Spiritbox are gearing up to hit the road once again, announcing an extensive U.S. fall tour in support of their latest album, Tsunami Sea.

The Canadian metal juggernauts will be joined by progressive metal stalwarts Periphery and rising alt-pop act Honey Revenge for the 19-date run, which kicks off Nov. 12 in Ontario, California, and wraps up Dec. 7 in Wallingford, Connecticut.

The upcoming trek marks Spiritbox’s second North American outing of 2025, following a string of summer festival appearances and a high-profile slot at Louder Than Life in September. Fans were recently treated to a preview of the band’s electrifying live energy when Spiritbox performed “Soft Spine” during their late-night TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on July 7.

Pre-sales for select dates begin Wednesday, July 9, at 10 a.m. local time through Live Nation using the code LIGHTS. General tickets go on sale Friday, July 11, at 10 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster.

The Tsunami Sea era has proven to be a breakout moment for Spiritbox. Released earlier this year, the album marked their second No. 1 on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart, and spawned the fan-favorite singles “Soft Spine” and “Torrential.”

It’s the Courtney LaPlante-led band’s second ruler on Top Hard Rock Albums, following Eternal Blue, which reigned in 2021. Between the two LPs, Spiritbox also made the ranking with the EP The Fear of Fear, which peaked at No. 5 in 2023.

Spiritbox’s 2025 U.S. Fall Tour is packed with arena and theater dates, including stops at Austin’s H-E-B Center, Detroit’s Masonic Temple Theatre, and Nashville’s Pinnacle. The band will also visit smaller markets like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Kingston, Rhode Island, offering a range of intimate and large-scale experiences for fans.

Periphery, fresh off their 2025 release Periphery V: Djent Is Not a Genre, will bring their signature technical wizardry to the tour, while Honey Revenge, whose debut album Retrograde Heart has been praised for its infectious hooks and alternative edge, will add an exciting contrast to the lineup.

The full list of dates is below:

Spiritbox 2025 U.S. Fall Tour Dates:
Nov. 12 – Ontario, CA @ Toyota Arena
Nov. 13 – Las Vegas, NV @ Pearl Concert Theater
Nov. 15 – Albuquerque, NM @ Revel Entertainment Center
Nov. 18 – Austin, TX @ H-E-B Center at Cedar Park
Nov. 19 – Oklahoma City, OK @ The Criterion
Nov. 21 – Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory
Nov. 22 – Omaha, NE @ Steelhouse Omaha
Nov. 23 – Kansas City, MO @ The Midland Theatre
Nov. 25 – Nashville, TN @ The Pinnacle
Nov. 26 – Cincinnati, OH @ Andrew J. Brady Center
Nov. 28 – Columbus, OH @ KEMBA Live!
Nov. 29 – Buffalo, NY @ Buffalo RiverWorks
Nov. 30 – Detroit, MI @ Masonic Temple Theatre
Dec. 2 – Greensboro, NC @ Greensboro Special Event Center
Dec. 3 – Virginia Beach, VA @ The Dome
Dec. 5 – Lancaster, PA @ Freedom Hall
Dec. 6 – Kingston, RI @ Ryan Center
Dec. 7 – Wallingford, CT @ Toyota Oakdale Theatre

Australian hip-hop heavyweights  Hilltop Hoods are gearing up for a triumphant return to the road in 2026 with their Never Coming Home national arena tour, supporting their upcoming album Fall From the Light.

The six-date run, presented by TEG and Blue Max Music, kicks off Feb. 14 at Hobart’s MyState Bank Arena before hitting Adelaide (Feb. 21), Sydney (Feb. 28), Melbourne (Mar. 7), Brisbane (Mar. 14), and concluding at Perth’s RAC Arena on Mar. 21. Fans can access pre-sale tickets from July 14 at 9 a.m. local time via the group’s mailing list, while general sale opens July 17 at 10 a.m. local time on the Hilltop Hoods website.

Fall From the Light, arriving Aug. 1 via Island Records/UMA, marks the ARIA-winning trio’s first album in six years following 2019’s The Great Expanse, which debuted at No. 1 on the ARIA Albums Chart and broke records as the band’s sixth consecutive chart-topper. The new LP promises collaborations with SIX60, Nyassa and Marlon, and includes recent singles “The Gift,” “Don’t Happy, Be Worry,” and “Laced Up.” Their latest release, “Never Coming Home,” drops this week.

“This album has been an exercise in patience,” Suffa (Matt Lambert) said in a statement. “Six years is a long time between albums, but we’ve never been so thorough, so pedantic with an album before. The result is something carefully crafted with extreme attention to detail.”

Pressure (Daniel Smith) added, “We put more years into it than any other album because we wanted it to be our best work to date. Putting it out after so long feels monumental and exciting.”

The Never Coming Home tour marks Hilltop Hoods’ first Australian headline trek since 2022’s Show Business Tour, which followed a global run and pandemic-era singles like “I’m Good?” that connected deeply with fans. Formed in Adelaide in 1994, Suffa, Pressure, and DJ Debris (Barry Francis) have built a career as one of Australia’s most celebrated groups, with six ARIA No. 1 albums, 10 ARIA Awards, and over one million records sold in their homeland.

Internationally, the group’s influence has grown steadily, with U.S. tours in 2014 and 2019, and plans to bring Never Coming Home to European and U.K. audiences later this year.

Hilltop Hoods made history in 2006 as the first Australian hip-hop act to top the ARIA Albums Chart with The Hard Road.

Hilltop Hoods Never Coming Home Tour – Australia 2026
Feb. 14 – MyState Bank Arena, Hobart
Feb. 21 – Entertainment Centre, Adelaide
Feb. 28 – Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney
Mar. 7 – Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
Mar. 14 – Entertainment Centre, Brisbane
Mar. 21 – RAC Arena, Perth

In one of the most unexpected moments of America’s Got Talent season 20 so far, Simon Cowell stunned the audience — and the contestant herself — when he interrupted an audition to invite her granddaughter on stage to sing instead.

The scene unfolded when Gina Bellina took the stage, explaining to the judges that her granddaughter, Lilliana, had secretly signed her up for AGT. “Behind my back, she signed me up,” Bellina told the panel with a laugh. “I only found out two days before I was meant to be here. I thought she was crazy, but she believed in me.”

With encouragement from the audience, Bellina began performing an original song written by Lilliana. But mid-performance, Cowell cut in. “Hang on a second,” he said, turning to Lilliana in the audience. “Did you write that song? You did? Can you sing it?”

Visibly nervous, Lilliana stepped on stage for an impromptu audition that quickly turned into a show-stopping moment. Her soulful rendition of the heartfelt track drew a standing ovation and left the judges speechless.

“You’ve got Gina here, but weirdly Gina got you here,” Cowell told Lilliana afterwards. “You’ve got the better voice. You’re cool, and I think people are going to root for you. So, as long as Gina, you’re prepared to let Liliana sing, this could work.”

Sofía Vergara echoed the sentiment, saying, “We would have never known you had this beautiful, beautiful voice if Simon hadn’t asked you to sing. I think people are going to love you.”

The judges were split on Bellina’s original audition. Mel B admitted, “I have to be honest, it didn’t quite get there for me,” voting no. But Mandel and Vergara said yes, pushing Lilliana through to the next round with Cowell’s decisive vote.

America’s Got Talent airs Tuesdays on NBC and streams on Peacock.

Live Nation poses more of a threat to independent promoters and venues than scalpers, officials with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) told the Trump administration in an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday (July 7).

The letter follows a call for public comment from the two agencies in the wake of an executive order by President Trump earlier this year aimed at addressing long-standing consumer complaints about the event ticketing business. While both Live Nation and NIVA submitted lengthy responses urging Congress to pass a slate of reform packages targeting often criticized practices in the ticket resale business, NIVA officials also included several criticisms of Live Nation in its letter, calling for the company to be broken up and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually in legal settlements.

In his letter to the FTC and DOJ, NIVA executive director Stephen Parker accused Live Nation of using its vertically integrated “flywheel” model to outbid independent concert promoters for artist tours, knowing that the money the company loses on the concert business will be made up from revenue from ticketing fees, venue ownership, artist management fees, merchandise sales and advertising and sponsorship packages it sells to major brands. Parker called Live Nation’s market power a “direct result of a policy failure in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” adding that the DOJ’s lawsuit against Live Nation filed in May 2024 represented an opportunity to “correct this error and deliver structural change that should have been required fifteen years ago.”

Notably, NIVA’s hard line against Live Nation comes as the concert promotion giant fights for its survival in U.S. District court after the Department of Justice and 40 states attorneys general brought suit against the company last year on charges that the company acted monopolistically and used its scale to unfairly compete in the concert promotion market.

Later in the letter, Parker pointed to Live Nation’s artist management business, which he claims gives “its promotions division the right of first refusal” to directly submit offers to the biggest artists in the industry. He also accused the company of unfairly enforcing its radius clauses, punishing artists who opt to work with independent promoters and “demanding to be added as a ‘co-promoter’ on shows it had no involvement in booking.”

“The National Independent Venue Association 2025 State of Live report paints a stark picture of what independent venues face,” Parker’s letter continued, referring to NIVA’s first-ever comprehensive national economic impact study released last month. “Despite hosting more than 153,000 events, serving 183.7 million fans, and driving $10.6 billion in off-site tourism spending and $19.3 billion in tax revenue, 64% of independent venues were unprofitable in 2024, and nearly one-quarter struggled just to stay open.”

Along with calling for the forced divestiture of Live Nation into four separate companies, Parker wants Live Nation to pay into a “long-term fund of $300–$500 million annually for at least 15 years, financed through settlement contributions, disgorgement, or performance-based revenue shares,” adding that the fund “would support capital investment, marketing support, and operational sustainability for small and mid-sized independent venues, festivals, and promoters.”

In their own letter to the FTC and DOJ, Live Nation officials refuted NIVA’s claims about the company’s impact on independent promoters and outlined their own recommendations for cleaning up the live events industry — namely, by cracking down on the secondary ticketing business.

Live Nation’s recommendations include giving artists “the exclusive rights to decide if, when and how their tickets can be resold” and capping the amount of money a scalper can charge fans to no more than 20% above face value (in Parker’s letter, he says NIVA wants resale capped at 10%).

In the letter, Live Nation officials further stated that the growing resale market wasn’t only being driven by automated bots, noting that “one underappreciated method is the use of automation to create thousands of ‘synthetic’ accounts, meaning primary ticketing accounts that appear to be normal fan accounts but are actually controlled by ticket brokers.”

More than 80,000 new accounts are created every day at Ticketmaster, according to Live Nation’s letter, which continues that “there is strong evidence that a significant portion of new accounts are bad actors generating fake accounts.”

Live Nation has experienced recent cyber attacks, the letter explains, including more than 25 million daily attempts to create fake accounts, sometimes by non-public IP addresses making more than 10,000 attempts at a time.

“Scalpers rely on a low success rate to end up with banks of fake accounts,” the letter continues, adding that the burden “falls on Ticketmaster to identify and weed out the fake accounts. We are increasingly able to do so, but no one should be happy about a system that permits rogue actors to bombard primary tickets systems with fake accounts, bots, and all the rest, and then relies on the ticketing companies to clean up the mess.”