Beyonce announces Cowboy Carter tour, to kick off in April
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US singer Beyonce announced on Feb 3 that her next tour will open in Los Angeles on April 28.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
Ben Sisario
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NEW YORK – Fresh off her big win for Album of the Year at the Grammys on Feb 2, Beyonce has more news: a new stadium tour is on the way supporting that 2024 album, Cowboy Carter.
The genre-bending American superstar announced on Feb 3 that her next tour would open in Los Angeles on April 28 and continue for 22 shows in eight cities, including two stops overseas in London and Paris. It will wrap on July 11 in Atlanta.
Pre-sales begin on Feb 11, and general ticket sales start on Feb 14 via Beyonce’s website.
The 43-year-old singer’s Instagram account simply posted a poster listing the cities with the caption: “She coming.”
The tour is Beyonce’s first since her 56-date Renaissance World Tour in 2023, which sold US$580 million (S$788 million) in tickets.
Like Renaissance, her last album – Act I of an announced trilogy, with Cowboy Carter as Act II – the elaborately staged tour drew on decades of retro dance style. It had a high-concept sci-fi look that, in a review in The New York Times, pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz said “conjured Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by way of the 1990 drag ball documentary Paris Is Burning”.
News of the tour was delayed by the wildfires in California.
After performing at half-time of a National Football League game on Christmas, Beyonce teased the date of Jan 14 on social media, with imagery straight from the Cowboy Carter cover – Beyonce waving an American flag atop a pale horse. It led fans to speculate about a tour tied to her most recent album.
But when that day came, the star said her announcement had been “postponed to a later date due to the devastation caused by the ongoing wildfires around areas of Los Angeles”.
At the same time, her BeyGood Foundation also announced a US$2.5 million donation for displaced families in Altadena, a historically black neighbourhood that has been decimated by the Eaton fire.
Cowboy Carter, which Beyonce first revealed during a Super Bowl advertisement in 2024, had been widely anticipated as her turn to country music.
But critics have hailed it as a broad and ambitious take on American pop history, drawing on multiple genres – including country – and, as pop music critic Jon Pareles of the Times wrote in a review, “openly interrogating categories and stereotypes and pointedly ignoring formulas”.
The album won three Grammys,
