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The Darkness Announce 20th Anniversary ‘Permission to Land’ Tour for 2023

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of their hit album  Permission to Land , The Darkness have just announced a headlining North American tour in October.

Released in 2003, The Darkness' debut album was a big commercial success, largely thanks to the smash single "I Believe In a Thing Called Love," which peaked at No. 35 on Billboard's US Mainstream Top 40 chart.

Fans can expect to see the band perform all 11 songs off  Permission to Land , as well as additional cuts from their other six albums, the latest being 2021's  Motorheart .

“When Permission to Land landed 20 short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe," comments frontman Justin Hawkins , "As if by magic, rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.”

READ MORE: The Darkness' Justin Hawkins Defends Lars Ulrich's 'Iconic' Drumming in Reaction Video

The tour kicks off on Oct. 3 in San Francisco and will wrap up in Washington D.C. on Oct. 22. See the full list of stops below.

Ticket pre-sales begin on June 6 at 12PM local times with the public on-sale following on June 9 beginning at 10AM local time at this location .

The Darkness 2023 U.S. Tour Dates

Oct. 03 — San Francisco, Calif. @ The Masonic Oct. 04 — Sacramento, Calif. @ Ace of Spades Oct. 06 — Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Wiltern Oct. 07 — Tempe, Ariz. @ Marquee Theatre Oct. 08 — Las Vegas, Nev. @ Brooklyn Bowl Oct. 10 — Denver, Colo. @ Summit Music Hall Oct. 11 — Kansas City, Mo. @ The Truman Oct. 13 — Chicago, Ill. @ The Vic Theatre Oct. 14 — Indianapolis, Ind. @ The Vogue Oct. 15 — Detroit, Mich. @ Saint Andrew’s Hall Oct. 17 — Boston, Mass. @ Big Night Live Oct. 18 — New York, N.Y. @ Terminal 5 Oct. 19 — Philadelphia, Pa. @ Franklin Music Hall Oct. 21 — Sayreville, N.J. @ Starland Ballroom Oct. 22 — Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club

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THE DARKNESS ANNOUNCE PERMISSION TO LAND 20TH ANNIVERSARY WORLD TOUR!

The Darkness News 22 March 2023

EUROPEAN DATES REVEALED

More shows around the planet to be announced soon.

Today the band are delighted to announce 13 European dates on the Permission To Land 20 tour, with many more jaw-dropping, show-stopping concerts around the world to be revealed shortly.

Frontman Justin Hawkins comments:

“When Permission to Land landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, Rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…

Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! 

The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.” 

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of ‘Black Shuck’ they’ll blast their way through all of Permission To Land ’s 11 tracks, including ‘Growing On Me’, ‘Love Is Only A Feeling’, ‘Giving Up’, ‘Love On The Rocks With No Ice’, ‘Get Your Hands Off My Woman’ and of course the iconic ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’.

And of course, in addition to that splendid confection of rock brilliance, Justin, Dan, Frankie and Rufus will pump out a bonus ‘Best Of The Rest’ set, stuffed to the gills with all the hits and fan favourites from their six subsequent studio albums. It’s enough to make any right-thinking music fan go weak at the knees!

There will also be a very special expanded Permission To Land deluxe album release coming later this year via Warner Music, with further details to be revealed soon.

PERMISSION TO LAND 20 EUROPEAN TOUR DATES

07-Nov    Germany, Berlin, Admiralspalast

08-Nov    Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle

09-Nov    Germany, Cologne Essigfabrik

11-Nov    Germany, Munich, Technikum

13-Nov   Italy, Rome Orion

14-Nov    Italy, Milan, Alcatraz

15-Nov    Italy, Modena, Vox

17-Nov    Switzerland, Prattlen, Z7

18-Nov    Luxembourg Den Atelier

20-Nov    Switzerland, Bern Muhle Hunziken

22-Nov    Belguim, Brussels, AB

23-Nov    France, Paris, La Cigale

24-Nov    Holland, Amsterdam Melkweg Max

permission to land the darkness tour world tour

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THE DARKNESS Announce North American Dates of Permission To Land 20 Tour

Band celebrates 20th anniversary of multi-platinum debut album.

17 June 2023 The Rockpit

This year finds Britain’s beloved rock band THE DARKNESS  – singer/guitarist Justin Hawkins, guitarist Dan Hawkins, bassist Frankie Poullain, drummer Rufus Taylor – celebrating 20 years since they birthed Permission To Land, the multi-platinum, chart-topping debut album that changed the face of rock music forever. To celebrate the landmark occasion, The Darkness will embark on the global Permission To Land 20 tour, with North American dates kicking off on October 3rd in San Francisco and wrapping on October 22nd in Washington, D.C. Tickets here

Frontman Justin Hawkins shares, “When Permission to Land landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, Rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.”

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of “Black Shuck” they’ll blast their way through all of Permission To Land’s eleven tracks, including “Growing On Me,” “Love Is Only A Feeling,” “Giving Up,” “Love On The Rocks With No Ice,” “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” and of course the iconic “I Believe In A Thing Called Love.”

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The Darkness Plots ‘Permission to Land 20′ North American Tour

The Darkness has announced North American tour dates commemorating the 20th anniversary of their debut album  Permission to Land .

The Permission to Land 20 trek begins on Oct. 3 in San Francisco and concludes on Oct. 22 in Washington, D.C. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday. You can see the full list of dates below and find more information on the band's website .

"When Permission to Land landed, 20 short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe," frontman Justin Hawkins shared in a statement. "As if by magic, rock wasn't dead! Fun wasn't banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again. Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver every time. Bring on the next 20! The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever."

Released in July 2003, Permission to Land  topped the album chart in the Darkness' native U.K., spurred by the No. 2-peaking single " I Believe in a Thing Called Love ." The album sold more than a million copies there and over 500,000 in the U.S., securing the band an RIAA gold certification. The glam-rock revivalists have since released seven studio albums, most recently 2021's  Motorheart . A deluxe edition of their debut titled  Permission to Land … Again is due this fall.

The Darkness, Permission to Land 20 North American Tour Oct. 3 - San Francisco, CA @ The Masonic Oct. 4 - Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades Oct. 6 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern Oct. 7 - Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre Oct. 8 - Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl Oct. 10 - Denver, CO @ Summit Music Hall Oct. 11 - Kansas City, MO @ The Truman Oct. 13 - Chicago, IL @ The Vic Theatre Oct. 14 - Indianapolis, IN @ The Vogue Oct. 15 - Detroit, MI @ Saint Andrew’s Hall Oct. 17 - Boston, MA @ Big Night Live Oct. 18 - New York, NY @ Terminal 5 Oct. 19 - Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall Oct. 21 - Sayreville, NJ @ Starland Ballroom Oct. 22 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club

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THE DARKNESS Announce North American Dates of “Permission To Land 20 Tour”

This year finds Britain’s beloved rock band THE DARKNESS  – singer/guitarist Justin Hawkins, guitarist Dan Hawkins, bassist Frankie Poullain, drummer Rufus Taylor – celebrating 20 years since they birthed  Permission To Land , the multi-platinum, chart-topping debut album that changed the face of rock music forever.

To celebrate the landmark occasion, The Darkness will embark on the global Permission To Land 20 tour, with North American dates kicking off on October 3 rd in San Francisco and wrapping on October 22 nd in Washington, D.C.

Ticket pre-sale begins June 6 th @12pm local times / Public on-sale starts June 9 th @10am local times via: https://www.thedarknesslive.com/tour-dates/ . VIP Experience ticket upgrades will be available across all shows.

Frontman Justin Hawkins shares, “When Permission to Land landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, Rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.”

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of “Black Shuck” they’ll blast their way through all of  Permission To Land ’s eleven tracks, including “Growing On Me,” “Love Is Only A Feeling,” “Giving Up,” “Love On The Rocks With No Ice,” “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” and of course the iconic “I Believe In A Thing Called Love.”

In addition to Permission To Land ’s splendid confection of rock brilliance, the band will pump out a bonus “Best Of The Rest” set stuffed to the gills with all the hits and fan favorites from The Darkness’ six subsequent studio albums: One Way Ticket To Hell…and Back, Hot Cakes, Last Of Our Kind, Pinewood Smile, Easter Is Cancelled and Motorheart. It’s enough to make any music fan go weak at the knees!

A special expanded  Permission To Land  deluxe album version called Permission To Land…Again is due out this fall on Warner Music.

PERMISSION TO LAND 20 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES :

10/3                San Francisco, CA               The Masonic

10/4                Sacramento, CA                   Ace of Spades

10/6                Los Angeles, CA                   The Wiltern

10/7                Tempe, AZ                            Marquee Theatre

10/8                Las Vegas, NV                      Brooklyn Bowl

10/10              Denver, CO                           Summit Music Hall

10/11              Kansas City, MO                   The Truman

10/13              Chicago, IL                           The Vic Theatre

10/14              Indianapolis, IN                     The Vogue

10/15              Detroit, MI                             Saint Andrew’s Hall

10/17              Boston, MA                           Big Night Live

10/18              New York, NY                       Terminal 5

10/19              Philadelphia, PA                   Franklin Music Hall

10/21              Sayreville, NJ                       Starland Ballroom

10/22              Washington, D.C.                 9:30 Club

Connect with The Darkness:

https://www.facebook.com/thedarknessofficial/

https://twitter.com/thedarkness

https://www.instagram.com/thedarkness/

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheActualDarkness

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THE DARKNESS Announces 'Permission To Land' 20th-Anniversary World Tour

2023 finds Britain's beloved rockers THE DARKNESS celebrating 20 years since they birthed "Permission To Land" , the multi-platinum, chart-topping debut album which changed the face of rock music forever. To celebrate the landmark occasion, THE DARKNESS will embark on a global tour later this year.

Today the band has announced 13 European dates on the "Permission To Land 20" tour, with many more jaw-dropping, show-stopping concerts around the world to be revealed shortly.

Frontman Justin Hawkins comments: "When 'Permission To Land' landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, rock wasn't dead! Fun wasn't banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…

"Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty!

" THE DARKNESS . The best. For you. Forever."

Tickets for these European shows will be on sale from Friday, March 24.

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of "Black Shuck" , they'll blast their way through all of "Permission To Land" 's 11 tracks, including "Growing On Me" , "Love Is Only A Feeling" , "Giving Up" , "Love On The Rocks With No Ice" , "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" and, of course, the iconic "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" .

In addition to that splendid confection of rock brilliance, Justin , guitarist/producer Dan Hawkins , bassist Frankie Poullain and drummer Rufus Taylor will pump out a bonus "Best Of The Rest" set, stuffed to the gills with all the hits and fan favorites from their six subsequent studio albums. It's enough to make any right-thinking music fan go weak at the knees!

There will also be a very special expanded "Permission To Land" deluxe album release coming later this year via Warner Music , with further details to be revealed soon.

"Permission To Land 20" European tour dates:

Nov. 07 - Germany, Berlin, Admiralspalast Nov. 08 - Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle Nov. 09 - Germany, Cologne Essigfabrik Nov. 11 - Germany, Munich, Technikum Nov. 13 - Italy, Rome Orion Nov. 14 - Italy, Milan, Alcatraz Nov. 15 - Italy, Modena, Vox Nov. 17 - Switzerland, Prattlen, Z7 Nov. 18 - Luxembourg Den Atelier Nov. 20 - Switzerland, Bern Muhle Hunziken Nov. 22 - Belgium, Brussels, AB Nov. 23 - France, Paris, La Cigale Nov. 24 - Holland, Amsterdam Melkweg Max

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The Darkness Announces ‘Permission To Land’ 20th Anniversary Tour

Beloved British rock band The Darkness will hit the road for the Permission To Land 20 tour, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the band’s multi-platinum-selling debut album.

Singer/guitarist Justin Hawkins , guitarist Dan Hawkins , bassist Frankie Poullain , and drummer Rufus Taylor will perform the 11-track album in full each night, including hit songs like “Growing On Me” and the iconic “I Believe In A Thing Called Love”, plus a bonus “Best Of The Rest” set comprised of hits and fan favorites from The Darkness’ six other studio albums.

The tour will kick off on October 3rd in San Francisco, CA and concludes on October 22nd in Washington, D.C., with stops in California, the Southwest, Colorado, Midwest, and Northeast.

“When Permission to Land landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe,” said frontman Justin Hawkins. “As if by magic, Rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.”

In addition to the tour, The Darkness will celebrate the 20th anniversary of  Permission To Land by releasing a special expanded deluxe album version called Permission To Land…Again this fall via Warner Music .

A ticket pre-sale for The Darkness’ Permission To Land 20 tour will begin on Tuesday, June 6th at 12 p.m. local time. Tickets will go on sale to the general public starting June 9th at 10 a.m. local time. Click below to view a full list of tour dates, and for tickets and more details, visit the band’s website .

PERMISSION TO LAND 20 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES:

10/3                San Francisco, CA               The Masonic 10/4                Sacramento, CA                   Ace of Spades 10/6                Los Angeles, CA                   The Wiltern 10/7                Tempe, AZ                            Marquee Theatre 10/8                Las Vegas, NV                      Brooklyn Bowl 10/10              Denver, CO                           Summit Music Hall 10/11              Kansas City, MO                   The Truman 10/13              Chicago, IL                           The Vic Theatre 10/14              Indianapolis, IN                     The Vogue 10/15              Detroit, MI                             Saint Andrew’s Hall 10/17              Boston, MA                           Big Night Live 10/18              New York, NY                       Terminal 5 10/19              Philadelphia, PA                   Franklin Music Hall 10/21              Sayreville, NJ                       Starland Ballroom 10/22              Washington, D.C.                 9:30 Club

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THE DARKNESS Announces October 2023 North American Tour, A Celebration of “Permission To Land” 20th Anniversary

This year finds Britain’s beloved rockers THE DARKNESS — singer/guitarist Justin Hawkins , guitarist Dan Hawkins , bassist Frankie Poullain , drummer Rufus Taylor — celebrating 20 years since they birthed “Permission To Land” , the multi-platinum, chart-topping debut album that changed the face of rock music forever. To celebrate the landmark occasion, THE DARKNESS will embark on the global “Permission To Land 20” tour, with North American dates kicking off on October 3 in San Francisco and wrapping on October 22 in Washington, D.C.

Ticket pre-sale begins June 6 at 12 p.m. local time. Public on-sale starts June 9 at 10 a.m. local time via TheDarknessLive.com . VIP Experience ticket upgrades will be available across all shows.

Front-man Justin Hawkins shares: “When ‘Permission To Land’ landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty! THE DARKNESS . The best. For you. Forever.”

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of “Black Shuck” they’ll blast their way through all of “Permission To Land” ‘s eleven tracks, including “Growing On Me”, “Love Is Only A Feeling”, “Giving Up”, “Love On The Rocks With No Ice”, “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” and, of course, the iconic “I Believe In A Thing Called Love”.

In addition to “Permission To Land” ‘s splendid confection of rock brilliance, the band will pump out a bonus “Best Of The Rest” set stuffed to the gills with all the hits and fan favorites from THE DARKNESS ‘s six subsequent studio albums: “One Way Ticket To Hell…And Back” , “Hot Cakes” , “Last Of Our Kind” , “Pinewood Smile” , “Easter Is Cancelled” and “Motorheart” .

A special expanded “Permission To Land” deluxe album version called “Permission To Land…Again” is due out this fall on Warner Music .

“Permission To Land 20” North American tour dates:

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• Consequence

The Darkness Announce Extensive 2022 North American Tour

The 34-date run will kick off in early March and feature The Dead Deads as support

The Darkness are coming to North America, and they’re doing it up big. The UK rockers have announced a lengthy North American tour in support of their just-released album, Motorheart .

Frontman Justin Hawkins, guitarist Dan Hawkins, bassist Frankie Poullain and drummer Rufus Taylor will hit the road next spring for 34 shows, setting off March 9th in San Diego, and running through an April 24th date in Boston. Fans should expect to hear new songs off Motorheart , as well as all the hits. The Dead Deads will open on all dates, with tickets available via Ticketmaster .

“You there, in the Americas — hear me, and hear me well: The Darkness know your pain, know that you have cried yourselves to sleep every night, bereft of quality English rock music,” Justin Hawkins said in a statement. “Well, desist from weeping and pull up your fully grown adult pants — salvation is upon you! As doctors, we UNDERSTAND the healing power of rock music and we have instructed our minions to make arrangements for us to visit your moderately distant shores.”

He added, “The cryogenically sealed Tupperware box of roadies has been set to ‘Thor’; and the mighty winged chariot has been dusted off. Remember — one lick of Darkness sweat and you will be cured — you will literally walk again, without COVID or anything! But what price freedom and eternal life, I hear you ask? To you sir, about thirty bucks (plus local taxes and booking fee). Now get the f**k in!”

The Darkness on Sex Robots, ’80s Goth Rock, and Guitar Solos

Tickets go on sale Monday, December 13th, at 10 a.m. local venue time, with some pre-sales having already begun.

Justin Hawkins recently guested on Kyle Meredith With …  for an interview about Motorheart and more. Listen to the chat beneath the list of tour dates below.

The Darkness’ 2022 North American Tour Dates with The Dead Deads: 03/09 – San Diego, CA @ The Observatory North Park 03/10 – Las Vegas, NV @ House of Blues 03/12 – Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre 03/13 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory 03/15 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Novo 03/16 – San Francisco, CA @ The Regency Ballroom 03/17 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater 03/18 – Seattle, WA @ The Showbox 03/20 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre 03/22 – Calgary, AB @ The Palace Theatre 03/23 – Edmonton, AB @ Union Hall 03/25 – Winnipeg, MB @ The Park Theatre 03/26 – Minneapolis, MN @ Varsity Theater 03/28 – Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave/Eagles Club – The Rave Hall 03/29 – Detroit, MI @ The Majestic Theatre 03/30 – Chicago, IL @ Park West 04/01 – Sauget, IL @ Pop’s Nighclub & Concert Venue 04/02 – Kansas City, MO @ The Truman 04/03 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater 04/05 – Austin, TX @ Mohawk 04/06 – Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live 04/08 – Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl 04/09 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade 04/10 – Orlando, FL @ The Beacham Theatre 04/12 – Tampa, FL @ The Ritz Ybor 04/13 – Fort Lauderdale, FL @ Culture Room 04/15 – Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre 04/16 – Warrendale, PA @ Jergel’s Rhythm Grille 04/18 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall 04/19 – Toronto, ON @ Phoenix Concert Theatre 04/20 – Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom 04/22 – Asbury Park, NJ @ Asbury Lanes 04/23 – Philadelphia, PA @ Brooklyn Bowl

Listen via  Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts  |  Stitcher  |  Pocket Casts  |  Radio Public  

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The Darkness announce details of 2022 North American tour

The tour kicks off next spring

The Darkness have unveiled details of an extensive North American tour in 2022.

• READ MORE:  Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! – Justin Hawkins, The Darkness

The group will head out to the US next spring on a 34-date run which kicks off in San Diego in March and concludes in Boston in April. Tickets for the shows are available here .

In a statement, frontman Justin Hawkins said: “You there, in the Americas — hear me, and hear me well: The Darkness know your pain, know that you have cried yourselves to sleep every night, bereft of quality English rock music.

“Well, desist from weeping and pull up your fully grown adult pants — salvation is upon you! As doctors, we understand the healing power of rock music and we have instructed our minions to make arrangements for us to visit your moderately distant shores.”

You there, in the Americas! Hear us and here us well. The English rock music you've been deprived of is coming, spring 2022! Click here to find a date near you and join us for the most rocking VIP experience of your lives. Come, don't be shy 🤩 https://t.co/9VPaCw2pEv — The Darkness (@thedarkness) December 10, 2021

“The cryogenically sealed Tupperware box of roadies has been set to ‘Thor’; and the mighty winged chariot has been dusted off. Remember — one lick of Darkness sweat and you will be cured — you will literally walk again, without COVID or anything!

“But what price freedom and eternal life, I hear you ask? To you sir, about thirty bucks (plus local taxes and booking fee). Now get the fuck in!”

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You can see the full list of dates here:

The Darkness’ 2022 North American Tour Dates 

MARCH 9 – San Diego, CA – The Observatory North Park 10 – Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues 12 – Tempe, AZ – Marquee Theatre 13 – Santa Ana, CA – The Observatory 15 – Los Angeles, CA – The Novo 16 – San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom 17 – Portland, OR – Roseland Theater 18 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox 20 – Vancouver, BC – Vogue Theatre 22 – Calgary, AB – The Palace Theatre 23 – Edmonton, AB – Union Hall 25 – Winnipeg, MB – The Park Theatre /26 – Minneapolis, MN – Varsity Theater 28 – Milwaukee, WI – The Rave/Eagles Club – The Rave Hall 29 – Detroit, MI @-The Majestic Theatre 30 – Chicago, IL @-Park West

APRIL 1 – Sauget, IL – Pop’s Nighclub & Concert Venue 2 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman 3 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater 5 – Austin, TX – Mohawk 6 – Houston, TX – Warehouse Live 8 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl 9 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade 10 – Orlando, FL – The Beacham Theatre 12 – Tampa, FL – The Ritz Ybor 13 – Fort Lauderdale, FL – Culture Room 15 – Charlotte, NC – Neighborhood Theatre 16 – Warrendale, PA – Jergel’s Rhythm Grille 18 – New York, NY – Webster Hall 19 – Toronto, ON – Phoenix Concert Theatre 20 – Buffalo, NY – Town Ballroom 22 – Asbury Park, NJ – Asbury Lanes 23 – Philadelphia, PA – Brooklyn Bowl

Speaking about the UK tour recently, Hawkins said: “The time has come, the walrus said…to put your fookin pants on your head and rock like Satan is eating your private parts with a pointy fork! Yes, we, The Darkness, are the fuck back on tour, praise Satan’s better half…come and party with us like it’s the last orders at the last chance saloon.

“Which it may well be, but I wouldn’t like to comment any further on that. Get in kids, it’s the Darkness, wot you knows and luvs, plus British Lion – Steve Harris’ top rock band who are guaranteed to blow your socks straight up your welcoming arses. What a night! Delirium! Outfits, including hats! Denim that smells of hamsters! Who doesn’t want that? See you down the front, connoisseurs of the finest that life has to offer…”

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The Darkness Tour '78

June 2, 2023 20 Songs, 1 hour, 53 minutes ℗ 2023 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

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   Swedish Cinematic Rock Outfit THE NIGHT FLIGHT...

   beaux gris gris ‘hot nostalgia radio’ tour the...,    status quo: ‘official archive series vol. 3 – ...,    mandoki soulmatess release we stay loud from u...,    nate bergman returns to the uk/ireland with am...,    rising symphonic metal stars elvellon release ...,    gatecreeper – release ‘masterpiece..., jquery(document).ready( function($) { var retina = window.devicepixelratio > 1 true : false; if ( retina ) { jquery( '.site--logo img' ).attr( 'src', 'https://metalplanetmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/metalplanetmusicbanner-2020.png' ); jquery( '.site--logo img' ).attr( 'width', '1000' ); } } );, the darkness – 20th anniversary tour of ‘permission to land.

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2023 finds Britain’s beloved rock band The Darkness celebrating 20 years since they birthed  Permission To Land , the multi-platinum, chart-topping debut album which changed the face of rock music forever. To celebrate the landmark occasion, The Darkness will embark on a global tour later this year.   Today the band are delighted to announce 13 European dates on the  Permission To Land 20  tour, with many more jaw-dropping, show-stopping concerts around the world to be revealed shortly.   Frontman Justin Hawkins comments,  “When Permission to Land landed, twenty short years ago, we were bathed in shock and awe. As if by magic, Rock wasn’t dead! Fun wasn’t banned! And Spandex was almost acceptable again…   Well, guess what? Twenty years on, the same rules apply. So please to squeeze yourselves into those inappropriate leggings, back-comb your mullet, splash on a big handful of attitude, and come celebrate with us! We promise everything and we deliver, every time. Bring on the next twenty!    “The Darkness. The best. For you. Forever.  

The shows promise to be a grand spectacle with the band playing the much-lauded, award-winning, foot-stomping, guitar-wailing, groove-making masterpiece in full. Kicking off with the splendid rifferama of ‘Black Shuck’ they’ll blast their way through all of  Permission To Land ‘s 11 tracks, including ‘Growing On Me’, ‘Love Is Only A Feeling’, ‘Giving Up’, ‘Love On The Rocks With No Ice’, ‘Get Your Hands Off My Woman’ and of course the iconic ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’.   In addition to that splendid confection of rock brilliance, Justin, Dan, Frankie and Rufus will pump out a bonus ‘Best Of The Rest’ set, stuffed to the gills with all the hits and fan favourites from their six subsequent studio albums. It’s enough to make any right-thinking music fan go weak at the knees!   There will also be a very special expanded  Permission To Land  deluxe album release coming later this year via Warner Music, with further details to be revealed soon. 

PERMISSION TO LAND 20 EUROPEAN TOUR DATES 07-Nov    Germany, Berlin, Admiralspalast 08-Nov    Germany, Hamburg, Markthalle 09-Nov    Germany, Cologne Essigfabrik 11-Nov    Germany, Munich, Technikum 13-Nov   Italy, Rome Orion 14-Nov    Italy, Milan, Alcatraz 15-Nov    Italy, Modena, Vox 17-Nov    Switzerland, Prattlen, Z7 18-Nov    Luxembourg Den Atelier  20-Nov    Switzerland, Bern Muhle Hunziken 22-Nov    Belguim, Brussels, AB 23-Nov    France, Paris, La Cigale           24-Nov    Holland, Amsterdam Melkweg Max

Tickets go on sale this Friday 24th March at 9am GMT here: https://www.thedarknesslive.com/tour-dates/

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• Cover Story

Album review: The Darkness – Motorheart

On the scale of rock’n’roll silliness, The Darkness take seventh album Motorheart all the way to 11…

Oh how we chortled in October 2019 when The Darkness chose Easter Is Cancelled as the title for their sixth album. Little did we know that a global pandemic would cause this portentous, falsetto-led prediction to effectively come true. The Darkness – British rock’s adorable panto dames – were right all along, and we ain’t been chortling much since.

Until, perhaps, right now. Motorheart is without doubt the silliest album The Darkness have ever made. Everything Justin Hawkins sings sounds desperately sincere, as if borne of nothing but authentic emotion, and when this apparent candour is applied to the title-track’s subject matter – having sex with robots – it’s clear that The Darkness are mostly here to make us smile.

The album opens with clan-rousing bagpipes and a warrior-class rocker called Welcome Tae Glasgae. Like recent single It’s Love, Jim, it’s riff-filled and joyfully thrusting – and, obviously, completely weird. The intriguing specimen that is Nobody Can See Me Cry features some genuinely dazzling musicianship, and there’s a compelling rock disco vibe underpinning Speed Of The Nite Time. While this isn’t likely to become anyone’s favourite Darkness album, it’s very much the album we need in our lives right now. Eastbound, for example, is a hoot, detailing Justin’s plans for a pub crawl in his home town of Lowestoft. The landlord at The Triangle Tavern will be thrilled to learn this is where the band plan to end up.

Spoof rock legends Spinal Tap taught us many things – the value of punctuality, that there’s nothing wrong with being sexy, and that without caution your music could cross the fine line between clever and stupid. On Motorheart The Darkness’s timekeeping is impeccable and with songs about shagging droids their virility proven beyond doubt. As for staying on the right side of that fine line, give the boys credit; two outta three ain’t bad.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Queen, The Struts, Aerosmith

Motorheart is released on November 19 via Cooking Vinyl.

READ THIS: 6 things you probably didn't know about The Darkness' Justin Hawkins

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St. Vincent Dives Headfirst Into the Darkness

Seven albums and 17 years into an acclaimed solo career, the musician Annie Clark said she craved “a pummeling” on her new LP: “I want something to feel dangerous.”

Supported by

By Lindsay Zoladz

Reporting from New York and Los Angeles

• April 18, 2024

On a recent Tuesday night in a dressing room of the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, Annie Clark, the 41-year-old musician who records as St. Vincent, thumbed through a shelf of secondhand records and sipped a glass of pink champagne. Clark, invited to D.J. the venue’s grand reopening party, was the room’s first inhabitant since a major renovation restored the former movie palace; a pristine, new-car smell lingered.

Holding court among a few members of her team and her 23-year-old sister, Clark was an attentive host in this antiseptic space, ready with a witty remark (the carefully curated LPs were probably “someone’s deceased grandma’s record collection”) or a topped-off beverage. She wore a cream-colored silk blouse, black kitten-heeled shoes and a gauzy black bow tied artfully around her neck.

Even in a moment of relative repose, Clark possessed a feline hyper-awareness of her surroundings. Dave Grohl, who plays drums on two tracks off St. Vincent’s blistering new album “All Born Screaming,” later told me in a phone interview, “When you’re talking to her and you’re looking in those eyes, you can only wonder what reels are whirring in her brain, every second.” He added, amused, “I’ve never seen her with her eyelids half closed.”

Clark is a gifted and nimble guitarist with a dexterously spiky playing style that contrasts with the moony smoothness of her voice. She is also known for the absolute commitment of her live performances. “What she does is so transformative,” said the musician Cate Le Bon, Clark’s close friend of over a decade, in a video interview. “When I see her play, it freaks me out sometimes. I can be even helping her get ready for a show, and it’s like I know nothing of the woman who’s onstage.”

Seven albums and 17 years into an acclaimed solo career, Clark has eked out a singular space in music, occasionally intersecting with the mainstream but for the most part staying uncompromisingly countercultural. She has collaborated with both David Byrne and Dua Lipa ; the riot grrrl pioneers Sleater-Kinney and the post-post-riot-grrrl pop star Olivia Rodrigo . She was one of four female musicians asked to front Nirvana for a night in 2014 when the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “She’s obviously outrageously talented,” Grohl said. “For her to play a Nirvana song was, maybe, a lot less complicated than her own music.”

I first met up with Clark in March, when we drank iced coffee beneath the shady pergola outside her manager’s Hollywood office. She carried a black Loewe handbag and wore a white T-shirt bearing the name of the Swedish punk band Viagra Boys. Clark has, in the past, embodied various characters and donned costumes — a gray-haired cult leader on the cover of her 2014 self-titled album; a louche ’70s glamour girl on her 2021 release “Daddy’s Home” — but these days she’s more or less dressing as herself.

“I’ve certainly played with persona, because I’m queer,” Clark said from behind large sunglasses. “That’s how I play and make sense of my life. All of that just seems absolutely natural to me, to play with persona and identity and to put it in the work.”

But adopting an over-the-top persona, she said, is not something she finds particularly compelling right now. “I’m more interested in that which is raw and essential,” she said. “You’re alive or you’re dead. And if you’re alive, you’d better live it, because it’s short.”

In some sense, Clark is coming off the greatest commercial success of her career, and one that is decidedly more sunshiny than the work she’s known for: During a session with the ubiquitous producer Jack Antonoff, who collaborated on her two previous albums, Clark helped write “Cruel Summer,” the sugar-rush pop song that Taylor Swift released on her 2019 album “Lover.”

“It was something Jack and I worked on and made its way to Taylor and made it back, as those things go,” Clark said. Though it was not initially released as a single, Swift’s formidable fan base has, in the past year, willed it into becoming the unofficial anthem of her Eras Tour and a No. 1 hit four years after its initial release. Clark attended a show in Los Angeles last year and found it surreal to witness 90,000 people singing along. “I’ve never seen anything like it, much less been a part of anything like it,” she said.

And yet, she has no interest in replicating that formula in her own music. In fact, “All Born Screaming,” due April 26, contains some of the heaviest, darkest and weirdest St. Vincent music to date. “That’s what I want from music right now, personally,” Clark said, safe in the shade of the California sun. “I would like a pummeling. I want something to feel dangerous.”

CLARK HAS A reputation for being guarded with journalists, in part because she does not like talking about her personal life. Unsurprisingly, she did not want to specify why themes of grief and loss permeate her new album, because she does not think it would make much difference to the listener. In one of our later conversations, she said that she believed a performer’s duty is simply “to shock and console” ad infinitum. Explaining oneself is superfluous to that job description.

“Generally everyone is misunderstood, and you realize it’s not your job to make people understand you,” Le Bon said. “It’s your job to work and align yourself with your own integrity. I think that’s even harder to harness when you’re an artist as big as Annie. But she does.”

“She’s almost certainly wildly misunderstood by people,” she added, “but there’s a perverse joy in that.”

Le Bon, who is from Wales, met Clark when she was opening for a St. Vincent tour in 2011. She said that at first she found it difficult to get to know Clark: “She was very mysterious, doing yoga a lot of the time,” Le Bon said. Eventually, however, Le Bon found a way into a “really rewarding” friendship. “She’s so honest without agenda, and that’s a rare thing in the world we both exist in,” Le Bon said. “She asks the tough questions, she gives you the real answers.”

Clark was born in Tulsa, Okla., and raised mostly in the Dallas suburbs. She picked up the guitar at 12 and showed a precocious talent; in her early teens, she sat in with her music teacher’s band and chose a song with a high level of difficulty, Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” Her aunt and uncle play as the jazz duo Tuck and Patti, and they brought her on tour one summer as a roadie to show her the realities of touring life. She loved it. “Some of my fondest memories of touring are from those really early days,” she said.

Le Bon said she sees a stark demarcation between the somewhat severe and imperious musical figure “St. Vincent,” and, as she put it, “Annie Clark from Dallas.” Annie Clark from Dallas slowly emerged, in our conversations, as a funny, genial and lightly self-deprecating person who enjoys modern comedy (she quoted “30 Rock” from memory and referenced both “Veep” and “Waiting for Guffman”), is close with her many siblings, and on at least one occasion has drunk too much pink champagne at a party celebrating the reopening of an old Brooklyn theater to make it to Pilates the next morning.

But I witnessed something switch over in her when we met one afternoon at Electric Lady Studios in the West Village, where Clark worked on parts of her last several albums. “This is the room where I recorded the vocals for ‘Violent Times,’ ‘Broken Man’ and ‘Sweetest Fruit,’” she said, referring to songs on the new album. She jumped up from a couch to demonstrate how she’d sung into a particular microphone. Then she got distracted by the studio’s wall of consoles and patch bays.

“Where is this 67 patched at the moment?” she asked herself with sudden ease, like an expat shifting into her native tongue. “Oh yeah, through the 10-73. But where’s the 11-76?”

“All Born Screaming” began with a sonic puzzle: “How do I render the sound inside my head?” After “hours and hours and hours basically making postindustrial dance music in my studio by myself,” Clark said she realized that the sound in her head was something she would not be able to explain to anyone else. So, although she has been a very involved co-producer on each of her other albums, she decided “All Born Screaming” was something she would have to produce herself.

She approached the task with characteristic zeal. She asked her friend and collaborator Cian Riordan to give her engineering lessons, and he found her an impressively apt pupil. “She would show up, there would be coffee, she’d have a notepad ready,” Riordan said in a phone interview. “She’s extremely focused. There was so much intention with everything.”

She mastered compression, mic shootouts, signal flow. To his dismay, Riordan eventually found Clark starting down a path that he had seen trip up many musicians in the digital age: analog synthesizers.

“Any time someone brings modular synths into the studio, that’s usually my cue to be like, ‘I’m going to go somewhere else, because this is going to be a giant waste of time,’” Riordan said. “But with her, it was really incredible to watch. She would buy all these esoteric things that I didn’t even know about, and I’d come back and they were all synced up and she’d be making music on them. It was fun to see her take it so far.”

Clark said those synths allowed her to build a new sonic world. “You’re actually harnessing electricity,” she explained. Her enthusiasm was palpable; her speech kicked up its tempo. “It’s going through unique circuitry, and you are at the helm, so you’re like a god of lightning.”

CLARK HAS LONG been someone who gets a thrill out of testing her limits and rising to challenges, but around the time of her brightly barbed 2017 album “Masseduction” she was beginning to hit a wall. “It would be like, ‘Sure you can go from Memphis to Beijing to Champaign, Ill., in a weekend,” she said. “Sure you can. See if you can pull this off.” But suddenly, after years of “going, going, going,” she noted, “my body just kind of shut down. My stomach — everything about my stomach hurt.” She stopped drinking and went into what she calls “nun mode,” throwing herself headfirst into studio work.

It wasn’t until the pandemic, though, that she was truly forced to slow down and stay put. She got very good at D.I.Y. projects and installed a lot of light fixtures. She also finished building her home studio and worked on a record that had been gestating for a while. During the pandemic, “Some artists went very interior and quiet, understandably,” she said. “Then, you know,” she laughed. “Some people put on wigs.”

She was referring to “Daddy’s Home,” the heavily stylized ’70s-inspired album she made in response to her father’s release from prison, after he served eight years for conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. “Daddy’s Home” won a Grammy for best alternative album and featured some imaginative experiments, but it was a polarizing release that generated some criticism online.

Clark is aware of this and thinks the album was in part a casualty of bad timing. “The story sort of became, not that I made a record about a difficult familial time, but that, like, ‘OK, good, we have someone to blame for the prison-industrial complex,’” she said. “It’s like, oh wait — that’s not quite what I was going for. But those were the times. Everyone’s lives upturned and everyone was increasingly online and there was a lot of fervor in general.”

For “All Born Screaming,” Clark went back to basics and drew inspiration from “that sort of rock that is the first music that felt like it was mine, and not music from another generation.” She was talking about Nine Inch Nails, Tori Amos and, yes, even that band she helped induct into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. While working on the bracing head banger “Flea,” she realized she needed some enormously forceful percussion. The only person she could imagine playing on it was Grohl. So she wrote to him saying as much, and a few days later he was in her home studio, laying down drum tracks for that and the back half of “Broken Man.”

“He’s a great drummer because he’s a great songwriter, right?” Clark said. “He adds so much power and electricity and vibrance, but he’s always supporting the song. He takes a song from a nine to, like, a hundred.”

“All Born Screaming” is sequenced like a journey from darkness into light; its brooding first track is titled, appropriately, “Hell Is Near.” The title-track finale ends up somewhere more comfortably earthbound, but while she was making the song, it was torturing Clark, who just “couldn’t crack the feel of it.” She called Le Bon and played her what she had. Le Bon told her, “Give me a beer, a bass and two hours.”

It worked. The song is bouncy and delightfully off-kilter, strange in St. Vincent’s inimitable, specific way. Clark said the song sprung from the realization that, as she put it, “Joy and suffering are equal, necessary parts of the whole thing. And the only reason to live is for love and the people we love and that’s kind of it.”

“It’s not easy," she added. “But it’s simple.”

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'Elite' star Danna on making 'peace' with early fame, why she quit acting for music

Danna has mastered the art of playing a role, so now she’s flipping the script.

Born Danna Paola Rivera Munguía, the Mexican pop singer who recently shortened her stage name from Danna Paola to Danna, entered show business at age 5. She cut her teeth as an actress with wholesome roles in the youth telenovelas “María Belén,” “Pablo y Andrea” and “Atrévete a Soñar,” among others. Danna’s star rose into adulthood with leading roles in the Spanish-language dramas “La Doña” and Netflix’s “Elite .”

But after two decades of bringing characters to life, Danna quit acting in 2020. Having released a series of pop albums from ages 6 to 25, Danna committed to a full-time music career. Her newest album, “ Childstar ,” which drops at 8 p.m. ET April 11, finds the 28-year-old singer reconciling her unique upbringing with a search for self-identity.

“Building myself through characters all the time and through different personalities was really crazy, so that’s why I think I started molding myself based on many personalities,” Danna tells USA TODAY in an interview conducted in English and Spanish. “And in therapy, I understood that there were things that were really (messed) up and that didn’t allow me to be my most authentic person. So, for this album, I made my peace with that.”

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But for those expecting a cynical album about the pitfalls of fame, think again. The 13-track LP is largely a collection of cathartic dance-pop in which Danna combs through the kaleidoscope of life experiences that have placed her at the center of her own story.

“I found myself as an artist. I found my voice, my way to produce my music, how I want to write my own songs,” Danna says. “It’s a beautiful journey, but at the same time, it has been really hard and emotional.”

How the ‘darkness’ of depression inspired Danna on ‘Childstar’

A face smudged with jet-black tears . A fishnet-clad devil trashing a dressing room. Bodies writhing in a strobe-light-filled nightclub. Unlike the bright spotlight of child stardom, the video imagery for “Childstar” is moody and gritty, which Danna says is a tribute to her battle with depression.

“I wanted to deconstruct the image people had about me in this pink, perfect world and this sweetie thing with this aesthetic,” Danna says. “This darkness is what made me find myself as an artist, and if it wasn’t for that depression and the hole I was living in, I wouldn’t have discovered myself.”

Danna also channels that darkness on the album’s opening track “The Fall,” a mournful ballad in which the singer accepts her inner turmoil but vows to rise above the pain, a lesson she has learned from living in the public eye. “You’re going to see me fall thousands of times because I’m not perfect, but I’m going to make art and music from it,” she says.

“I’m a human being, and I make mistakes too every day, public or not public. I don’t want to be perfect. I just want to learn about life. I think that’s something that’s given me a lot of peace today.”

Danna broke free from the ‘comfort zone’ of acting with music

Danna’s final acting role before diving back into music was Lu Montesinos, a sharp-tongued schoolgirl on the teen crime thriller “Elite.” Danna, who won a Premios Juventud award for her performance, said she ultimately left acting because she was “tired of being someone else instead of discovering myself.”

“As an actress, I enjoyed so much being in another skin and another world in my mind, and I became that person. It takes a lot to detach myself from a character after three, four, six months. Lucretia, which was my last character, really left particles of her DNA in me.”

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But Danna hasn’t left the dramatic art form completely behind. The singer, who performed an emotional monologue for the “Childstar” trailer , said she has been able to fuse the heightened emotion of acting with the unrestricted self-expression she has found in music.

“I think that I’m feeling free making music,” Danna says. “It’s not because I hate acting, but it was a comfort zone just being an actress and not believing in myself as an artist and as a singer. I love singing, and interpreting a song and really feeling what I wrote is really important to me.”

Why ‘Childstar’ makes Danna feel ‘empowered’

On “Tenemos Que Hablar,” one of the songs that rounds out “Childstar,” Danna takes a sobering look at a relationship that has crumbled in the wake of the singer’s newfound independence. “Today, my happiness doesn’t depend on anyone,” she sings over a pulsing dark synth-pop beat.

“In the end, happiness is a choice. It’s a thing you that you have to create in your life every day,” Danna says. “When we put our happiness in others and depend on them, we limit ourselves to create our own magic, our own world and our way of viewing life.”

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Part of Danna’s happiness today comes from the self-realization of her renewed creativity.

“In every inch of this album is my DNA, so that’s what I’m really, really proud of. Because for me, now is the first time where I’m really comfortable with all the things I’m saying: with my music, with the way I dress, with my sexuality. I’m empowered.”

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How Taylor Swift Won Back the Public

The reputation era was the last time the pop star let someone else define her. here’s how she rebuilt her image..

Taylor Swift is largely unmatched in modern pop — an artist who combines the soul of a poet, the nous of a chess master, and a hedge-funder’s eye for arbitrage opportunities. And her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department , caps off a period of cultural dominance unseen in recent history. For an industry that runs on youth and novelty, Swift’s hitting a career peak in her mid-30s is a rare feat, and it’s even more remarkable for a woman, especially one who, eight years ago, endured a protracted public backlash tied to her long-running feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. That was the last time Swift let someone else define her. Since then, she has rebuilt her image so successfully that it’s hard to imagine anyone else taking her down again. As Swift enjoys playing with the concept of multiple selves — explored in music videos, tour sets, and credit-card commercials — here are the 13 Taylor Swifts that put her back on top again.

The Victim (2017)

In her quarrel with the Wests, Swift was cast in the role of perfidious white woman falsely claiming victimhood. And since she has made her near-downfall an integral piece of her star narrative, the darkness before the inevitable triumph, some have questioned whether it was really that bad. (This magazine once called her single “Look What You Made Me Do” a “pure piece of Trump-era art,” which was not intended as a compliment.) After retreating from the public eye for months, she resurfaced in the summer of 2017 for a civil suit against a radio DJ who’d groped her years earlier. Confronted with a situation in which Swift incontrovertibly was a victim, seeking nothing more than a symbolic $1 in damages, public opinion began to turn around once more. She made such a winning appearance on the witness stand, refusing to be shaken by aggressive questioning, that even outlets who’d once denounced her published roundups of her best quips .

The Garbo (2018)

During Swift’s year away, she began dating up-and-coming actor Joe Alwyn. Throughout their seven-year relationship, the pair were rarely photographed together and said as little as possible about each other in interviews. “We decided together we wanted our relationship to be private,” Swift would say. Going dark not only helped Swift ward off the overexposure that caused her trouble in the past, it also meant that, if you wanted to follow their love story, you could only do so through her music, a medium where Swift had full control. (And where Alwyn, credited as “William Bowery,” would occasionally pop up as a co-writer.) As Swift returned to the spotlight, she was careful to underline the difference between her public and private selves. In the liner notes to Reputation , she wrote, “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them that they have chosen to show us.”

The Vulnerable One (2018–19)

What version of Swift did she show us in the documentary Miss Americana ? Lana Wilson’s film, which follows the star through 2018–19 and was released in 2020, provides a glimpse of what Swift considers to be her human side with frequent shots of her journaling and hanging out at home with her cats. (Alwyn is barely seen.) Amid the stage-managed authenticity of scenes in which Swift defends her decision to wade into politics to a room full of middle-age white men, there are a few genuine revelations. She discusses her history of disordered eating and her innate people-pleasing tendencies with the self-awareness of someone who has undergone a lot of therapy. Tellingly, the doc is bookended by scenes of Swift failing, first at the Grammys, then at politics. When she dejectedly declares that all she needs to do is make a better record than Reputation, it’s almost enough to make her feel like an underdog again.

The Ally (2019)

In the polarized atmosphere of the Trump presidency, the urgency of the moment overcame Swift’s natural prudence. After being knocked for her silence during the 2016 election — “Taylor Swift is never, ever, ever going to tell you whom she’s voting for, because speaking up is never, ever, ever going to benefit Taylor Swift,” quipped Vox.com — she entered the electoral arena during the subsequent midterms, calling on her fans in Tennessee to vote against anti-gay, anti-feminist Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn. She continued in this vein during her Lover era, campaigning for a bill outlawing discrimination against the LGBT community and issuing the thinly veiled Trump diss track “You Need to Calm Down” as a single. “Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?” she sang, cavorting in the video with drag queens and the Queer Eye guys … and also Katy Perry, with whom she’d buried the hatchet, ending a yearslong feud. Unfortunately, both of Swift’s interventions came up short. (Blackburn was elected with nearly 55 percent of the vote — the political defeat Swift referenced in Miss Americana .) In retrospect, the greatest legacy of this moment was Swift waving the rainbow flag so fervently that a contingent of fans became convinced she was secretly queer. ( Is that why her hair was the same color as the bisexual pride flag? , conspiracists wondered.)

The Owner (2019)

The old Taylor had made hay out of feuds with other artists; the new Taylor would only battle enemies from within the executive class, none of whom could boast their own stan armies. Performing a career-spanning medley at the 2019 American Music Awards, Swift wore a shirt emblazoned with the names of her first six albums. It was a defiant salvo in a war that had begun three months earlier, when Swift announced a plan to rerecord her old music in protest of former Big Machine Records head Scott Borchetta’s   sale of her old masters to manager Scooter Braun, a Swift nemesis. “This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,” she wrote on Tumblr . The AMAs performance was preceded by a public back-and-forth in which Swift claimed she had been forbidden from performing her old music unless she abandoned the project. (Big Machine Records denied this.) In the current Swift narrative, this is the other dark moment she had to overcome, and her personal activism, at least, had a happy ending. The rerecording project got underway in 2021, allowing Swift to rewrite the story of her career under self-ownership.

The Auteur (2020–22)

Swift’s COVID albums folklore and evermore saw her turn away from autobiographical songwriting, employing fictional narratives inspired by the cinematic “folktales” like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth she’d been exploring in quarantine. Full of contemplative woodland imagery and duets with adult-contemporary acts like Bon Iver and the National (whose guitarist Aaron Dessner co-wrote and produced significant chunks of both albums), the new music introduced a more highbrow, Pitchfork-friendly version of Swift. As the writer B.D. McClay noted, this era “brought back the fans who hadn’t loved her turn to pop or who had lost touch with her as they got older,” while also attracting “new fans who were interested in a Taylor Swift album without all the Taylor Swift personal baggage.” Swift’s serious-artist bona fides were further underscored by her burgeoning directorial career, which wiped away memories of earlier questionable Hollywood forays like Cats . Having begun helming her own music videos on Lover , she campaigned for a Live Action Short Oscar nomination for her “All Too Well” ten-minute version video, name-dropped her fave art-house films at film-festival talkbacks, and appeared opposite Martin McDonagh for Variety ’s “Directors on Directors” series. These efforts didn’t earn her an Oscar nom, but they did set up what appears to be the next stage of her career: In 2022, she landed a feature-film deal with Searchlight, whose presidents hailed her as a “once in a generation artist and storyteller.”

The Titan (2023)

Swift went on tour in 2023, having released four new albums since she’d last hit the road and being in the middle of her rerecording project. Other artists’ live shows might have struggled from a lack of focus, but as always, Swift found a way to make it work for her: She embarked on the Eras Tour, a celebration of her entire career — ten acts, with past and present on equal terms, and Swift miming the lyrics the way her fans had done since childhood. In the words of critic Steven Hyden , the Eras concept dismantled “the ‘new work vs. old work’ binary for artists,” allowing Swift “to be a ‘legacy act’ and a ‘relevant pop act’ simultaneously.” As one college-age fan gushed to the New York Times , “You could so easily be ashamed of singing Taylor Swift in your bedroom. You could leave it behind. But she doesn’t let you … What if we weren’t ashamed of our eras? What if we realized they were always with us?” Eras is considered the highest-grossing concert tour ever, adding billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and reportedly making Swift herself a billionaire, too. Every night, she flexed her biceps in the lead-up to the Lover cut “The Man,” towering over the music industry like a colossus.

The Crisis Manager (2023)

After news broke of her breakup with Alwyn in April 2023, Swift rebounded with his exact opposite: outspoken edgelord Matty Healy of the band the 1975. When Healy made racist comments about rapper Ice Spice on a podcast, the resulting controversy seemed for a second to engulf Swift herself. She quickly went into damage control, collaborating with Ice Spice on the remix of her latest single, “Karma,” and bringing her onstage at the Eras Tour in New Jersey. (The Healy relationship, which was never confirmed by either party, ended soon after.) The idea of Swift as a PR mastermind became such a significant element of her star image that her publicist, the all-seeing, all-knowing Tree Paine, became a minor celebrity in her own right.

The Squad Leader (2023)

Swift’s 1989 was the era of her squad — a collection of similarly famous women who represented the power of female friendship, the freedom to not be defined by her romantic relationships. (Little did she know fans would simply assume she was dating girls instead.) Coincidentally or not, the run-up to the 1989 rerelease in October 2023 saw the rebirth of the squad, as Swift began making more public appearances flocked by her celebrity friends. She was not subtle about employing the spotlight as a shield. When Sophie Turner was hounded by the tabloids amid her divorce from Joe Jonas, a Swift ex from years ago, Swift took Turner under her wing, keeping her close in a signal of solidarity. Not everyone received the same benefits: As rumors swirled that Swift was feuding with Olivia Rodrigo over songwriting credits, the latter was a conspicuous absence in her personal life.

The Mogul (2023)

When it came time to release a concert movie from the Eras Tour, Swift seized control of the means of production. She self-funded the project, then made a distribution deal with AMC directly, cutting out the big Hollywood studios. (Here, too, she was savvy in her enemies, as at that moment the studios were widely despised due to the SAG and WGA strikes.) The most notable guest at the premiere? Beyoncé, whose Renaissance Tour overlapped with Swift’s, and who would soon release her own concert film through similar methods — a gesture that they would no longer be pitted against each other, at least outside the Grammys. “The way she’s taught me and every artist out here to break rules and defy industry norms,” Swift wrote on Instagram , alongside a Boomerang of Beyoncé tossing popcorn.

The Empire (2023)

Swift doesn’t give many interviews, and when she does, they’re usually with Time, which hits her sweet spot: venerable, middlebrow, and pliant. (You can imagine her parents were subscribers in the ’90s.) Her 2023 “Person of the Year” cover was a culmination of her playing a nearly perfect game on the celebrity front. “It feels like the breakthrough moment of my career, happening at 33,” Swift told the mag. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question … ‘Are you not entertained?’” However, the accompanying photos demonstrated a disconnect between Swift’s brand of relatable stardom, which all but demands a feline accessory, and the high-glam style of the culture industry. Alone among A-list pop stars, Swift is not expected to slay: As Puck’s Lauren Sherman wrote, her current aesthetic is aimed at “14-year-olds, or someone of any age who wishes to look like a senior at Emerson College in 2006.” She serves big sister, not strictly mother.

The Girlfriend (2024)

Swift’s relationship with NFL tight end Travis Kelce can be seen as a corporate merger of the last two vestiges of the monoculture, and her frequent presence on Chiefs broadcasts was widely credited for expanding the league’s female audience. This relationship has played out in full view of the media, as unlike Alwyn or Healy, Kelce — who harbors ambitions to be as famous as the Rock — has been an enthusiastic participant in Swift’s star project, flying to Argentina on his bye week so she could run into his arms after a Buenos Aires concert. Such a public performance of romance was the biggest fan service Swift could provide, and it inaugurated a period of mass saturation that has marked a stark shift from her earlier reclusion. In her Time interview, Swift confirmed her approach had changed since the Reputation era. “Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years — I’ll never get that time back.”

The Mastermind (2024)

When Swift walked the 2024 Grammys red carpet in a white Schiaparelli gown and black gloves, haters pounced. (As one anonymous writer put it , her outfit “looked like hotel curtains saddled with opera gloves and a watch choker that cut her neck in half.”) Still, as they had been trained to do, fans obsessively studied the look for clues about the rerecorded version of Reputation , which is linked with monochrome imagery in Swiftie lore. But they had it all wrong. When Swift won Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights — her 13th Grammy, she noted auspiciously — she used her acceptance speech to announce a brand-new record, The Tortured Poets Department . Which perhaps explains the over-the-top romanticism of the look. She wasn’t dressing for the Grammys, or for Midnights ; she was dressing for her new era.

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Girl in Red is back, baby!

Three years after her first album, the norwegian pop star and taylor swift eras tour opener returns with a polished new record.

Girl in Red’s new album is downright cheerful, and if that doesn’t sound quite on brand, you’re not paying attention. As the title track, “Doing It Again Baby,” unravels from an upbeat, synthy groove into a banjo-forward breakdown, those less in the know might ask: What happened to the homemade bedroom pop that launched Girl in Red (a.k.a. Marie Ulven) from indie stardom to opener for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour?

True, the 25-year-old’s early days as an artist in her native Norway were marked by the wistful singles that have since amassed hundreds of millions of Spotify streams (and also by a relatively successful fingerboarding career ). Dreamy tunes like 2018’s “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” still haunt the playlists of the young and pining: “I don’t want to be your friend/ I want to kiss your lips,” Ulven sings, her muffled voice emoting all the tortured artistry of a teenager in love.

But in the six years since, Ulven has grown up — as a songwriter, as a producer and as a human.

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“It’s like I need to update my profile picture, but I need to do it with my entire discography,” she says over Zoom with a slight SoCal surfer inflection. It’s early April, and Ulven is in Nashville rehearsing for an arena tour that’ll take her across the country before summer and throughout Europe in the fall. She continues talking between bites of room service pancakes. “I feel like this new album is the thing that’s going to set that,” she says. “So that when people think of Girl in Red, they don’t think of a demo I posted in 2016.”

Released last week, “I’m Doing It Again Baby!” is a maximalist sophomore album that, while delivering 27 minutes of polished pop, veers into strange and satisfying new territories for Ulven: Her voice stretches like bubble gum over danceable tracks with hints of Rodrigo-esque punk . She’s joined on one by fellow Eras alum Sabrina Carpenter. In short, it’s a lot of fun.

That’s not to say there aren’t songs like 2018’s gentle yet discomforting “Summer Depression” — songs that deal head-on with Ulven’s struggles with mental health. On “Ugly Side,” there’s a particularly vulnerable spoken-word example: “The people I love the most are the ones who get the worst of me/ And I don’t like that.”

So despite a swing between genres, for Ulven it’s the right next step. That’s in no small part because of her growth as a producer; she’s now worked with such big-name producers as Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother) and, most recently, Norwegian composer Matias Tellez.

“I hear things differently now,” Ulven says. “It’s a natural progression for me, sonically, because I’m just better at what I do.”

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Ulven has kept busy despite the three-year gap between albums. For one, she’s been hitting the festival circuit hard. For another, she was scooped up by reigning pop queen Swift for her record-breaking Eras Tour last summer. Although she had conflicting headlining shows, she couldn’t say no. By June, she had jetted off to Chicago to embark on a string of Northwestern shows.

“If [Swift] comes knocking, you do whatever she f---ing says,” Ulven says, half joking.

As Ulven herself notes, we live in a time when the biggest names in pop belong to women. And although she is eager to join those ranks, she’s hesitant to be put in a box with queer contemporaries. It’s true that explicitly gay female artists are having a moment in pop: Look no further than Reneé Rapp or Chappell Roan. But there was a time not long ago when the internet memed the phrase “Do you like Girl in Red?” meaning, “Are you gay?” For Ulven, it got tiresome.

“I would constantly get messages from people being like, ‘I’m not gay, but I really like [your 2018 single] “We Fell in Love in October,”’” she says. “I was like, ‘Why are you saying that? That’s so weird.’”

Instead, her sexuality has been a background to her art only insomuch as her love songs are about women — such as the new album’s delicate “A Night to Remember,” a hopeful, drum-driven bop about meeting her girlfriend at a bar.

But Ulven’s favorite song on the record, she says as she clutches a vinyl copy to her chest, is the opener, “I’m Back,” which explains her absence from music (“I was gone for a minute ’cause I went to get help”). It’s just gentle enough to ease listeners in to the rest of the track list’s high-energy bangers, a sort of introductory lullaby to an album that has an explicitly eager name. Ulven says she cries when she listens to it and cries when she plays it. “It feels like the song that most correctly and truly reflects my reality,” she says.

“I’m Back” is also cheery, certainly, but in a way that feels earned. “Sometimes I get bit by the dark/ It spreads into my heart, takes over me,” Ulven sings, then answers her own doubts: “I believe I will laugh/ I believe it will pass/ I believe there’s hope for me.”

April 20 and 21 at 8 p.m. at the Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. theanthemdc.com . Saturday sold out; Sunday tickets $45-$95.

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Madonna returns to Austin after 40 years with sweaty, sexy Celebration Tour at Moody Center

“It took 40 years to invite me back,” Madonna told an Austin audience on Sunday night. “Should I take that personally?”

The Queen of Pop indeed last performed in the Live Music Capital in 1985 at the Erwin Center. Strange, but true (blue).  Perhaps the mistress of reinvention, ever looking for the new, waited until that venue was demolished and she could pack in two nights at Moody Center . She’ll perform again on Monday.

Regardless, Austin has missed a lot of Madonna over four decades. That made her retrospective Celebration Tour all the more spectacular — and if the cradle of weird can appreciate anything, it's a spectacle. 

Madonna postponed her original September dates following a health scare, and pent-up fan pride runneth over. Before the show, material girls and leather daddies filed through the corridors of the arena. Blonde Ambition-era high ponytails mingled with “Lucky Star” hair bows. Local drag artists like Brigitte Bandit — in full “Like a Virgin” regalia — posed for photos a few steps away from a Trisha Yearwood-branded nacho stand. On the floor, a group of middle-aged ladies in tulle skirts and fishnet gloves chatted next to a row of bears in decades-old concert tees. Accessorization was key. If you forgot your chunky silver cross pendant, hopefully someone could lend you their riding crop.

The air conditioner took the night off. The show had an 8:30 p.m. start time, but the main event didn’t get going until 10:30 p.m., when tour emcee Bob the Drag Queen emerged wearing the rosy contents of Marie Antoinette’s closet. 

“It’s showtime,” Bob said with a tongue pop. 

Her Madgesty lived up to her name, appearing as a holy apparition, much more exciting than her namesake’s various cameos on pieces of toast. Cloaked in a dark kimono with giant sleeve cutouts, Madonna donned a headpiece equal parts crown and halo to sing late-’90s techno earworm “Nothing Really Matters.”  A giant lighting rig circled above like an even larger hat from heaven. It’s right there in the name, folks.

“Nothing takes the past away/ Like the future,” she sang. The song made a fitting icebreaker for the mother of all pop music: “Everything I give you/ All comes back to me.”

Then it was off to the time machine — though as the star admitted later in the show, the setlist made emotional sense, if not always the chronological kind. First stop: Danceteria. Madonna conjured her early 1980s it-girl era with “Everybody” and “Into the Groove.” Dancers swarmed around her in thrift store finery and spotted the singer in a backbend. There was a lot of crotch work.

“I’m about to share the story of my life with you,” Madonna said during the first of several rambling, prickly stretches of crowd work that skirted right up to coherence but instead opted for a middle finger. Joined by a masked dancer dressed as her past self, she asked if everyone knew what a metaphor was. An audience member asked who her next boyfriend would be. “My next boyfriend is me,” she cracked.

Then, Madonna offered a sage bit of advice for the next two hours: “Embrace the confusion.”

The singer astral projected into CBGB with an electric guitar as her guide, shredding through “Burning Up” and spewing Budweiser at the front rows. (Shout out to the stage tech responsible for wiping up Ms. Ciccone’s beer spit immediately afterward.) 

So much of Sunday’s party hinged on awe-inspiring choreography. For “Open Your Heart,” Madonna and company made iconic use of a few chairs and the laps that went on top of them. For “Holiday,” the singer and her crew became a many-headed disco hydra massed around a mirror ball the size of New Jersey.

A trip through time also invited sorrow. At the end of “Holiday,” a dancer fell to the ground as Madonna gazed mournfully. She entered a floating picture frame rigged to the ceiling, one of the night’s most oft-used set pieces, for a gorgeous rendition of “Live to Tell.” Around her, photos memorialized icons lost to AIDS — Freddie Mercury, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arthur Ashe, Cookie Mueller and more. An affecting vigil from a pioneering activist.

But this was a Madonna show, so then shirtless men in lace gimp masks came out to writhe around glowing crosses. Robed monks, rosary beads, a Catholic censer and a snippet of Sam Smith’s “Unholy” helped usher in “Like a Prayer.” One of her most controversial pop culture moments, the song played like a thumping salute to sacrilege and gymnastics.

Madonna put on a Marlene Dietrich wig and thrusted her way into the 1990s: “Erotica,” “Justify My Love” and “Bad Girl.” In the middle there, she squeezed in 2005’s “Hung Up,” which might have felt like an awkward fit for that act if not for the fleet of topless dancers.

Of course, Madonna couldn’t curate her legacy without two things: cone bras and “Vogue.” Bob the Drag Queen took the stage with a glittery bowler hat and a houndstooth fan to take Austin to the ballroom. Clips of the tour’s “Vogue” segment have gone viral for months, and it was just as joyful in person. A conically breasted Madonna always welcomes a special guest to help her judge a cavalcade of runway looks. For Sunday’s show, she brought up drag superstar Trixie Mattel , and the pair gave their 10s and chops as appropriate. A gay ol’ time.

The dancers weren’t the only ones falling into dips on stage. The setlist meandered a bit after Ginger Rogers danced on air and Rita Hayworth gave good face. “Human Nature” and “Crazy For You” led into James Bond theme “Die Another Day,” a song this reviewer appreciates for nostalgic reasons but admits is an oddball cut for a four-decade hit parade. If you longed to see Madonna dressed like a character from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” while dropping mainstream music’s foremost reference to Sigmund Freud, congrats.

The wide-brimmed hats kept coming. Madonna stripped to full cowgirl leathers, boot-scooted and strummed out “Don’t Tell Me” from the “Music” album. For “Mother Father,” she brought out son David Banda to sing and play guitar. (She also welcomed daughters Mercy and Estere onstage to perform during “Bad Girl” and “Vogue,” respectively.)

“People don’t get tired in Texas, do they?” Madonna asked after picking up her fallen cowboy hat with her foot. More freewheeling Madge moments: bragging on the kids, talking about forgiving herself for mistakes, berating an audience member for not lighting up his phone upon her command. 

“It’s so important you understand the concept of light,” she said while vamping about darkness and such. Madonna led the “boys and girls and theys and thems” in a campfire singalong to an acoustic “Express Yourself.” 

During “La Isla Bonita,” she projected jumbo photos of cultural revolutionaries like Sinead O’Connor, Che Guevara and Martin Luther King Jr. Not sure what the thematic connection between song and imagery was, but RIP Malcolm X — you would have loved dreaming of San Pedro, I guess.

As Madonna rounded the home stretch, she changed into a pink wig and textured silver catsuit that evoked Jane Lynch performing “Super Bass” on that one episode of “Glee.” Nevermind the sartorial critique: As Madonna soared above the arena in her aerial frame and doused the crowd in lasers during “Ray of Light,” she truly was goddess of her universe.

“Take a Bow” led into a questionable amount of time devoted to a Michael Jackson tribute. But there wasn’t much time to marinate on that, as Madonna stormed the stage flanked by her cadre of dancers, all dressed in recreations of some of her most famous looks. The finale: “Bitch I’m Madonna,” of course. 

Super Bowl Madonna strutted next to “Frozen” Madonna. If you’d sealed an Austin fan in a cryogenic tube for the decades since the pop icon last came to town, the multiversal procession might have driven them to madness.

But, then again … the American-Statesman’s review of Madonna’s 1985 show praised the “slick, polished, contemporary Las Vegas-style production.” The critic also wrote: “Madonna may be considered by some music critics as a fleeting pop star and her penchant for lingerie and erotic posturing understandably irritates feminists. Nevertheless, Madonna is a formidable, timely talent.” 

Erotic posturing. Formidable talent. She might be the living avatar of reinvention, but Madonna never lost her own plot. That’s something worth waiting 40 years to celebrate.

Eric Webb is an award-winning culture writer based in Austin. Find him at www.ericwebb.me .

Phish Announce First New Album in Over Four Years

By Angie Martoccio

Angie Martoccio

Phish have announced their new album Evolve , out July 12 via JEMP Records. The record marks the band’s first studio album in over four years. They also shared the title track, a breezy summer jam that stretches just over four minutes. Check it out below.

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Next week, Phish will perform four sold-out nights at the Sphere in Las Vegas, kicking off on April 18. They’ll tour this summer, kicking off in Mansfield, Massachusetts, on July 19. The tour goes through August, with three nights at New York’s Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on Aug. 9. The trek will wrap with four shows in Commerce, Colorado on Aug. 29.

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