The Bends are doing their first headline tour this fall — the Leeward Drive Tour, 15 cities through November — and the routing makes sense for a band still in the early work of converting a viral streaming moment into a real touring career. They play The Echo Lounge & Music Hall in Dallas on Saturday, September 12. The night before is Scoot Inn in Austin. A Texas two-night stretch eight days into a run that launched in Baton Rouge on home turf.
The Echo is a reasonable call for where The Bends are right now. Live Nation–operated, capacity up to 1,000, situated in the Design District corridor where a lot of Dallas’s mid-tier action has settled. Large enough to frame an arrival. Not so large that it has to look half-empty to feel okay. It’s the kind of room a band books when they’re not overreaching — and after a Lollapalooza stage in August and support runs with Houndmouth and Ole 60, The Bends have enough receipts to fill it.
About The Bends
The four-piece formed at LSU — frontman Hayden Field (vocals, guitar), Ian Marmande (lead guitar), Chase Perkins (bass), Jacob Rhodes (drums) — Baton Rouge-bred and Nashville-based now, as the arc of the past two years would suggest. First show in 2023. Nearly 100 college circuit dates across the Southeast after that. Debut single “Makeup” hit 6.2 million Spotify streams and cracked the Top 5 on the platform’s Viral Chart. “Weekend Love” earned SiriusXM Alt Nation Advance Placement. Then Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra heard them, co-wrote and produced “Virginia,” and connected them to Warner Records.
The Leeward Drive EP followed in 2025 — five tracks, including “The Fence,” produced by Brad Shultz of Cage the Elephant. This year brought two new Warner singles: “Lips” and “Tango” (March 2026), the latter described by Field as “a meditation on reconnecting and navigating the emotional distance that time can create.”
The reference points — The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, early Kings of Leon — come with the genre and The Bends aren’t fighting them. What’s harder to comp is the production instinct on Leeward Drive; Griffin and Shultz aren’t running a nostalgia operation, and neither is the band. The live reputation also tracks: sold-out shows in New Orleans and New York City before this headline run started, with a stage presence that’s been called ferocious by enough people that it bears repeating.
The Echo Lounge & Music Hall
The Echo Lounge & Music Hall is at 1323 N. Stemmons Fwy in Dallas’s Design District — a 25,000-square-foot Live Nation–operated room that books across rock, metal, hip-hop, and electronic. Capacity up to 1,000. Find more DFW concerts on the site.
Tickets
Doors at 7:00 PM on Saturday, September 12. Get tickets for The Bends at The Echo Lounge →