminder that a reunion this long in the making doesn’t necessarily mean everything snaps back exactly the way it was.

Musically, the set leaned hard into the new record alongside the catalog’s biggest moments, “Hold On” included, while notably skipping Howard’s solo-era material entirely — a set built to honor Alabama Shakes as a band, not as a platform for its most famous member’s side career. Tune in tonight at 9 PM EST and catch the full reunion set exactly as it happened.

Billie Eilish and James Cameron’s Stadium Film Finds Its Streaming Home

A cold email after a Manchester show turned into one of the most technically ambitious concert films ever made.

It’s an odd pairing on paper: a 24-year-old pop artist known for whispered vocals and bedroom-pop intimacy, and the director behind two of the highest-grossing films in history, both built on cutting-edge 3D technology. But Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), co-directed by Billie Eilish and James Cameron, is exactly that pairing, and it’s now widely available on major streaming platforms following its May 2026 theatrical run through Paramount Pictures — with a permanent home on Paramount+.

The collaboration began, by most accounts, about as informally as a project like this can: Cameron reached out to Eilish directly by email after attending one of her shows in Manchester, England. Eilish was reportedly hesitant at first, worried that bulky camera rigs on her stage would compromise the visual flow of a show built around tight choreography and lighting design. Cameron spent roughly six months making the case that the raw, close-up intensity of her performances would translate into something genuinely new in native 3D — persistent enough that Eilish eventually stepped in not just as a subject but as a formal co-director.

The execution backs up that persistence. The film was shot over four nights using an array of 17 moving stereoscopic cameras, with Cameron’s production banner, Lightstorm Vision, bringing in specialized AI-driven tools from 3D tech firm Outsyders to fine-tune depth and color grading across a constantly moving arena environment. The staging itself was unusual by pop-concert standards: a long, gray rectangular runway built directly into the center of the arena floor, placing Eilish physically inside her audience rather than facing it from a traditional stage.

Across a 29-song set pulled largely from her third studio album, the film swings between massive arena sing-alongs on songs like “Birds of a Feather” and “Bad Guy” and near-silent solo moments, including Eilish alone with a live vocal loop pedal building the harmony for “when the party’s over” from scratch, in real time, in front of tens of thousands of people. Her core touring band, backup singers Jane and Ava, and her brother and longtime producer FINNEAS all make appearances throughout.

What ultimately sets the film apart from a standard concert-film cash-in is what Cameron originally wanted to leave out. Against Eilish’s initial instincts, he pushed to include raw, unedited backstage footage — her ankles being taped and her makeup applied before she runs out to the crowd, candid moments where she discusses chronic shin splints and ankle strain from her physically demanding performance style, and a look inside a wellness room she keeps backstage on tour that’s stocked entirely with local rescue dogs available for adoption. Critics have responded well: the film holds a Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Cameron describing the effect he was chasing as a “tuning fork effect” — the specific emotional frequency and closeness Eilish shares with a stadium full of strangers.

Sources: Deadline, The New York Times, Variety, Reuters

Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning Heads to Theaters

Captured seventeen days before his death, Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance becomes a permanent memorial.

Some concert films exist to capture a moment. This one exists to preserve a goodbye. Back to the Beginning documents the final live performance of heavy metal’s most enduring frontman, and it’s headed for a global theatrical event beginning October 28, 2026, with tickets going on sale September 24.

The 100-minute film captures the Back to the Beginning stadium festival held July 5, 2025, at Villa Park in Osbourne’s own hometown of Birmingham, England — a show that featured a solo set from Ozzy alongside a reunion with the original Black Sabbath lineup of Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward, the first time all four had shared a stage in over twenty years. The setlist leaned on the band’s most definitive material: “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” songs that essentially invented the vocabulary heavy metal has used ever since.

The emotional weight here is difficult to overstate. The concert was filmed just seventeen days before Osbourne passed away on July 22, 2025, at the age of 76. According to his wife Sharon Osbourne, his one wish at the end of his life was to perform once more, specifically to say goodbye and thank the fans who’d followed him for more than five decades. That context reframes every frame of the film — not as a farewell tour stop, but as a man closing out his entire public life on his own terms, in his own hometown, with the band that started it all.

The production itself was built for exactly this kind of permanence. Produced by Mercury Studios and distributed by Trafalgar Releasing, the film was engineered specifically for theatrical presentation, with immersive Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound designed to put audiences inside the stadium rather than simply watching it. It’s directed by Ben Wainwright-Pearce, who previously edited Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — a filmmaker with direct experience turning a massive single-day event into something that holds up as a standalone piece of cinema.

The original festival itself was hosted by actor Jason Momoa, with Tom Morello serving as musical director, and included supporting sets from Metallica and Guns N’ Roses across a ten-hour day. The film distills all of that down into a focused, deliberately intimate portrait of one artist’s final bow — a love letter with an ending everyone involved already knew was coming.

Sources: PA Media, AXS, BBC, Ultimate Classic Rock

Reeperbahn Festival 2026 Kicks Off in Hamburg

45,000 fans, 340 artists, and 70 stages — Europe’s biggest club-circuit festival takes over St. Pauli this week.

While most major festivals are built around a handful of headliners on a handful of stages, Reeperbahn has always worked in the opposite direction. This year’s 21st edition has officially opened in Hamburg, transforming the city’s famous St. Pauli entertainment district — better known internationally for its nightlife than its music-industry infrastructure — into what’s widely regarded as one of the most important business platforms in global live music, running September 16 through 19.

The scale is the whole point. Organizers are expecting more than 45,000 international fans and industry professionals to move through the district this week, taking in around 340 international and emerging artists spread across more than 70 distinct stages and clubs — everything from small rooms like Docks and Kent Club up to the architecturally striking Elbphilharmonie concert hall. It’s less a single festival than an entire city district reorganized, for four days, around live music discovery.

That dual identity — fan festival and industry trade show — is baked into how Reeperbahn operates. Alongside the public-facing showcases, the Reeperbahn Conference brings in more than 6,000 labels, booking agents, and music professionals from around the world for matchmaking sessions, panels, and networking built specifically around discovering the next wave of touring artists before anyone else has. For 2026, Ukraine holds the festival’s official Guest Country of Honor designation, giving Ukrainian artists and industry professionals a dedicated platform within the broader event.

The 2026 lineup leans heavily toward buzz over brand recognition, with acts like Pale Waves, Dry Cleaning, Anna von Hausswolff, Dream Wife, Fat Dog, HVOB, and Dotan representing the kind of emerging, critically-watched artists Reeperbahn has built its reputation on breaking. The festival’s public hub sits at Spielbudenplatz, an open-access meeting ground hosting live podcast recordings, street art, food vendors, and spoken-word performances — a free, walk-up counterpart to the ticketed club circuit happening around it.

Sources: Reeperbahn Festival, IQ Magazine, DIY Magazine

Live Entertainment Tech Giant Fever Raises $250 Million

A $5.2 billion valuation signals just how much money is now chasing pop-up culture and live event discovery.

The ticketing and event-tech giant Fever, the platform behind DICE, has raised an unprecedented $250 million in its latest funding round, pushing the company to a $5.2 billion valuation. It’s the kind of number that puts Fever squarely among the most heavily capitalized companies in live entertainment technology, well outside the traditional territory occupied by legacy ticketing platforms.

Fever built its business on a model that looks fairly different from traditional concert ticketing: immersive pop-up experiences, candlelight concerts in unconventional venues, and curated local event discovery, layered on top of DICE’s more conventional live-music ticketing infrastructure after the two companies combined forces. This new capital injection is being framed around expanding that immersive, pop-up side of the business globally, alongside continued growth in core live-event ticket access.

The raise lands at a notable moment for the industry. With Live Nation and Ticketmaster facing continued antitrust fallout and pressure to loosen their grip on the market, a well-funded, fast-growing alternative platform gaining this kind of capital and valuation is exactly the sort of development regulators and rival promoters alike are likely to be watching closely.

Gorillaz Kick Off The Mountain Tour, Their First U.S. Run Since 2022

A full-circle opening slot for Deltron 3030 gives this run a hip-hop pedigree most arena tours can’t touch.

Gorillaz’s animated members rarely tour this extensively on North American soil, which makes The Mountain Tour worth flagging on scale alone. The 22-date arena and amphitheater run kicked off September 17, 2026, in Orlando, Florida, and will travel through the U.S. and Canada before wrapping on Halloween night in Seattle — the band’s first extensive North American trek since 2022.

The tour supports the virtual band’s ninth studio album, The Mountain, released earlier this year on their own KONG label and featuring experimental collaborations with IDLES, Sparks, and Yasiin Bey. Live, the show blends masterminds Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s famous animated characters — 2D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel — projected across massive screens, backed by a powerhouse live band fronted by Albarn himself.

The most meaningful pairing on the bill, though, might be the opener. Deltron 3030 — the sci-fi rap supergroup made up of Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and Kid Koala — is opening all 22 dates. It’s a genuine full-circle moment: Del the Funky Homosapien provided the iconic guest verses on Gorillaz’s breakout 2001 hit “Clint Eastwood,” meaning the collaboration that helped put Gorillaz on the map twenty-five years ago is now literally opening their biggest U.S. tour in years. UK rap artist Little Simz rounds out the bill, opening the majority of dates as well.

Major stops include Atlanta’s Shaky Knees Festival on September 20, Madison Square Garden on September 29, and the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on October 24. New York fans have an added reason to circle the calendar: the House of Kong visual exhibition in Brooklyn, chronicling the band’s 25-year history, runs concurrently through September 28. Between Gorillaz dates, Deltron 3030 has also added a handful of intimate solo headline club shows in cities like Baltimore and Asheville.

Sources: Consequence, Hypebeast, Music Fiends

Beirut Announces First North American Tour in Eight Years

Zach Condon’s indie-folk project is dipping a toe back into U.S. touring with just six shows.

Zach Condon’s Beirut project has spent the last eight years almost entirely absent from North American stages, even while staying active across European festival circuits and in the studio. That changes in Spring 2027, when Beirut returns for a brief, highly anticipated run focused on intimate performances in historic theaters and major arts venues.

The tour follows the release of Beirut’s eighth studio album, A Study of Losses, an 18-track record originally commissioned by the Swedish acrobat troupe Kompani Giraff and heavily inspired by Judith Schalansky’s book An Inventory of Losses. The album expands Beirut’s already orchestral, horn-driven sound with choral and ambient elements, giving the material a scale that fits unusually well in the kind of ornate, historic rooms this tour is built around.

True to that scale, the band is treating this explicitly as a limited reintroduction rather than a full comeback tour — a strictly six-date run across five cities. That includes back-to-back shows at Brooklyn Steel in New York on April 2 and 3, followed by stops at Roadrunner in Boston, the iconic 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., the Salt Shed in Chicago, and History in Toronto to close things out on April 13.

For a band that built its reputation on ornate, old-world arrangements as much as any specific hit song, returning to rooms with genuine architectural character — rather than standard arena boxes — feels like a deliberate match between the material and the setting. Tickets for the East Coast and Midwest dates are currently available via Ticketmaster and Beirut’s official website.

Sources: Pitchfork, Consequence, Glide Magazine

Hans Zimmer Locks In 2027 Arena Dates

Following sold-out European runs, the film composer brings a self-described “rave party” version of his scores back to U.S. arenas.

Hans Zimmer built his reputation scoring some of the highest-grossing and most acclaimed films of the last three decades, and over the past several years he’s built a second, parallel career translating that catalog into full-scale live arena shows. The newly finalized “Hans Zimmer Live – The Next Level” tour leg marks his high-profile return to major arenas across the United States and Canada, following a string of sold-out European dates. The 30-date run kicks off February 17, 2027, in Hartford, Connecticut, and closes April 11 in Portland, Oregon.

What separates this from a standard orchestral touring show is the framing. Zimmer himself has described The Next Level as a reinvention designed to feel “like a rave party or riding a roller coaster,” blending massive orchestral arrangements of his best-known cinematic scores with electronic soundscapes, elaborate stage design, and high-energy lighting — a deliberate departure from the more reverent, seated-orchestra presentation audiences might expect from film music performed live.

Notably, this isn’t a curated tribute where Zimmer stays behind the scenes. Unlike the concurrent The World of Hans Zimmer arena show, which he curates but doesn’t personally perform in, Zimmer will be on stage for every date of The Next Level, performing alongside a powerhouse 19-piece live band. The setlist draws from a genuinely staggering catalog: Dune, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy, Gladiator, The Lion King, and Pirates of the Caribbean all make appearances.

The route hits flagship North American venues including UBS Arena in New York on February 19, Prudential Center in New Jersey on February 21, United Center in Chicago on March 5, Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on April 1, and Chase Center in San Francisco on April 4. Tickets open to the general public Friday, September 25, at 10:00 AM local time via Ticketmaster, with American Express cardholder presales beginning September 23 and official artist registration presales on September 24.

Sources: Billboard, Hans Zimmer Live, Pollstar

Freedom Mortgage Pavilion’s Country-to-Indie Double Header

Camden’s waterfront amphitheater is stacking two very different nights back to back. Tomorrow night brings a heavy country bill headlined by Jason Aldean alongside Chase Matthew, one of the bigger mainstream country pairings to hit the venue this season. Then next Thursday, indie favorites Mt. Joy headline their own outdoor show, swinging the venue’s calendar from stadium-country energy to warm, harmony-driven indie rock in less than a week.

Sources: AnyTicket, BroadwayWorld

Haddon Avenue Street Festival Returns to Farnham Park

The annual Haddon Avenue Street Festival returns tomorrow, taking over Farnham Park with a full lineup of regional musicians, local food vendors, and area makers. It’s the kind of community-built block festival that doesn’t chase big-name headliners so much as give the neighborhood a full day built around local talent — a genuine grassroots counterpart to the bigger amphitheater bookings happening the same weekend.

Wilson’s Live Music Showcases Keep the Room Booked

The local South Jersey restaurant and live lounge room has locked in R&B/soul group Velvet Remedy tonight, giving the area a genuinely soulful option for anyone not heading to a bigger stage this evening. Looking further out, Wilson’s has a multi-genre roots night on the calendar next month featuring The Vilage Bridge Band, continuing the room’s run as one of the more reliable smaller-venue bookers in the region.

Sources: Facebook, Eventbrite

UB40’s Unstoppable Journey Rolls Through the Area

Reggae mainstays UB40 are crossing the country on The Unstoppable Tour 2026, and the run hits landmark theaters along the way, including a stop at the historic Keswick Theatre. Few bands have carried reggae into mainstream Western pop as durably as UB40 has since the early 1980s, and a theater-scale room gives longtime fans a far more intimate setting than the band’s biggest festival dates.

Sara Bareilles Launches Her First Tour in Seven Years

Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles is launching her highly anticipated theater run, The Good Grief Tour, this month in support of her new studio record — her first tour in seven years, following a stretch spent largely focused on television, theater writing, and other creative projects outside of touring. The run hits major theater stops around the country, including a headline date at The Met Philadelphia, giving local fans a rare chance to see her in a full theatrical production after such a long gap between tours.

Liz Phair & Sleater-Kinney Team Up for a Co-Headlining Run

Two of indie rock’s most influential and uncompromising voices are sharing a bill: Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney have teamed up for a major co-headlining package tour, stopping at major rock rooms including Philadelphia’s Franklin Music Hall. Both acts helped define what indie and alternative rock sounded like coming out of the 1990s, and pairing them on the same night gives longtime fans of either artist a genuinely rare double bill.