Skip the FIFA watch party and head out to these Tucson concerts

You just need a little diversion from the pitch.

How about a little old school R&B or pop-rock, or some next-gen emo?

We found three excuses worth forgoing this weekend's FIFA watch parties. 

Revisiting emo

The Santa Cruz, California, quintet First Day Back opens its Graduation Tour with a sold-out show at Club Congress on Thursday, July 9.

Those lucky enough to snag a ticket before they were all gone likely got wind of the band from its socials, including on Spotify, where the band has nearly 190,000 monthly listeners.

Or maybe you were among the 2.1 million people who streamed the band's 2025 debut (and only) album "Forward," recorded in a friend's living room and released last June. If so, you might be among the people singing the band's praises on platforms like Reddit, where fans have christened the band as the legit torchbearers of the emo revival.

Pitchfork's Nina Corcoran notes that while the band's members were not alive in emo's 1990s heydays, "that doesn’t stop (them) from sounding like one of the decade’s foundational emo bands." But the band, Corcoran opined, has no interest in reinventing the 1990s Midwest emo vibe. "They want to experience what it was like to live through it the first time," she wrote. 

The Graduation Tour, which runs through July, celebrates the recent graduation of the first-name-only members — drummer Spencer, lead singer and violinist Maggie, Nathan and Zion on guitar and Luke on bass — from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. 

Thursday's show starts at 7 p.m.; doors at Club Congress, 311 E. Congress St., open at 6. Being An Angle and Forget Machine open the show.  

Retracing R&B roots

Dru Hill arrived in the midst of the golden age of the modern boy band, surrounded by slick dance-pop bands like Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees and NYSYNC.

But while their contemporaries were putting out radio-friendly, school-girl-swoonable love songs, the Baltimore R&B quartet Dru Hill was remaking the template for R&B and the whole boy band genre.

The band, led by founder Tamir "Nokio" Ruffin and named after Baltimore's Drud Hill Park, pioneered hip-hop soul with a focus on vocal harmonies layered with gospel emotions delivered in contemporary hip-hop rhythms. They refined the bad-boy-meets-romantic template with impressive choreography and the immense vocal range of frontman Mark "Sisqó" Andrews. 

Over a career that spanned the 1990s and all but a couple of years in the 2000s, Dru Hill has amassed seven Top 40 hits, including 1998's "How Deep Is Your Love," which was featured on the "Rush Hour" movie soundtrack. Other hits include "In My Bed," "Never Make a Promise," "Tell Me," "These Are the Times" and "We're Not Making Love No More."

Dru Hill brings its "The History of R&B" tour to the AVA at Casino del Sol, 5655 W. Valencia Road, on Friday, July 10. The show starts at 8 p.m., and tickets start at $32.40 through casinodelsol.com.

Recalling the city they built

Here's a fun fact about Starship's iconic hit "We Built This City."

It was the first single off the first album by the mid-1980s San Francisco band led by Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick.

Who woulda thought that that song would resonate today, 41 years later, with Millennials, Gen Z and today's college-age Gen Alpha?

Slick is long gone from the band that Thomas still fronts, but you can bet when he lights into the opening chords of "We Built This City" at Desert Diamond Casino on Saturday, July 11, the audience will go crazy. They are sure to applaud, but that will be quiet compared to the voices ringing out from the casino's entertainment center at 1100 W. Pima Mine Road.

Those lyrics — "Marconi plays the mamba / Listen to the radio, don't you remember? / We built this city / We built this city on rock and roll" — are stuck in our subconscious. OK, so we have no idea who Marconi is and why he's playing the mamba in a rock and roll band, but who cares. That song is part of our DNA, even if we were born decades after the song hit No. 1 in the U.S., Australia and Canada in November 1985.

Starship featuring Mickey Thomas goes on stage at 8 p.m. Tickets are $39-$65 through ddcaz.com.