10 Best Concerts of the Week: Olivia Rodrigo, Jenny Lewis, Sleater-Kinney and More

Kicking off Women’s History Month, half of this week’s best concerts are woman-fronted acts from an array of genres. The concert week kicks off with simultaneous shows from folk duo Indigo Girls at the Longhorn Ballroom and pop star Olivia Rodrigo at American Airlines Center. On Saturday, indie goddess Jenny Lewis comes to the Cedars while gothic singer songwriter Chelsea Wolfe plays in Deep Ellum. Get ready to riot on Tuesday when the iconic riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney comes to The Studio at The Factory. This week will also see two nights of shows from indie-pop act LANY, a concert from indie-rocker Ariel Pink, a min-festival headlined by San Anontio metal band The Union Underground, Midwest emo band Mom Jeans. playing on Lower Greenville and a lesson from rapper KRS-One. Spring is surely in the air, and the concerts only get better from here.
Indigo Girls
6:30 p.m., Friday, March 1, Longhorn Ballroom, 216 Corinth St. $35 at prekindle.com

Thanks to last year’s Barbie movie and its wonderful use and re-use of Indigo Girls’ “Closer To Fine,” the longtime duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have seen renewed interest in their songwriting partnership. The duo have known each other since grade school and began performing together as high schoolers in Decatur, Georgia, in the early ’80s. The two parted ways after high school; Saliers went to Tulane University in Louisiana and Ray to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Both grew homesick and returned to Georgia, transferring to Emory University in Atlanta in 1985 when they began performing as Indigo Girls. That lifelong shared bond really shows in Indigo Girls’ music. Roots Americana and honest to its core, Indigo Girls’ songwriting has always explored the nuances of identity and emotion, never bending in its integrity. Southern gothic singer-songwriter Kristy Lee opens the show.
Olivia Rodrigo
7:00 p.m., Friday, March 1, American Airlines Center, 2500 Victory Ave. $400+ at stubhub.com

With verified resale tickets starting at around $400, we certainly hope that you scored tickets to Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour concert with Chappell Roan before reading this. If you haven’t, we’re also quite certain that your social media feed will have plenty of poorly shot videos of the show for you to scroll through come Saturday morning. The former Disney Channel actress turned pop star released her second album, Guts, last September, a much anticipated follow-up to her Grammy Award-winning debut, Sour, from 2020. Guts didn’t fare as well at this year’s Grammy Awards, receiving none of the awards for which it was nominated from the Recording Academy. The album did, however, take home the “Album of the Year” award at this year’s People’s Choice Awards, and it’s people who buy albums and concert tickets, not the Academy.
LANY
7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, South Side Ballroom, 1135 Botham Jean Blvd. $23.50+ at axs.com

The duo of guitarist and lead vocalist Paul Jason Klein and drummer Jake Clifford Goss, otherwise known as LANY, will play two nights this week in The Cedars as part of this beautiful blur: the world tour 2024. The indie-pop band was formed in Nashville in 2014 before moving to Los Angeles to make it big. The band’s name is a nod to its nationwide ambitions, spanning from Los Angeles to New York. To date, the band has released five albums, all of which have entered the Billboard 200. Last year, the band released A Beautiful Blur, its first since leaving Universal Records for Virgin Records to have more creative freedom. It was also the band’s first album as a duo after the departure of keyboardist Leslie Priest, but as Priest became more of an engineer for the band, the music has not suffered. Singer-songwriters Hazlett and Conor Burns open the show.
Jenny Lewis
7 p.m., Saturday, March 2, South Side Music Hall, 1135 Botham Jean Blvd. $42+ at axs.com

Indie goddess Jenny Lewis comes to town this week on her Joy’All Tour with avant-garde musician Hayden Pedigo. Lewis had a long career as a child actor in the ’80s and ’90s before starting Rilo Kiley with fellow child actor and then-boyfriend Blake Sennett of Salute Your Shorts and Boy Meets World. In addition to playing with Rilo Kiley, Lewis also contributed background vocals for bands Cursive and The Postal Service. Lewis had started doing solo work before Rilo Kiley officially disbanded, releasing Rabbit Fur Coat with the Watson Twins in 2006 and Acid Tongue in 2008. For those albums, as with her next two, The Voyager and On The Line, Lewis stuck close to the indie-rock genre that has gotten her this far. On Joy’All, however, she has gone more in an avant-country direction that is at once familiar and foreign.
Ariel Pink
7 p.m., Saturday, March 2, Granada Theater, 3524 Greenville Ave. $32 at prekindle.com

Ariel Pink is nothing if not a controversial figure in the music world. Seen as both the godfather of lo-fi hypnagogic pop and chillwave as well as a glib speaker who has said more than his share of problematic things in interviews, Pink has established himself as one of those figures whose life and music is an extension of a larger artistic project. Pink’s work with The Haunted Graffiti from the late ’90s through the ’00s repurposed the sounds and techniques of decades past, but also generated the feelings that kind of music evoked. Pink’s first two studio albums in 2010 and 2012 brought this kind of musical hauntology to the masses before he dropped The Haunted Graffiti band and began exploring art rock in all of its directions. Pink will have opening support from Period Bomb, Psychic Love Child and Semiwestern.
Chelsea Wolfe
7 p.m., Saturday, March 2, The Studio at The Factory, 2727 Canton St. $30.50+ at axs.com

Singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe grew up in Northern California as the daughter of a country musician father, an upbringing that inspired the young Wolfe to begin writing and recording songs in her childhood. Far from the music of her father, Wolfe’s earliest recordings were Casio-based, dark R&B songs. As Wolfe developed as a musician, she began to combine elements from the folk music she grew up with and doom metal, gothic rock and experimental noise. Wolfe’s early struggles with sleep paralysis inspired many of the lyrics in her albums Abyss and Hiss Spun. Wolfe has also struggled with alcoholism since an early age, but in 2021, she made the decision to become sober, documenting her ups and downs in the newly released album, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She. For this album, Wolfe went in a more electronic direction, creating music more akin to trip-hop than neo-folk. Australian doom metal band Divide & Dissolve will be there Saturday to warm up the crowd.
The Union Underground
8 p.m., Sunday, March 3, Trees, 2709 Elm St. $28 at axs.com

Sunday night in Deep Ellum will take us back to the 2000s nü metal scene with a concert from San Antonio’s The Union Underground. The band never saw the success of a Korn or Limp Bizkit, but The Union Underground did give us one undeniable classic from the era. When the band released … An Education in Rebellion in 2000, it came with the hit single “Turn Me On ‘Mr. Deadman’,” which stayed on the mainstream rock charts for six months, earning the band spots on Marilyn Manson’s Holy Wood tour in 2000 and the Ozzfest 2001 tour. However, in 2002, the band released a live album and broke up. The band members all went on to new projects, notably John Moyer joining Disturbed on bass. But in 2016, singer Bryan Scott announced that the band would be coming back with a new lineup, and although this new lineup has yet to release any new material, the band is set to show you everything it has been working on Sunday after sets from SOiL, RA and Flaw.
Mom Jeans.
6 p.m., Monday, March 4, Granada Theater, 3524 Greenville Ave. $38 at prekindle.com

Berkeley, California, indie-rock band Mom Jeans. started in early 2014 at UC Berkeley, and it has been coming up slowly on the indie music scene for the past decade. For the band’s first three albums, Mom Jeans. stuck to a pretty standard indie-rock sound one would expect from anyone bearing such a genre label. Last year, Mom Jeans. decided to do something a little different for its fourth album, Bear Market. Rather than writing new songs, the band returned to its older songs to re-record them with a new perspective. In these new renditions, the songs have taken on a poppier sound that has really divided fans and critics. While some praise the album for its clean mixes and tightened time signatures, others think that the new approach has ruined the old music. You can judge for yourself Sunday night when the band plays after Summer Salt, Hunny and Slow Joy on Lower Greenville.
Sleater‐Kinney
7 p.m., Tuesday, March 5, The Studio at The Factory, 2727 Canton St. $41 at axs.com

Sleater-Kinney formed in 1994 in Olympia, Washington, when Corin Tucker of riot grrrl band Heavens to Betsy and Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17 joined forces, creating one of the most important and influential bands to come out of that time and place. Taking its name from Sleater Kinney Road, in Lacey, Washington, the band combines feminist and progressive politics with punk-infused indie rock, playing sharp, hard-driving music that’s had a profound influence on women like St. Vincent and Beth Ditto as well as men like Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus. Sleater-Kinney released seven albums before going on a 10-year hiatus in 2005. Since 2015, the band has released four more, including Little Rope, which came out in January. Indie-rock singer-songwriter Black Belt Eagle Scout will open.
KRS-One
7 p.m.. Wednesday, March 6, Trees, 2709 Elm St. $35 at axs.com

“Woop-woop! That’s the sound of da police.” KRS-One is back in town with a show in Deep Ellum Wednesday night. The legendary rapper made his debut in 1993, helping to popularize the “boom bap” sub-genre of hip-hop, named after the kick-snare pattern used primarily in the East Coast style of hardcore hip-hop. Before that, KRS-One had been one-third of the hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions, where he first incorporated a Jamaican zung gu zung melody — a rapping style made famous by Yellowman — into American hip-hop. Over the years, KRS-One has maintained his prominent stature in hip-hop culture, not just as an early music influence, but as a philanthropist and a philosopher concerned with pushing forward hip-hop music and the culture from which it originates. No opening act has been announced for the show.