Medium Build named the Austin stop of the King of Having Fun Tour “The King of Austin Texas” — a bolder title than most touring acts grant a single date, and not without logic. Nick Carpenter spent the summer playing arenas as a support act for Mumford & Sons, including Madison Square Garden, and now he’s turning around and headlining the East Riverside circuit. The shift in scale is intentional. Emo’s at 1,700 people is a room you can actually feel; MSG is a place you fill.
About Medium Build
Carpenter built Medium Build while living in Anchorage, Alaska — not the obvious origin story for someone who’d eventually get championed by Elton John and signed to slowplay/Island Records in 2023, but that’s partly what makes the project interesting. His genre range is genuinely hard to categorize: country picking, emo emotional register, 80s new wave production textures, and something in the verse cadence that owes more to 90s hip-hop than to the Americana he sometimes gets filed under. Zane Lowe named him to his Artists to Watch list for 2024. He’s since relocated to Nashville, and the career has been accelerating.
The anchoring release for this tour is King of Having Fun, out September 4 on slowplay/Island Records — a 14-track record that Carpenter described in early 2025 as “f***ing dark,” built around themes of friendship, freedom, addiction, anxiety, love, and regret. The lead single, “Armor,” is the sonic proof of concept: arena-scale production paired with headspinning personal lyricism. The comparisons to Harry Styles, Sam Fender, and U2 aren’t marketing shorthand — the production actually reaches that far. Carpenter’s own framing is more grounded: “I want this to feel lived-in. It’s sort of me finding a defined place.”
About Emo’s Austin
Emo’s Austin sits at 2015 E Riverside Drive, Live Nation-operated, with a capacity of 1,700 — the right room for where Medium Build sits right now: too established for a 400-person club, not yet anchoring an amphitheater headline on its own. It’s a booking that says something. The show starts at 7:00 PM. For the full Austin concert calendar, check our listings.
Tickets
Tickets go on sale June 29 at 10:00 AM local time. Medium Build has been building toward something for a while — the Mumford & Sons arena run, the Island Records deal, a new album with genuinely large ambitions — and the custom show title suggests they’re treating Austin like more than a routing stop. Don’t sleep on this one.