Beck

From the Lower East Side to “Loser”

Beck David Hansen was born in Los Angeles on 8 July 1970, the son of the composer and arranger David Campbell and the artist Bibbe Hansen, who had been part of Andy Warhol’s circle. He moved to New York in 1989 and fell in with the Lower East Side anti-folk crowd, then came back to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The breakthrough arrived by accident. “Loser”, a slide-guitar and drum-loop sketch released in 1993, picked up unexpected radio play and climbed to number ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Its shrug of a chorus was read as a slacker anthem, and Beck spent much of the next decade demonstrating how little it described him.

His early releases were scattered across independents, including Bong Load Custom Records and K Records, before DGC/Geffen signed him for Mellow Gold in 1994. That relationship ran until 2008. Since 2013 he has recorded for Capitol, which releases the new album.

The records that count

Odelay (1996), produced with the Dust Brothers, is the record most people mean when they talk about Beck: sample collage, hip-hop drums, country and folk fragments, and the singles “Where It’s At”, “Devils Haircut” and “The New Pollution”. It won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1997, alongside Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Mutations (1998), his first with Nigel Godrich, went quieter and more tropical and took the alternative Grammy again in 1999. Midnite Vultures (1999) was the loud, funk-driven reaction.

Sea Change (2002), again with Godrich, is the break-up record: slow tempos, string arrangements, and a band that included Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Jason Falkner. Those names matter for what happens in 2026. Guero (2005) returned to the Dust Brothers, and “E-Pro” went to number one at modern rock radio. Modern Guilt (2008) was made with Danger Mouse.

Morning Phase (2014) was pitched as a companion to Sea Change and became the biggest prize-winner of his career, taking Album of the Year, Best Rock Album and Best Engineered Album at the Grammys in 2015. Colors (2017), produced by Greg Kurstin, swung back to bright pop and won Best Alternative Music Album and Best Engineered Album in 2018. Hyperspace (2019), made with Pharrell Williams, was the last set of new songs before a seven-year gap.

Orchestras, covers and a gap that was not a silence

Beck spent 2024 and 2025 performing his catalogue with symphony orchestras, using arrangements by his father. A nine-show North American run in July 2025 took in New Haven, Montreal, Toronto, Ravinia outside Chicago, Colorado Springs and Red Rocks, most of it conducted by Edwin Outwater. At Ravinia in July 2025, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the reviewer for Chicago Concert Reviews described roughly 90 minutes with the orchestra, opening on the instrumental “Cycle”, then a 30-minute band encore of “Devils Haircut”, “Debra”, “Ozzy”, “Mixed Bizness” and “Loser”, and judged the songs “refreshed and downright resplendent”.

On 29 January 2026 Capitol released Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime digitally, with a physical edition on 13 February. It is an eight-track, 30-minute compilation of love-song covers and rarities: the Korgis title track, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “I Only Have Eyes for You”, Caetano Veloso’s “Michelangelo Antonioni”, Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, John Lennon’s “Love”, Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End” and his own “Ramona” from the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack. Will Hodgkinson in The Times gave it four stars and called it “very pretty, rather dreamlike and unquestionably romantic”.

In May 2026 the orchestral show reached Australia for the first time: three nights at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 7 to 9 May, then two at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on 12 and 13 May. Rolling Stone Australia’s review of the 7 May opening night noted it was his first time on that stage despite more than a dozen Australian visits, and called it a “thoroughly satisfying and career-spanning set”. That night also carried the live debut of a new song called “Ride Lonesome”.

Ride Lonesome, dated

The single “Ride Lonesome” appeared without warning on 20 April 2026, and the tour dates followed the next day. A duet version with Sierra Ferrell came on 26 June. On 15 July Beck announced the album of the same name and released “In the Night”, with a video directed by Mikai Karl and starring the French actor Denis Lavant. A third single, “Disappearing Act”, followed on 19 August.

Ride Lonesome, out 18 September 2026 on Capitol, is his fifteenth studio album and the first of new songs since Hyperspace. He produced it himself, Nigel Godrich mixed it, and it was recorded in Room B at United Studios in Hollywood. The point of the record is the personnel: Hormel, Waronker, Meldal-Johnsen, Manning and Falkner, the Sea Change and Morning Phase players, back in one room. “This time it felt like the playing and the chemistry had evolved and deepened,” Beck said in the announcement, “a sound that’s come together over the decades of working together.” NME described the direction as a nod to the stripped-back acoustic sound of those two albums.

There are twelve tracks: “Ride Lonesome”, “Run Away”, “In the Night”, “Failed Words”, “Bleed”, “Disappearing Act”, “For Your Love”, “Slow Canyon”, “It Ends Right Here”, “Falling Through My Hands”, “If You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “Beyond the Light”. Two of the released singles run under three minutes. No reviews of the full album had been published at the time of writing.

What the show is now

Two versions of Beck live exist at the moment. The orchestral concert, as staged in Sydney in May 2026, runs to roughly 70 minutes of symphonic material followed by a short encore with the band. The Sydney set went: “Cycle”, “The Golden Age”, “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”, “Lonesome Tears”, “Wave”, “Tropicalia”, “Blue Moon”, “Lost Cause”, “The New Pollution”, “Ride Lonesome”, the Scott Walker covers “It’s Raining Today” and “Montague Terrace (in Blue)”, “Round the Bend”, “Paper Tiger”, “We Live Again” and a run of Morning Phase songs, before “Where It’s At”, “Devils Haircut”, “Mixed Bizness” and “Loser” with the band. Rolling Stone Australia reported him joking that orchestral arrangements are “the beginning of the end” for raw bands, playing a solo blues riff in the encore and testing the empty orchestra chairs for a laugh.

The Ride Lonesome tour is the other version: 25 dates in theatres and amphitheatres, opening at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre on 16 September 2026, two days before the album, and closing at The Truth in Nashville on 31 October. The route takes in Woodinville, Portland, the Santa Barbara Bowl, the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on 23 September, two nights at San Francisco’s Masonic, Red Rocks on 1 October, Omaha, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, the Auditorium in Chicago, the Fox in Detroit, two nights at Toronto’s Massey Hall, Boston, Philadelphia, two nights at Brooklyn Paramount, the Anthem in Washington, Durham, Asheville and Atlanta. Tickets went on sale on 24 April. Detroit’s venue lists Ioanna Gika as special guest, and other dates may differ. Because the tour had not started at the time of writing, no reviews exist and the setlist shape is unknown. The Sydney show and the band on the record point to Sea Change and Morning Phase material sitting at the centre, with the Odelay singles kept for the end.