The Best Concerts of 2024

The final night of Swift’s year-and-a-half-long Eras Tour in Vancouver was marked by no big announcements, no special guests, no extra gimmicks, no frills — unless, of course, you take into account that this was the frilliest tour of all time, and that every night on the 149-concert road show felt as spectacular as any actual grand finale could. Of course, the “secret songs” segment made each date on the epic tour feel deeply individual, however much Swift spent the other 95% of these nights giving crowds the same ecstatic joy-bomb experience. Swift said she’d “had so long to prepare for the end of this tour,” and was” trying to think about what songs really encapsulate how I feel about tonight, so I decided to go back to the beginning.” That turned out to be a reprise of one of her very earliest, most innocent-sounding, “just a girl” songs, “A Place in This World,” which was mashed up with “New Romantics,” one of her most knowing songs — a four-minute encapsulation of youthful naivete and lovingly cynical maturity that made not just the tour but her entire life feel like one unbroken era, however much she’d broken it all up for thematic setlist purposes. Whether you’re one of her thirtysomething contemporaries, a fresh teen fan or a proud #SwiftieOverFifty, the Eras Tour was bound to made you reflect on the segmentation of your own life… when the 210 minutes’ worth of joybombs weren’t just blowing up your cerebral cortex. (Read our original review here.) —Chris Willman

It was subtle enough, but if the setlists for Springsteen’s 2024 shows had a single theme, it was the thin veil between life and death, and how the losses we suffer make each minute on earth all the more precious. None of them more so than the 140 to — on this particular night at the Forum — 200 minutes we might spend celebrating with friends or family in an arena with a lifetime’s worth of Springsteen’s music as a bonding epoxy. (How funny that Swift’s shows this year also clocked in at the exact length of Springsteen’s Forum show… 3 hours and 20 minutes being a sweet spot for exactly two superstars on earth who can justify the heft.) It’s reductive to focus too much on the running time, which makes it feel like an endurance test or marathon. The miracle is not just that he and the band hold up that long every night. The miracle is that he bobs and weaves with a dynamic setlist that needs that much expansiveness to sufficiently cover multiple moments of sorrow or grief and “Twist and Shout” (should you be so lucky to get that encore bonus track as a celebration of life). “You’ll need a good companion for this part of the ride,” Springsteen sang toward the end of the show in “Land of Hope of Dreams.” When he wrote that line, maybe he didn’t mean it as an actual rock ‘n’ roll direct-sales, but he sure keeps living up to it. (Read our original review here.) —Willman

As I wrote immediately after seeing the opening night of Dead & Company’s three-month residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere, “Thursday’s show joins U2’s first night (in the same venue) in a tie for the most visually spectacular gig I’ve seen in untold decades of concertgoing… If you were knocked out by what U2 accomplished in the fall (of ’23) and worried that some augmentation might be necessarily in order to effectively give Dead & Company’s setup a handicap… well, proceed with whatever microdosing you feel is warranted, but ‘Dead Forever’ is a stone-cold-sober knockout.” (Read our original review here.) Ultimately I went on to see the show four times, and was never bored for a moment of the three-hour-plus sets, despite having previously been only a moderate Deadhead — it turns out that the Sphere visual theatrics make for a good gateway drug into going more hardcore. Of course, prior generations of fans didn’t need much more A/V prompting than the sight of a wall of giant amps to cement their obsession, since different incarnations of the Dead have always been about changing the set from night to night to keep listeners and themselves fully engaged in the moment. But creative director John Mayer’s idea that at least some of the visuals should change every night in the residency — while leaving certain spectacular setpieces in place, like the opening and closing journeys from Haight-Asbury to outer space — was in keeping with the collective’s core ethos of reliable unpredictability. Mayer is a guitar monster, and Bob Weir is Old Home Week in and of itself. But Mickey Hart’s “Drums” extravaganza was worth the price of admission all by itself, especially if you were in the Sphere seats with built-in haptics — a truly bespoke, once-in-a-lifetime experience. —Willman

It was well worth the wait. For her first-ever headlining tour, Missy Elliott captured the galaxy-brain aesthetic of her catalog and music videos with the Out of This World trek, bringing frequent collaborators Timbaland, Ciara and Busta Rhymes along for a wild ride. Elliott has always been a masterful world-builder, and she carried that approach to the mind-blowing stage production for the lot of her biggest hits. At each performance, Elliott played ringmaster to a team of backup dancers as she toured her discography, giving each song its own bit of flair from the massive Mega Man Missy gliding through space during “Sock It 2 Me” to a billowing black suit for “She’s a Bitch.” It’s a wonder that she held off this long to take center stage, but she made it work, and then some. (Read our original review here.) —Steven J. Horowitz

Mitchell has done a few shows in the past few years billed as “Joni Jams,” and Brandi Carlile, Annie Lennox and the other jammers were out in force once again to complement her on this weekend of shows at the Hollywood Bowl. But it marked her first time truly officially headlining a billed show as Joni freaking Mitchell since she suffered an aneurysm in 2015… or, really, since she did her last tour 24 years ago, which had her last headlining in L.A. at the Greek in 2000. It felt for a night, at least, like some Boogie Man up there must like us. (For the record, she was singing “God Must Be a Boogie Man” in concert for the first time since 1983.) Production-wise, the setting was much the same as the previous Jam shows, with a big cast of musicians and singers seated on chairs and couches around the legend’s throne. And there were two moments in which other stars did step forward to take foreground vocal turns, effectively serenading Mitchell — Lennox on “Ladies of the Canyon,” and Marcus Mumford on “California.” But if you’d come to hear Joni Mitchell sing her heart out, at length and in full, without really ceding the stage for more than those two cameos, that is what you got, for the first time in nearly a quarter-century. It was one more incremental step on her path back to public performance, but it also felt like one giant leap for Mitchell-kind — a seemingly impossible moment in which the singer was commanding the stage for about three hours (not counting intermission) and delivering just what you might have hoped for from her at any point in her long career. Carlile was still a big presence, of course, but as wingman most of all: “YOU JUST LISTENED TO JONI MITCHELL SING ‘HEJIRA’!” Back-announcing doesn’t get any better, or more bluntly appropriate, than that. (Read the original review here.) —Willman

Rodrigo’s tour behind her sophomore album was reason enough for Angelenos to drive to Palm Springs for the opening night of her tour. Little did the majority of attendees realize they were also getting in early on the biggest new pop phenom of 2024, Roan, the opening act for the first part of the tour. (Plenty did already know Roan’s late 2023 album, though… the “Hot to Go” spell-check that soon consumed a young nation did not go un-enacted here.) Variety‘s review of Rodrigo’s headlining set poked a few classic-rock bears by saying, “It’s a rock ‘n’ roll show, by the way — maybe the best rock tour we’ll get all year, even if the season is young.” To the youngsters who cheered when asked by Rodrigo if anyone was attending their first concert, we added: “You’ve just officially been spoiled. Not many of your future gigs are going to involve world-class talents, caught in the preternatural bloom of youth, who happen to be equally, proficiently gifted in the areas of singing, songcraft, self-revelation and the fine art of rocking out. It’s gonna be all downhill from here, kids.” Of the “star in the making” opener, Roan, we added, “The chorus of Roan’s neo-disco ‘After Midnight’ avows that ‘everything good happens after midnight,’ but her opening slot on the Rodrigo tour proves that some awfully good things happen between 7:30-8:10 p.m.” Thanks are still owed to their mutual producer/co-writer, Dan Nigro, for making this perfect two-fer possible. (Read our original review here.) —Willman

White’s “pop-ups” tour of 2024 was frustrating to some, certainly, in the inherent exclusivity that came with playing only small theaters or even clubs, and then only announcing the dates a few days in advance in each city. (Hitting “buy” at just the right moment to procure a ticket really was the hardest button to button.) For those who managed to make it through that gateway, it was rock ‘n’ roll as it was meant to be, or at least as White rightfully means it to be — fast, spur-of-the-moment, intimate and red-hot. Or blue-hot, in his eternally color-coded world. In L.A., he hit two venues, a Thursday gig at the Lodge Room, capacity 500, followed by a Friday night show at the 1,300-cap Mayan. White performed 20 songs each night, only 10 of which overlapped. Fans who were at one show or the other will brag they got the true FOMO experience, but those of us who were fortunate to see both can attest that it was a happy draw — either of the stops non-stop, sweat-soaked and proficiently frantic enough to feel more than sufficiently draining for any normal human person. Those who missed out don’t have any good reason to stay mad, by the way — in ’25, White’s playing bigger venues and even announcing them in advance. We suspect those concessions to normie touring won’t mean the thrill is gone. (Read our original review here.) —Willman

Those who have paid attention to Charli XCX and Troye Sivan since the start of their respective careers would know that each puts on a mesmerizing live show. That much was true when their worlds collided as co-headliners of their Go West Fest in 2019, and it came into much sharper focus with their double-billed Sweat tour this year. Few things screamed 2024 more than “Brat,” which went from buzzy cult fixation to Kamala-level phenomenon, and the tour couldn’t have been timed better in the wake of “Brat” and Sivan’s “Something to Give Each Other.” What they conceived was a non-stop assault on the senses, with each artist taking turns with mini-sets before concluding together with their “Talk Talk” remix. If 2024 was about brat summer and inevitably brat fall, then fans will have a chance to stretch it out to the new year when Charli heads back to arenas for more. (Read our original review here.) —Horowitz

Although Laufey’s first show at the Bowl — and second concert ever with the LA Phil — was an instant sellout, the FOMO ended up being a little lighter on this one, by virtue of the fact that it got filmed by director Sam Wrench for an Imax concert movie that hit big screens nationally in early December. As we described it then: “If a team of aesthetically attuned scientists was able to reverse-engineer the perfect Bowl act, they might have come up with the 25-year-old Icelandic-Chinese-American sensation who goes by the singular name of Laufey: A chanteuse who would have seemed at home on the same stage in the 1950s, yet who appeals to a young demographic in the 2020s. A multi-instrumentalist with chops on electric guitar, piano and cello. A romantic with a great sense of swooniness that feels apropos for a summer date night. And, maybe most importantly: plays well with Thomas Wilkins and woodwinds. Some are to the manor born; Laufey is to the Bowl born.” (Read our original review here.) —Willman

They have to finally stop leaving Los Angeles… or finally stop leaving whatever cities the four members of X have now made their hometowns in order to keep hitting the road. More than 45 years after the band started gigging on the local club scene, X — which miraculously still has its original lineup intact — finally embarked on a farewell tour, with what may or may not be a final album to match. Punk is not a genre that always weathers the decades well, but X is timeless, partly because John Doe’s and Exene’s lyrical concerns always read more as smart beat poetry than as generationally bound complaints, and partly because of how undiminished the power trio of Doe, DJ Bonebrake and Billy Zoom is (even if the guitarist mostly peels those amphetamine-rockabilly licks off from a stool now). At the Troubadour, the new material fit in perfectly with the vintage stuff; this goodbye calls for a 10-year-or-so encore. —Willman

Not nearly enough bands planned an “eclipse show” to coincide with the complete blackout of the sun that happened across parts of the country in April. But then, not many have what it takes to not have their music overshadowed by a total eclipse. Still, visual loyalties were somewhat divided as the Texas sky darkened while the group performed its first full show in years. They took a break to let the crowd soak in the actual minutes of totality, which was a smart move, even though it would have been cool to find out what couple of numbers they would’ve have chosen to play in near-complete darkness. Of course, after all that time away, Vampire Weekend didn’t need a gimmick to sell out an amphitheater. Right about the time in a career that any band should be facing accusations of being washed up, Vampire Weekend isn’t getting older, it’s getting better, and “Only God Was Above Us” is one of the group’s best. So for those of us torn between turning around to watch the sun slowly getting blotted out and getting blotto keeping our attention on the show, this exercise in multi-tasking was a contest of self-will. (Read our original review here.) —Willman

Eilish sang “O Holy Night” as the surprise Christmas song on the last night of her U.S. tour, but the whole show felt holy, in a holy cow kind of way. We’ve long since moved past the shock of how good she is, but we haven’t gotten completely blasé about the joy of watching her early precocity turn into an actual plateau that’s looking to last through her 20s and beyond. (She turned 23 over the course of her five-night stand at the Forum… 23 going on 230.) The hometown friends-and-family show — which had Finneas opening and turning up later in her acoustic segment, and Mom and Dad indulging lots of fan photo requests in the loge section — had the feel of a victory lap, both figuratively and literally. The stage was set up in an elongated in-the-round format that took up a majority of the arena floor, with her band members and some pyrotechnics set up in two recessed areas of the stage, allowing the star not just to run in circles around the edge but to do some figure-eights, too. But this show wasn’t just about celebratory cardio. As songs that go from a whisper to a belt go, “O Holy Night” found its equal in the canon of magnificent originals that Eilish and Finneas have compiled, including a powerful new ballad, “The Greatest” — delicate and emotionally drilling. (Read our original review here.) —Willman

Co-headlining tours all too rarely involve both bands actually sharing space for the entire length of the night’s performances. A beautiful example of how it can be done was the joint tour by Dawes and Lucius, the all-too-short itinerary for which brought it only as close to L.A. as distant Pioneertown. The confluence of planets was worth driving a few hours to witness. If you’re a fan of either act, you might have had some appreciation going in for how these artists could complement one another. But if you happen to already recognize both of them as best-in-class examples of how strong old-fashioned rock virtues can continue to be in the 2020s, then this was a match made in heaven, or at least the highest parts of the high desert. (Read our original review here.) —Willman