RIO KOSTA

Two session players who met at a soundcheck

Kosta Galanopoulos grew up in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in a house where Bob Marley, George Jones and Dire Straits shared the stereo and where bar bands and Greek folk-dancing events were part of the furniture. He started drum lessons at ten and was playing gigs by twelve. By the time Rio Kosta existed he had spent a decade as a Los Angeles studio drummer, with a reported tally of around a thousand records to his name. Interviewers tend to describe him as the organised one, the head of production.

Mike Del Rio was raised in Queens in a musical and artistic family. He started dancing at six after watching a cousin, then moved to Long Island as a teenager, where the emo scene was his first live music and his first show was a Beach Boys tribute. He studied advertising in New York and worked as an in-house musician at an ad agency before moving to Los Angeles around 2011. There he spent roughly ten years producing and writing for other artists and played in the duo Powers with his wife.

The two met at a festival in the redwoods of Northern California before the pandemic. The accounts differ on the year, with Del Rio remembering 2018 in one interview and a later piece placing it in late 2019, but the scene is the same each time: keyboards and drums at a soundcheck, contact details swapped. When lockdown arrived they began trading ideas remotely from Los Angeles, and the partnership carried on once rooms reopened. Del Rio has said the pandemic gave them the time and space to work out what the collaboration actually was. Their Bandcamp bio still reads, in full, “Intergalactic children at play.”

Unicorn, the record that set the shape

The debut album Unicorn came out on 18 July 2025 through Verdigris Records, preceded by the singles Ancients, It's Starting and Higher. Reviewers reached for Tame Impala and Khruangbin as reference points, and the band's own description is looser: seventies groove, stacked harmonies and production that leans psychedelic without losing the pulse. Both members' heritage, Greek on Galanopoulos's side and Spanish, Italian and Puerto Rican on Del Rio's, runs through the rhythms and the occasional Spanish-language title.

The album is built as a single arc rather than a playlist. Del Rio has explained that the record begins in the late afternoon and that by the time the listener reaches the track called Intermission the sun has finally set, with the second half occupying a different emotional temperature. The closing song is It's Starting, chosen precisely because it refuses to conclude anything. Galanopoulos has summed up the working method as “everything we do comes from a place of love,” which reads as a slogan on paper but matches how the pair talk about protecting the early, unselfconscious stage of an idea.

Del Rio's line from the summer of 2025 is the one that has stuck: “I think bands should feel like a limitless art project.” Galanopoulos put the commercial logic the other way round, saying you make the art you love first and it will have its own ambitions. The newest entry on the band's Bandcamp page is a double A-side, Slowly/She, listed above Unicorn in the discography.

From club headliners to a March announcement

The first year after the album was spent at club level. The band were on a European headline run at the turn of 2026, and by early March they were back in North America playing rooms such as White Oak Music Hall in Houston, where on 2 March 2026 they played twelve songs across an hour, closing with Hermano. In those interviews Del Rio named the Hollywood Palladium as the Los Angeles room he most wants to headline, recalling a Prince show there that ran past five hours with six encores. Galanopoulos, characteristically, said he had yet to find an LA venue whose acoustics impressed him.

The step change was announced on 25 March 2026, when Jungle unveiled a 2026 world tour with Rio Kosta as the named support act. Tickets went on general sale on 27 March, and Jungle's own album Sunshine followed on 14 August via AWAL. For a duo barely a year past its debut, the run is disproportionate to anything they had played before: the North American leg alone moves from the Armory in Minneapolis through the United Center in Chicago, Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the Moody Center in Austin and two nights at Red Rocks.

Between the announcement and the tour itself they played Osheaga in Montreal on 31 July 2026, an afternoon slot on the first day of the festival running from 2.40pm to 3.20pm. The Montreal interview published on 3 August described what was coming as a three-month arena tour with Jungle, and that is exactly what has now begun.

Where they stand this week

As of 11 September 2026 the Jungle tour is two dates in. Rio Kosta opened at the Minneapolis Armory on 9 September and at the United Center in Chicago on 10 September, with Toronto on 12 September and Montreal's Place Bell on 13 September next. The North American leg runs through Boston, two nights at The Anthem in Washington on 17 and 18 September, Brooklyn on 19 September, Nashville, Houston, Austin, Dallas and Red Rocks on 27 and 28 September, then swings up the west coast in early October to finish at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on 10 October.

Alongside the support slots the band hold their own billing at Austin City Limits Music Festival on both weekends, 2 to 4 October and 9 to 11 October, which means back-to-back trips between Texas and the Pacific Northwest. Songkick currently lists 42 upcoming shows across 14 countries.

The European leg opens at the MEO Arena in Lisbon on 24 October and moves through Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, Łódź, Munich, Vienna and Milan before the UK and Ireland dates: 3Arena Dublin on 18 November, First Direct Arena Leeds on 21 November, Utilita Arena Cardiff on 22 November, two nights at The O2 in London on 24 and 25 November, Co-op Live in Manchester on 27 November and the OVO Hydro in Glasgow on 28 November. The March 2026 announcement also listed Australian dates in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth for March 2027.

What the show is now

In the support slot the set is short and fixed. At the Armory on 9 September 2026 they played nine songs, opening with Ancients, Follow the River and It's Starting, moving through Higher, Volar Lejos (Like a Feather), My Dreams, Unicorn and One With You, and closing on Mountain Top. The Osheaga set eight weeks earlier used the same spine in forty minutes, adding The Wheel and the album's Intermission in place of the last two. When they headline the set roughly doubles, with the Houston show in March 2026 stretching to twelve songs and Hermano as the final number.

Del Rio has described live music as “the last form of true congregation,” an ancient feeling of being around other people experiencing something at the same time, and his own background as a dancer shows in how the pair talk about wanting audiences to move rather than watch. Neither interview to hand describes the current touring line-up or the staging on the Jungle dates, and published reviews of the arena shows have not yet appeared, so the honest description is the one the setlists give: a tight, groove-led forty minutes that front-loads the singles and ends on Mountain Top.