Thievery Corporation

Thievery Corporation

United States · No upcoming dates announced · 6 past appearances

BassDowntempo & ExperimentalIndie & Alt ElectronicScene & Other

Thievery Corporation are Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, who met in 1995 at the Eighteenth Street Lounge in Washington, D.C. and turned a shared taste for dub, bossa nova and acid jazz into one of the defining downtempo catalogues. They founded ESL Music the following year and built a run of records - 'Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi', 'The Mirror Conspiracy', 'The Richest Man in Babylon', the Grammy-nominated 'Radio Retaliation', 'Culture of Fear' - that pull reggae, Indian classical, Middle Eastern and Brazilian music through a hip-hop producer's sensibility, usually with an explicit political streak. 2026 marks thirty years of the group. The reason to buy a ticket rather than stream them is that the live act is a full band: drums, sitar, guitar and percussion behind a rotating cast of vocalists singing in several languages, which is a genuinely different experience from the records.

Popularity

How this is measured

An absolute, national (US) measure — not a ranking against the other artists on this site. We take the strongest of three open signals: ListenBrainz listens, English Wikipedia pageviews, and the number of Wikipedia language editions that have an article. The strongest one wins, so a signal we couldn't read never drags the result down. Bucket 1 means measured and small. Unrated never means small — it means we don't have the numbers.

Listen

Spotify YouTube Music YouTube Apple Music SoundCloud Bandcamp

Top songs

  1. Lebanese Blonde
  2. The Richest Man in Babylon
  3. Until the Morning
  4. Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes
  5. La Force de Melodie

Upcoming shows

Nothing on the calendar for Thievery Corporation right now. They've played the region 6 times before. Browse all events.

What listeners say

81/100

Thievery Corporation are one of the better-reviewed live electronic acts working: LiveRate aggregates 58 critic concert reviews at 81 percent, puts them in the top 10 percent of live performers, and the recurring critic words are powerful, energetic, intricate and mid-tempo. The specific thing reviewers keep describing is the band format - a rotating line of vocalists (Ras Puma, Mr. Lif, Laura Vall and Frank Orrall on the 2026 anniversary run) singing in different languages and styles, plus live sitar and percussion - which turns what could be a DJ-set nostalgia show into an actual concert; a Cologne review of the 30th-anniversary tour called it a flawless, legendary night. Fan ratings on show archives run 95-100 percent, with the rare complaint being organisational (a rain-delayed festival set cut to an hour) rather than musical.

Loved

+ full live band - sitar, percussion, drums, guitar - not a laptop or DJ set+ rotating guest vocalists across several languages and singing styles keeps a long set moving+ 81 percent across 58 critic reviews on LiveRate; top 10 percent of rated live performers+ thirty years of catalogue, so the set is deep and the well-known material is all in play+ the 2026 anniversary shows are being described as celebratory and uplifting rather than perfunctory

Gripes

− mid-tempo by design; anyone expecting a peak-time dance set will find the pacing restrained− at 81 percent across 58 reviews there are weaker nights in the pool− the rare fan complaints found were organisational - a rain-delayed festival set cut short - not performance-related

Gathered 2026-08-24 (high confidence) from musicbrainz.org, en.wikipedia.org, liverate.com, reflectionsofdarkness.com, loudmemories.com, thieverycorporation.bandcamp.com, thieverycorporation.bandcamp.com, thieverycorporation.bandcamp.com, https://www.deezer.com search API — artist image via exact case-insensitive name match, highest fan count

← All artists