There is a strain of American music that has always treated grief as a form of honesty — the blues tradition, the country weeper, the soul ballad that refuses to resolve cleanly — and Rod Wave has spent his career working that vein with uncommon directness for an artist his age. The St. Petersburg rapper and singer, born Rodarius Marcell Green in 1998, has built one of the more remarkable commercial trajectories in contemporary music not by chasing formats but by staying close to something difficult and real. He brings his largest headline tour to date, the Don’t Look Down Tour, to American Airlines Center in Dallas on Saturday, September 26, with an 8:30 PM start. FRIDAYY joins on support.
About Rod Wave
Three of Rod Wave’s albums — SoulFly (2021), Beautiful Mind (2022), and Nostalgia (2023) — debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. His 2024 release, Last Lap, landed at number two, his fifth consecutive Top 3 entry and fourth straight chart-topper on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. The cumulative stream count exceeds 15 billion, with a weekly average of 82.3 million. “Heart on Ice” introduced him to a wider audience that had been growing organically long before the numbers caught up with the moment.
In 2026, Rod Wave earned a Grammy nomination for Best Song Written for Visual Video, for a track contributed to Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners — placing his work inside one of the year’s more culturally weighted projects and connecting him, in the eyes of the Academy at least, to a tradition of songwriting that carries its own kind of weight beyond the chart.
His seventh studio album, Don’t Look Down, arrives August 28 via Alamo Records, four weeks before Dallas. The artist has described the album’s trajectory in his own terms: “I feel like every album, as I grow older, is different. I paint a different picture, because I’m a different version of myself.” The cinematic trailer — featuring Golden Globe-nominated actor Danny Hudson in a scene that opens at a funeral and shifts forward into something harder to name — carried a line that doubles as a directive: “No more sneaky business, no more side deals. Keep building our own machine. Keep going and don’t look down.”
The Don’t Look Down Tour spans 25 cities across North America, running from Philadelphia on September 12 through Atlanta on November 18, with stops across the South, Midwest, East Coast, and West Coast. Rod Wave’s previous headline arena run, The Redemption Experience, sold out every date on the schedule. FRIDAYY accompanies the full tour.
American Airlines Center
American Airlines Center sits at 2500 Victory Ave, the 20,000-capacity anchor for major touring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The room handles the full scale of an operation like Rod Wave’s — his streaming numbers are the kind that reliably fill arenas of this size, and the Don’t Look Down Tour is built accordingly. For venue information visit americanairlinescenter.com.
Tickets & Pricing
An artist presale opens June 24 and runs through June 25; registration deadline for the artist presale is June 22. A Spotify Premium presale is available to eligible subscribers. General on-sale begins Friday, June 26 at 1:00 PM local time through Ticketmaster, LiveNation.com, and official-rodwave.com. VIP and Platinum ticket options are available. Get tickets here.