SPOON RETURN TO DALLAS / LONGHORN BALLROOM / 12.29.26
Spoon return to North Texas for a late-December show at the Longhorn Ballroom, bringing three decades of exceptionally economical rock music and a couple of new songs into a room that should suit them unusually well.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
Spoon have never sounded particularly interested in how much can be added to a rock song. Britt Daniel and Jim Eno’s band has spent most of its life pursuing the opposite question: what can disappear before the thing stops working? A guitar arrives exactly when it needs to, a piano hangs around for four bars, a chorus refuses to become enormous simply because that is where another band would make it enormous. It is a deceptively difficult way to make music, and somehow Spoon have kept finding different versions of it for more than thirty years.
That catalog now stretches from the clipped urgency of A Series of Sneaks and Kill the Moonlight through Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, They Want My Soul and 2022’s Lucifer on the Sofa. The songs that survived beyond their albums — “The Way We Get By,” “I Turn My Camera On,” “The Underdog,” “Inside Out,” “Do You” — make Spoon’s longevity seem fairly obvious in retrospect. None of them sound especially attached to the year in which they were made.
The band has also been back in the studio. “Chateau Blues” and “Guess I’m Fallin In Love” arrived in 2025 from sessions for their next record, with road-tested live versions released this February. Rather than announcing an entire campaign around them, Spoon simply put the songs out because they were finished and wanted people to hear them, which is probably the most Spoon-like way imaginable to begin another chapter.
The Longhorn Ballroom makes a particularly good place for the Dallas date. Spoon remain unmistakably a Texas band even after becoming something much larger, and this show begins a three-night run through the state before San Antonio on December 30 and Austin on New Year’s Eve.
There are bands whose histories eventually become the main attraction. Spoon have accumulated enough history to fill the Longhorn several times over, but they have never seemed terribly interested in behaving like an institution. The songs stay lean, the set keeps moving, and something new is usually being worked out somewhere in the margins.
