22 June 26 - July 2, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Tank and the Bangas 8 P.M. THURSDAY, JUNE 26, TULIPS, 112 ST. LOUIS AVE., FORT WORTH. $35.57+ AT SEETICKETS.US New Orleans funk-soul-rock-rap outfit Tank and the Bangas won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest in 2017 and hasn’t looked back. The group, an- chored by the charismatic Tarriona “Tank” Ball, will be rolling into town fresh from its first Grammy win for its 2024 LP The Heart, The Mind, The Soul, which won for best spoken word poetry album. Turns out, Ball has loved the art of poetry even longer than music: “I grew up sing- ing, but I also grew up writing,” Ball told Under the Radar magazine earlier this year. “[Poetry] is my first love. ... At one time, I was thinking I wanted to be a singer full time. I said, ‘Well, I don’t have any songs? But aren’t songs just words? Aren’t poems just words without mel- ody?’ I said, ‘If that’s the case, I have a million songs.’ So, I began to start making my poems into my songs.” Cure for Paranoia will open. PRESTON JONES Thievery Corporation 7 P.M. FRIDAY, JUNE 27, HOUSE OF BLUES, 2200 N. LAMAR. $60+ AT TICKETMASTER.COM The duo of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton has been making music as Thievery Corporation for the better part of the last three decades. Pinning down the pair’s precise style — inclined toward electronica, but encompassing acid jazz, reggae, hip-hop, bossa nova and another half-dozen genres besides — is practically a music lover’s Rorschach test, but Garza and Hilton have made this mixed sensibility one of the primary plea- sures of Thievery Corporation’s catalog. “When we started, we wanted to make music that has one foot in the past, and the other foot in the fu- ture, and we were just messing around with a lot of different styles,” Garza told TNT magazine in 2024. Although the band hasn’t formally re- leased a studio project since 2020’s Symphonik, Garza and Hilton have also stayed busy under their own names. Hilton just dropped Midnight Ragas, his third LP in the last two years. With Remy Reilly. PJ DeeBaby 8 P.M. FRIDAY, JUNE 27, SOUTH SIDE BALLROOM, 1135 BOTHAM JEAN BLVD. $56+ AT TICKETMASTER.COM Houston rapper DeeBaby (born Jesus Martinez) has moved swiftly since breaking out in the early 2020s, releasing a mixtape a year beginning with 2023’s Junkie Mode. His third and latest ef- fort, Ms. Salazar, is a 26-track tribute, with no features, to the woman who raised him, a woman he considers his non-biological grand- mother. “Everybody wants to feel loved, and sometimes it isn’t the person you expect to re- ceive that love from,” DeeBaby said in a state- ment. “I knew that my mother loved me, and I didn’t know my dad, and though I did have a fa- ther figure who stepped up, he had his own per- sonal journey to go through before he could be there for me. His mother, Ms. Salazar, isn’t my blood grandmother, but she made me feel like she loved me more than anybody in the world.” With Fresco Trey. PJ Ashley McBryde 10 P.M. SATURDAY, JUNE 28, BILLY BOB’S TEXAS, 2520 RODEO PLAZA, FORT WORTH. $28+ AT AXS.COM Sometimes, you just have to keep at it. Singer- songwriter Ashley McBryde has taken the slow and steady route to burgeoning country star- dom, having moved from Arkansas to Tennes- see after college. Over the nearly two decades since, McBryde, who has opened for artists like Willie Nelson and Chris Stapleton, worked steadily until she got a break about a decade ago, thanks to the sharp ears of Eric Church. On the strength of her 2016 EP Jalopies & Expensive Guitars, which first got Church’s attention, she signed a deal that led to her 2018 full-length de- but Girl Going Nowhere. Now 41, the Grammy- winning artist is headlining big rooms on the strength of her four-LP catalog, the latest of which, The Devil I Know, dropped in 2023. PJ Mark Lettieri 8 P.M. SUNDAY, JUNE 29, SUNDOWN AT GRANADA, 3520 GREENVILLE AVE. $25+ AT PREKINDLE.COM North Texas audiences occasionally don’t realize just how spoiled for talent they really are. Case in point: The phenomenally gifted (and dizzy- ingly prolific) guitarist, composer and producer Mark Lettieri has called Fort Worth home for de- cades and continues to rack up accolades around the world as a member of the acclaimed jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy. In between those dates, the five-time Grammy winner also keeps busy guesting on too many local artists’ records to name, as well as performing with the Fearless Flyers, the Mark Lettieri Group and even solo, as he’ll do at the intimate Sundown at Granada with a set focused specifically on bari- tone guitar-centric tunes. Count your blessings, y’all. PJ Jeremy Tauriac Tarriona “Tank” Ball is the dynamic force animating New Orleans’ Tank and the Bangas. | LET’S DO THIS | t Music
