Olivia Rodrigo's Tour Openers Are a Masterclass in Taste-Making Power

Olivia Rodrigo announced her third album, "you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love," with one single and a tour announcement that landed at the same time. The album drops June 12, 2026. The tour starts September 25 in Hartford. The single is good. The openers are the story. Rodrigo announced "The Unraveled Tour" with a rotating lineup of five acts: Wolf Alice for the first leg, The Last Dinner Party and Devon Again for later runs, Grace Ives and Die Spitz for select dates. That is a more interesting curatorial decision than any single announcement she could have made. ## Wolf Alice Has Been Waiting for This Exact Slot Wolf Alice, the London quartet led by Ellie Rowsell, released their fourth studio album in March 2026. It debuted at number 3 in the UK. In the US, it peaked at 47 on the Billboard 200, which is strong for a British guitar band in 2026 but nowhere near the chart position the album deserved by any critical or fan metric. Being announced as the opening act for the first leg of Olivia Rodrigo's arena tour changes that calculation. Rodrigo's first tour, the "Sour Tour" in 2022, sold out venues in under four minutes. Her "Guts" tour in 2024 generated $173 million in gross revenue. The "Unraveled Tour" will be larger. Wolf Alice's Glastonbury appearance in 2022 was watched by approximately 600,000 viewers on BBC iPlayer. Rodrigo's Hartford opener will be attended by 14,000 people. The venue scale is smaller, but the demographic overlap, alternative-curious pop listeners aged 17 to 25, is the exact audience Wolf Alice needs to reach in America to convert streaming numbers into US touring revenue. ## Devon Again Is the TikTok-to-Arena Test Case Devon Again is an alt-pop artist from Los Angeles who first surfaced on TikTok in 2020. Her debut single "Suburbia" dropped in 2021. By 2025 she had released the EP *In Order* alongside a catalog that includes the projects *never goes away* (2024), *cherry cola / sunburn* (2024), and *deep* (2023). Her songs move between R&B-inflected melodies and indie-pop production, a sound that sits in the space between self-aware bedroom pop and something with real arena-scale emotional reach. The songs that built her following, "cherry cola," "never goes away," "skittles," are the kind of tracks that connect on repeat listening rather than on first impression. That is a specific sonic quality that is hard to maintain in opening-act context, where you have 30 minutes and an audience that showed up for someone else. Devon Again's catalog does something specific: it earns attention quietly rather than demanding it loudly. Rodrigo's decision to include Devon Again in the Unraveled Tour lineup is a statement about where alt-pop is going, not where it has been. Wolf Alice represents the British guitar tradition. The Last Dinner Party represents theatrical art-rock. Devon Again represents the generation of artists who built their entire audience infrastructure on short-form video before releasing a traditional body of recorded work, and who are now asking whether arena touring can translate that intimacy. The answer is not guaranteed. TikTok-adjacent artists have failed to convert at live shows before, including several high-profile cases where artists with 5 to 10 million followers sold under 500 tickets for headline club shows. Devon Again's catalog has enough depth now, four releases since 2022, to sustain a 30-minute set without relying on the one or two songs her casual listeners know. Whether that depth comes through at Hartford or Brooklyn or LA will be the real test of her Unraveled Tour run. ## The Pattern Going Back to Chappell Roan Rodrigo's reputation for tour openers started with Chappell Roan and PinkPantheress on the "Sour Tour" in 2022. Both were unknown outside of music media at the time. Roan headlined Coachella's main stage two years later. PinkPantheress is now a feature credit on major-label releases. The Last Dinner Party followed a similar arc. The British band was announced for the 2024 "Guts" tour two months before their debut album "Prelude to Ecstasy" went to number one in the UK. Rodrigo chose them before the album landed. That is taste-making with actual leverage behind it: a 23-year-old artist using the 18,000-seat venues she has access to as a broadcast platform for who she thinks matters. The Fader's framing, "opening for Olivia Rodrigo is a short cut to megastardom," is accurate but slightly late. The short cut only works if the opener is already good. Rodrigo is not creating these acts. She is surfacing them at exactly the right moment in their trajectory. ## "You Seem Pretty Sad" Is Alt-Rock Compatible The album framing matters for understanding the tour opener logic. "you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love" is being described by sources close to the project as Rodrigo's most sonically adventurous record, drawing from shoegaze, post-punk, and early 2000s UK rock alongside the pop structures that made "Sour" and "Guts" commercially dominant. That sonic shift creates the opener alignment. Wolf Alice, The Last Dinner Party, Devon Again, and Grace Ives are not stylistically adjacent to Rodrigo's first two albums. They are adjacent to what the third album appears to be doing. The openers are not chosen to match her audience; they are chosen to shape it. ## Grace Ives Is the One to Watch Of the five announced openers, Grace Ives has the smallest existing profile and the highest ceiling. Her 2024 album "Janky Star" generated significant critical attention at Pitchfork and The Line of Best Fit but limited commercial traction. Her live show has developed a reputation for precision and economy, two qualities that survive large venues. Die Spitz, the New York post-punk duo, represents the wildest card in the lineup. Their recorded output is raw and unpolished in ways that arena touring has historically smoothed out of openers who make the jump. Whether that rawness translates at scale is an open question. ## The Arena as A&R Department Rodrigo's tour selection functions as a multi-million-dollar investment in five acts that most major label A&R departments would not green-light for arena exposure without more commercial evidence. The difference is that Rodrigo has the audience and the curatorial credibility to make the exposure meaningful. The Unraveled Tour runs through May 2027. By the time it ends, at least two of the five openers will have substantially larger profiles than they have now. Devon Again converting her catalog depth into arena moments would be the sleeper story of the whole run. That is not a prediction. That is the pattern, documented, across two previous tours, and it is about to run for the third time.