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The parking lots on Prairie Street in Inglewood love to see me coming. Whenever I’m running late to a show at the Forum or Sofi—i.e., always—I find myself at the mercy of the same corner lot and whatever they deign to upcharge as we get closer to showtime. They saw a fair amount of me in the past week or so, thanks to an especially loaded tour schedule in LA that brought A$AP Rocky and Rosalía to the Forum within days of each other, while Don Toliver tore down the Staples Center (referring to it as Crypto is like calling Twitter “X”) in between.

It’s to the point where I’ve inspired my own one-man loyalty program: when I pulled up at Rocky, the garage owner Derrick recognized me—“My man always be at everything”—and gave me a homie discount; days later, with minutes to spare before Rosalía took the stage, as he shooed everyone else away from the already full lot, he instructed his employees to lift the cones and let me in. So shoutout to Derrick, shoutout to the tour gods for lining up a blockbuster summer of shows in LA, and shoutout to being blessed enough to attend all three, which will absolutely go down as some of the must-see tours of the year.

For the last decade and a half, A$AP Rocky has arguably been making the best music videos in hip-hop, so it should come as no surprise that he can put together such a visually engrossing live show. While lot of artists at his level coast on surface-level vibes that are really just one or two degrees removed from an idea someone else already did before, Rocky is a true innovator, for better and worse. That goes for production, curation and collaboration, aesthetics, ideas—he’s always throwing a lot at the wall and trying to tie it all together under a fusion of taste and street. When it works, it works beautifully. Rocky cited Tim Burton as a major influence for his at-long-last-released (and honestly, underrated) fourth album Don’t Be Dumb, and as he opened the show rapping “Helicopter” from an actual helicopter on the ceiling while jack-booted dancers in SWAT riot gear raged below him, he looked every bit like Jack Nicholson’s Joker throwing dollars and laughing gas out to the citizens of Gotham from his parade float. It was, in a word, not simply turnt, but cool. It felt cinematic, and it made that song and others from the album feel even bigger than they do on wax. (Providing the entire arena with white tees to spin in the air as the song instructs certainly helped.)

That’s the thing: for all the hiatuses, the years of snippets, loosies and leaks, and the jokes from critics and enemies that music is the last thing anyone thinks of him for these days, Rocky commands a pretty loyal, unwavering fanbase. Much has been made of his ability to keep booking festival headlining slots even with no new music, but a sold-out tour his first time on the road in seven years is even more impressive. Despite the sabbatical, he showed no rust. The crowd obviously went nuclear for Tyler, The Creator’s cameo, as any LA arena would and does, but Rocky held the room on his own for much of the show. The only time he briefly locked out? Catching his son Riot’s gaze in the crowd, towards the end.

To that end, though, the show would’ve hit even harder if it felt tighter. At one point Rocky assembled Danny Elfman and his band on stage for Dumb’s lead single; it was a dope tableau but took a little long to set up. Often there were transitions where, in service of setting Rocky’s ideas up, the energy lapsed a little and over-relied on A$AP Lou screaming at everyone to keep the tees spinning amidst loud, droning helicopter whirring, which got old. Rocky didn’t even remove the ghoulish mask he wears to start the show until about an hour in; the rapper they call Pretty Flacko is so committed to his bits that he covers his face for half the show. My last note? Sequencing. Rocky has joints, both crowd-pleaser singles and features and core fanbase favorites—the crowd spent half of the night pleading for “L$D” until he finally acquiesced towards the end, and went up for album cuts like “Angels” or “Excuse Me.” But the first part of the show didn’t mix those songs in well-enough, opting to run through a lot of the new album first, and he took a lot of breathers between songs where in my opinion it’s always a little more impressive when a performer just seamlessly transitions from banger to banger to banger.

But perfection and polish weren’t the goals here. Rocky made that clear from the jump, when he started the show in earnest from the floor amongst the moshpits. It was punk, sure, but also in opening himself up to the unpredictability of fan interactions (“Yo, chill out, shorty!”) it was inherently messy and raw. Rocky might say that was the whole point.

Let’s get this out of the way: I went to Don Night 1—which is to say, not the night where Toliver brought out his label boss Travis Scott and Travis’ old label boss Kanye, together, for one big family-tree of raging. But do I sound believably unbothered when I say I didn’t really mind in retrospect, because Don doesn’t need guests to absolutely crush a full-length tour show? (Plus, I’ve seen Travis pop out at a Don show in Irving Plaza a couple of years ago to do “Embarrassed,” give me a rare album cut in a small venue over the standard arena cameo any day.) ((I’m protesting too much now, I know.))

OWT marks Don’s first arena tour, after he did one-off arena shows during his last stint on the road for Hardstone Psycho. At that show he turned Staples into a Mad Max-meets-Sons of Anarchy biker hellscape, a peak that’s hard to match. But the Octane tour has the advantage of being in service of Don’s most polished album to date. As I wrote about the album when it dropped earlier this year, it’s just a thrill to watch him get progressively better on each project, reinventing himself each time while retaining his core sound: a more melodic, at times more sensual version of the same rager DNA strands that Travis Scott popularized. Octane came into 2026 as the rap album to beat; only Drake and maybe Isaiah Rashad have managed to best it. What was most impressive was just how much of the new music already had the entire sold-out arena in the palm of Don’s hands. Generally artists playing to a crowd that big get the biggest reaction from established hits, but there were two girls in front of me going bar-for-bar, ad-lib for ad-lib on every Octane cut like the album had been out for 4 years instead of four months. That Don was wreaking all of this controlled havoc just a couple hours after literally running across the street from performing live at the BET Awards was just the cherry on top of the flex. The tour’s set design centers Don in an observatory setting, rapping down from on high, but it feels like, slowly but surely, he’s climbing even higher.

Here it is, the hardest show out right now. Show of the year, perhaps. Best show since Cowboy Carter, even. Believe all of the hype. I’m still annoyed to this day that I missed her at Webster Hall in 2019, where I just know “Aute Cuture” rang the fuck off, so I was hellbent on making sure I made it out to Lux, but I was not prepared for the experience (mostly because I generally stay away from social media clips of any tour before I see it for myself.)

In case it’s unclear that Rosalía is presenting high art, she makes it metatextual: the stage design is a painting canvas, she opens the show getting unboxed from a crate amidst a setting that looks like it could be Thomas Crown’s museum hangar, and at one point she even performs from the frame of the Mona Lisa, complete with adoring real fans admiring her on the stage. You can pop that kind of shit when the show is this good, though. Setting things off with a 25-piece orchestra and conductor on the floor while Rosalía croons lilting ballads with her haunting, booming voice piercing through the air, I felt like I was Frasier Crane watching one of the conservatories he’s always geeking over with Niles. The choreography, the lighting, and the cinematography of the footage for the arena screens—which during “La Perla,” were more compelling to watch than what was actually happening on stage thanks to some costume and camera trickery, a consideration that’s another sign of an all-time performer— all came together for a fully enveloping experience that just felt masterful, like watching an artist make the leap from “one of them ones” to Her in real-time. It made me even more pissed off than I already was at Euphoria season 3; no one this locked-in should have their precious time wasted like that.

I think my favorite thing about the show was that despite all these swings for greatness and prestige, it never felt self-serious. Rosalía is charming, quick-witted, and pretty funny, and she kept those qualities on display often, from recounting filming her first ever music video in Hollywood where “some bitch ran off with her only pair of heels,” to interacting with fans with funny signs, and declaring during the second act—which switches the vibe up from demure ballet to third-act Black Swan—that she knows the crowd didn’t just come here to cry, but to shake some ass too. And the nightly viral moment, where she brings a celebrity onstage to improv through a confessional, was a delight with special guest Odessa A’zion bringing a lot of chemistry and even mild flirtation to the proceedings. (“That’s Bobby Hill’s daughter,” a man behind me helpfully explained to his date.)

But as turnt as the show got, some of Rosalía’s ballads new and old were so moving that she herself was shedding a few tears towards the end; crying to your own shit is the greatest flex. Her encore song, “Magnolias,” has a line where Rosalía sings “God descends and I ascend/We meet in the middle.” Watching the Lux Tour live felt like the meeting point.