Lake Street Dive

A conservatory joke that outlasted the joke

Lake Street Dive formed in 2004 at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where four students — Rachael Price on vocals, Bridget Kearney on bass, Mike Calabrese on drums and Mike "McDuck" Olson on trumpet and guitar — put a band together with no fixed idea of what it was meant to sound like. The name came from Lake Street in Minneapolis, and specifically the Bryant Lake Bowl, a haunt of the group's early years. Kearney took the jazz category of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in 2005, which was the first outside signal that the writing was worth attention.

The influences the members cite have stayed remarkably consistent across two decades: the Beatles, Motown, mid-century jazz, 1960s soul. What changed was the proportion. The early records leaned on the conservatory training; the later ones spend it rather than display it. Price's voice has been the constant selling point throughout, and the thing audiences tend to mention first.

The records, and the slow climb

The self-titled debut arrived in 2010 on Signature Sounds, but the record that moved the needle was Bad Self Portraits in 2014, which reached number 18 on the Billboard 200. Around it came the street-corner video of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back", filmed in Boston with an upright bass and a trumpet, which passed six million views on YouTube and did more for the band's profile than any single release had. Television followed — The Colbert Report, Letterman, Conan, Ellen — and between 2013 and 2014 the band played more than 300 shows across 175-plus cities, 43 states and eight countries.

A move to Nonesuch produced Side Pony in 2016 (number 29), Free Yourself Up in 2018 (number 8, still their chart high) and Obviously in 2021 (number 63). The lineup shifted in that stretch: Akie Bermiss joined on keyboards in 2017, and Olson left in May 2021 after sixteen years, with James Cornelison taking over on guitar. The band also wrote the theme for Netflix's Somebody Feed Phil, which brought an Emmy nomination for outstanding original main title theme music in 2018. Fun Machine: The Sequel, a covers EP, landed in 2022 on Fantasy.

Good Together and a Grammy nomination

Good Together, the eighth studio album, came out on 21 June 2024 through Fantasy and Concord, produced by Mike Elizondo, whose previous credits include Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow and Gary Clark Jr. Bermiss has described the record as a deliberate act of joyful rebellion against the weight of everything else, and the band changed its writing method to make it — a dice-rolling system that forced unfamiliar pairings and instruments. The result took in R&B, funk and Brazilian pop alongside the soul-pop the band was already known for.

It was nominated for best traditional pop vocal album at the 2025 Grammy Awards. The touring around it was substantial. On 14 December 2024 the band played MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston for 100 minutes with a three-piece horn section drawn from the Huntertones, Theo Katzman opening for 45 minutes, and closed on "(I've Had) The Time of My Life". In January and February 2025 they crossed the UK and Europe: Glasgow's Old Fruit Market on 26 January, Manchester's New Century Hall on 28 January, Dublin's Vicar Street on 29 January, London's Roundhouse on 31 January and Bristol's SWX on 1 February, then Amsterdam, Paris, Antwerp, Heidelberg, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm. "Dance With a Stranger" got a Late Show airing in the same window.

Two singles, one summer

The April 2026 run was salted with material nobody had heard. Setlists from that month list "Vegas Mattress", "Better Not Tell You", "It's Getting Late", "Gertrude" and "Just Ask" alongside the catalogue. "Vegas Mattress", written by Calabrese, is about an Airbnb host who became enormously proud of a hotel mattress he had installed in the rental — a fair sample of the band's tolerance for the absurd.

"You're Never Around" arrived on 29 July 2026, the first new original since Good Together. It is the most rock-forward thing they have put out in years, with Price trading the soul and jazz inflections for something blunter, over a lyric the band describes as the rumination of a partner left at home while the other half tours. Phineas Alexander directed the video. "Laundry Day Overalls" followed on 26 August 2026, paired with it as a two-track single and given its own Alexander-directed video. JamBase reported that "You're Never Around" is expected to appear on a forthcoming album; no title or release date has been made public.

Where they stand in September 2026

The band has logged around 40 concerts in 2026. After the spring theatre and arena run, they took roughly three months off and resumed on 31 July, moving up to amphitheatre scale for the American summer: Pier Six Concert Pavilion in Baltimore on 4 August, the Wharf Amphitheater at Orange Beach on 26 August, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands on 28 August, Germania Insurance Amphitheater in Austin on 29 August, Morton Amphitheater in Riverside, Missouri on 1 September and Fiddler's Green outside Denver on 2 September.

The scale still appears to surprise them. At Mohegan Sun Arena on 11 April 2026, Price told the room she had assumed the band would be playing a ballroom at best; the reviewer present noted that the full arena seemed to genuinely catch her off guard. CARRTOONS opened that night.

Europe is next. The run opens at Fållan in Stockholm on 24 September 2026 and covers 24 dates through Oslo, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin's Huxleys Neue Welt on 2 October, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Stuttgart, Bern, Zürich, Milan, Luxembourg, the Bataclan in Paris on 16 October, Ancienne Belgique in Brussels and TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht. The British leg is Bristol Beacon on 20 October, O2 Academy Leeds on 21 October, the Eventim Apollo in London on 23 October, Albert Hall Manchester on 24 October and Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow on 25 October. John Splithoff and Mamas Gun are listed as support on selected dates.

What the room gets

The 2026 shows run long by the band's own historical standard. At Ting Pavilion in Charlottesville on 19 April the set ran 8.10pm to 9.45pm — 95 minutes, nineteen songs in the main set and two more in the encore. The Albany Palace show on 8 April, sold out and billed around the band's twenty years, ran close to two hours, with Price opening on a few unaccompanied bars before the band came in behind her.

The shape is consistent enough to predict. "Bad Self Portraits" opened sixteen of the year's shows; "Good Kisser" closed twenty-nine of them. In between sit "Hypotheticals", "Baby, Don't Leave Me Alone With My Thoughts", "You Go Down Smooth", the title track from Good Together and, since late July, the two new singles. The covers are a fixed feature rather than a novelty — the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back", the Cranberries' "Linger" and Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" all recur, with Hall and Oates' "Rich Girl" turning up in encores — and several are played in a stripped acoustic section that the band parks in the middle of the set.