The Unraveled Tour’s 65-date run is the obvious headline. The five women on the opening slot might be the more interesting one.
In February 2024, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour opened in Palm Springs with a then-mid-tier indie pop singer named Chappell Roan in the opening slot. By the second weekend of dates, Roan’s streaming numbers were up 32 percent. Her run as Rodrigo’s opener wrapped on April 2 in Boston. Within weeks, she was the most-talked-about artist at Coachella. Within months, she was the most-talked-about artist in pop, full stop.
That sequence — opener slot, streaming spike, full cultural breakout — is the lens through which to read Thursday morning’s announcement of Rodrigo’s third tour, the 65-date Unraveled World Tour in support of her June album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. The dates, the venues, the $20 Silver Star tickets, the on-sale logistics — those will be litigated in 50 ticketing pieces by the weekend. The more interesting story is the five names at the bottom of the press release: Wolf Alice, The Last Dinner Party, Grace Ives, Devon Again, and Die Spitz.
Because Rodrigo, at 23, has quietly turned the opening act on her own tour into the most consequential piece of real estate in pop.
The pattern, in three tours
The Chappell Roan story is the splashy one, but it isn’t the only one. Look at the receipts.
The Sour Tour (2022), Rodrigo’s first headlining run, brought along Gracie Abrams and Holly Humberstone as openers — two artists who were then critically respected but commercially niche. Abrams is now selling out her own arena tour. Roan, also, opened a single Sour date in San Francisco. (Yes, Rodrigo had her on the radar that early.)
The Guts World Tour (2024) cycled through Roan, then Remi Wolf, then PinkPantheress, then Benee — across 101 shows that ultimately drew 1.6 million people and grossed $209 million. Roan got the breakout, but every act on that bill saw measurable lifts.
The Unraveled Tour (2026–2027) brings Wolf Alice (the British alt-rock band that won the Mercury Prize in 2018), The Last Dinner Party (the buzziest UK indie act of the past two years and a Brit Award winner), Grace Ives (a Brooklyn synth-pop artist with a small but cultish following), Devon Again (a Denver-born, LA-based left-of-center pop artist who broke through on TikTok), and Die Spitz (an Austin-based all-female punk band signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records).
Three things to notice. All five are women. None are conventional pop. The list reads less like a Live Nation package tour and more like a Pitchfork year-end staff list.
The thesis
This is not accidental, and it is not a label decision. Rodrigo is famously involved in every aesthetic choice on her tours, from the choreography (limited, deliberate, anti-pop) to the staging (rock-show pacing, not pop-show pageantry) to the support acts. Her openers across three tours add up to a clear curatorial point of view: women, guitars, real bands, real catalogues, the louder the better.
It also adds up to a thesis about what an arena pop tour can do for an industry that’s structurally bad at developing the kind of artist Rodrigo keeps platforming. Indie-rock acts fronted by women have, for the better part of a decade, been the genre most chronically underbooked into arenas. Wolf Alice has been a critically beloved band for over a decade without ever quite cracking American arenas as a headliner. The Last Dinner Party broke through in 2024 on the back of festival sets, magazine covers, and Brit Awards — but had not, until now, had a vehicle that puts them in front of 18,000 American 19-year-olds a night.
That’s what the Rodrigo opener slot is. It’s a vehicle.
Who breaks?
The Chappell Roan trajectory has reset the expectations on what this slot can do. Roan was not the first artist to ride a Rodrigo tour to a bigger room — but she was the first to ride one all the way to a Best New Artist Grammy and a year of magazine covers. The question hanging over Unraveled is which of the five new openers, if any, replicates the arc.
The smart money is on The Last Dinner Party. They already have the buzz, the look, the songs, and the international press; they need American mainstream penetration, and Rodrigo’s audience — young, female, indie-curious, very online — is exactly the demo that has historically converted on UK indie acts. (See: every Florence + the Machine and Wolf Alice U.S. breakout of the past 15 years.)
But the Die Spitz booking is the more revealing pick. Die Spitz is an aggressive, all-female punk-and-grunge four-piece from Austin, signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records, with rapidly growing critical buzz (Metal Hammer recently called them “the best new band in the world”) but no commercial radio presence and a sound that lands closer to Babes in Toyland than anything pop-adjacent. Putting them in front of a Rodrigo crowd in Brooklyn or Los Angeles is the kind of bet a major-label A&R department would never green-light. It’s the kind of bet a curator makes.
Grace Ives is the most obviously Rodrigo-pilled of the five — slept-on art-pop with a knowing edge, exactly the sensibility Rodrigo namechecks when she talks about her own influences. Devon Again is the development play; she is least known of the bunch and stands to gain the most. Wolf Alice, of all of them, is the elder stateswoman, the closest thing to a peer booking, and arguably the act that confers the most credibility on Rodrigo rather than the other way around.
The bigger picture
It’s worth saying plainly: pop stars do not have to do this. The opener slot on a 65-date arena tour is a lucrative piece of inventory that most headliners use to either return label favors, pre-sell their next tour, or platform an artist already on a commercial trajectory the headliner can ride. Rodrigo, on three consecutive tours, has used it differently. She has used it to put critically respected, commercially undersized women in front of the largest pop crowds in North America, and waited to see what happens.
What has happened, so far, is one of the defining pop breakouts of the decade. The smart play, between now and September 25 in Hartford, is to learn the names of the other five.
The Unraveled Tour kicks off September 25 at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford, Connecticut, and concludes May 2, 2027 at Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. American Express presale begins May 5; general on-sale is May 7.
