Believe it or not, Taylor Swift’s return isn’t the only musical event on the horizon this fall. Here’s what we’re most excited to see, read and listen to in the months ahead.
Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts at the Hollywood Bowl (Sept. 15)
The veteran rocker will wrap his latest world tour — ostensibly booked behind June’s “Talkin to the Trees” album — with a sure-to-be-shaggy gig at the Hollywood Bowl. The Chrome Hearts are Spooner Oldham on organ, Micah Nelson on guitar, Corey McCormick on bass and Anthony LoGerfo on drums. — Mikael Wood
Nine Inch Nails at the Kia Forum (Sept. 18 and 19)
Whenever Nine Inch Nails returns to the road, a beloved meme circulates of Trent Reznor riling up his crowd: “Having a good time? Ready to party? Well, that was the last guys. Wrong band. We’re here to have a bad time. (Synthesizer playing.)” By those standards, this summer is going to be an extremely bad time for devotees of NIN’s industrial rock. The band has a new album of sorts out Sept. 19 in “Tron: Ares,” the latest film score from Reznor and his partner Atticus Ross. Then their “Peel It Back” tour hits the Forum for two nights; the band looks to be playing in the round for some experimental passages before firing on all cylinders with its new (and old) drummer, Josh Freese, who they swapped in from Foo Fighters just days before the tour started. Most intriguingly, the Future Ruins Music and Arts Festival at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center on Nov. 8 will highlight avant-garde film music from Cristobal Tapia de Veer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, John Carpenter and Questlove, among many others. — August Brown
Cardi B, “Am I the Drama?” (Sept. 19)
One sign of how long Cardi B has been preparing her sophomore studio album: The last track on the LP is “WAP,” her blockbuster collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion that topped Billboard’s Hot 100 … back in the summer of 2020. — MW
Mariah Carey, “Here for It All” (Sept. 26)
Fresh off receiving the Video Vanguard Award at MTV’s VMAs, Carey will release her first studio LP since “Caution” in 2018. “Here for It All” marks her reunion with the veteran record exec L.A. Reid, who served as executive producer on the album (as he did on Carey’s smash 2005 comeback, “The Emancipation of Mimi”). — MW
Laufey at Crypto.com Arena (Sept. 26 and 27)
This young pop-jazz singer from Iceland shot a concert movie last year at the Hollywood Bowl; now she’s doubling down with two adopted-hometown shows at Crypto.com Arena just as her album “A Matter of Time” is garnering substantial Grammy buzz. — MW
Tate McRae at the Kia Forum (Sept. 26 and 27 and Nov. 8)
The main pop girls have been expanding their portfolios of late. After showing off a limber pop sound on 2023’s “Think Later” that made full use of her dance gifts, McRae proved her staying power with this year’s “So Close to What,” which topped the Billboard 200 by pulling from a rich seam of Y2K R&B and club jams. Yet she scored her first No. 1 single with the Morgan Wallen collab “What I Want.” Whatever you think of Wallen — and McRae’s young, queer fan base had thoughts — the song showed that McRae’s Alberta roots could drop right into a pop-country setting. — AB
Lionel Richie, “Truly” (Sept. 30)
Between his judging gig on “American Idol” and his role as the principal narrator of Netflix’s hit “We Are the World” doc, Richie hasn’t exactly made it hard of late to hear his stories of the old days. Still, he’s promised to tell all in this memoir, which he’ll discuss onstage Oct. 6 at the Orpheum Theatre. — MW
Taylor Swift, “The Life of a Showgirl” (Oct. 3)
Ready for it?
Dua Lipa at the Kia Forum (Oct. 4, 5, 7 and 8)
Lipa has found a formidable second life as a public intellectual with her fantastic book club, Service95. (This month’s suggestion: Helen Garner’s “This House of Grief,” a true-crime meditation on the inscrutability of intent and the limits of empathy.) But on the heels of last year’s (unfairly!) slept-on “Radical Optimism,” the singer returns to SoCal for four nights at the Forum, where that record’s exquisite catalog of disco-funk effervescence will hopefully get its due on the dance floor. — AB
Sleep Token at Crypto.com Arena (Oct. 11)
Sleep Token is by some measures the biggest heavy rock band in the world right now. Its May LP “Even in Arcadia” demolished streaming records for a metal act, reaching well beyond the genre’s cantankerous core fan base, which has mixed feelings about Sleep Token’s pop chart success, to say the least. (No one is more skeptical about the band’s new fame than its cryptically anonymous front person Vessel: “Right foot in the roses, left foot on a landmine,” he sings in “Caramel,” “They can sing the words while I cry into the bass line.”) The band’s high-drama live shows are where Sleep Token really shines, though, as in this return to L.A. for a set that finally provides the scale its runic masks, robes and necrotic body paint have always called for. — AB
Lorde at the Kia Forum (Oct. 18)
Just as her generation has, by all accounts, sobered up and gone sexless, Lorde returned this year with a defiant album about the giddy rush of partying and the frightening ramifications of a body in search of pleasure. “Virgin” pulls her back to the experimental electro-pop many fans were hoping for after the relatively complacent “Solar Power,” and the album is brimming with startling meditations on pregnancy scares, familial inheritance and the malleability of gender. — AB
“Depeche Mode: M” (Oct. 28)
Is there any deeper love in music than that between Mexicans and gothic Brits? Depeche Mode has been the subject of several great concert films (especially 1989’s “Depeche Mode: 101,” which captures a Rose Bowl show from the perspective of the band’s ecstatic L.A. fan culture). But “Depeche Mode: M” is different and poignant, using its 2023 “Memento Mori” tour to drill down into specifically Mexican conceptions of death and remembrance in the wake of the death of co-founder Andy “Fletch” Fletcher. The film is a deep act of respect to the rites of one of the group’s most passionate fan bases, whose practices helped Fletcher’s survivors come to grips with the mystery of death in their own band. — AB
“The Beatles Anthology” (Nov. 26)
Thirty years after the Beatles-nostalgia apparatus kicked into high gear with the release of 1995’s sprawling multimedia “Anthology” series, the biggest band in pop history is expanding that franchise by adding a ninth episode to the much-loved eight-part documentary. (The new installment, which will stream on Disney+, is said to include behind-the-scenes footage of, uh, the Beatles working on the original “Anthology.”) On Nov. 21, the group will also drop a fourth volume in the “Anthology” album series, this one with 13 previously unreleased rarities. — MW
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