Music Box Events

Music Box, 1337 India St, San Diego, CA 92101

Here is what is coming up at Music Box, and what has already happened there. Concerts, games, festivals and the smaller nights that never surface in a generic search — no account needed.

Coming up 8 events

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8 days away

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Peter Bjorn and John, Josh Rouse

In 9 days · Oct 16 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

You have whistled that hook in a grocery store within the last decade without once wondering who wrote it. They did, and the interesting part is everything around it — two decades of Swedish pop that is considerably more melancholy and stranger than the one song everybody can hum suggests. Seeing them is a slightly disorienting experience: you arrive for the whistle and spend the rest of the set realising you have been under-rating a serious catalogue. Josh Rouse opens, which is a genuinely thoughtful pairing rather than a filler booking. Little Italy, doors at seven, music at eight, on a Friday. October 16, Music Box, 1337 India St. Bring the person who will also admit the song is good. The gap between a band's one famous track and what they actually spend their life doing is the most reliably rewarding thing to go and investigate in a city with this many mid-size rooms.

Coming Soon

20 days away

CLUB BATACLYSM / Poxsey

Oct 28, 2026 21+ Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Wednesday has no business being the best night of your month, and yet. Most dark-alternative nights in this city land on a weekend, when the floor is padded out with people who wandered in for drink specials and drifted off the moment the DJ played something recorded before they were born. A midweek date filters all of that out. What is left standing in Little Italy is the room that actually knows the words: the ones who recognized Velas Negras from a flyer, who came for Poxsey and stayed through The Fever Vault and Neonstorm, who will tell you unprompted that this whole night was built by the same person behind San Diego's World Goth Day Expo. Doors at seven means you can come straight from work and still be home before you turn into a problem. Bands first, then DJ 7th Stranger, and somewhere in there it stops being a show and becomes a scene. You will know inside ten minutes whether these are your people. They almost always are.

Yuki Chiba — First North American Headline Tour at Music Box San Diego

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26 days away

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Yuki Chiba — First North American Headline Tour at Music Box San Diego

Nov 3, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Somewhere between city pop and shoegaze there is a room that only opens at night, and Yuki Chiba holds the key. The Japanese singer-songwriter's voice sits in the same frequency as streetlights reflecting off wet pavement — warm, a little blurred, impossible to ignore once you've noticed it. This is his first headline tour in North America, which means the room will be full of people who discovered him through playlists that autoplay at 2 AM, through anime-adjacent OSTs that hit harder than the show itself, through a friend's story that just said 'trust me.' The Music Box in Little Italy is small enough that you'll feel the bass in your chest and see the setlist taped to the monitor. This is the kind of show where the crowd is half the experience — everyone there found him the same way you did, and nobody can explain why it feels this personal. Tickets are twenty-five dollars advance, thirty at the door. Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 8 PM · Music Box in Little Italy · 1337 India St · $25 adv / $30 door

Coming Soon

32 days away

Thomas Dolby — Music Box, San Diego

Nov 9, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

The synthesizer is not an instrument. It is a time machine. And Thomas Dolby — the man who blinded you with science before you were born, who built the software that powered early digital music, who disappeared into academia and then came back because the songs were not done — is bringing the whole contraption to a 700-cap room in Little Italy on a Monday night. This is not a nostalgia act. Dolby still performs like a man who believes the future of music has not arrived yet and he is personally responsible for delivering it. The Music Box is small enough that you will hear the keys click. The crowd will be people who still own synthesizers they cannot explain to their partners. The kind of room where a stranger turns to you during 'Hyperactive!' and says something that makes you friends. Some shows are events. This one is a reunion of people who did not know they were a community. Music Box, 1337 India St, San Diego, CA 92101. Monday, November 9, 2026. 8:00 PM. Tickets on AXS.

John Craigie With special guest Lucy Clearwater - Keep It Warm Tour 2026

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40 days away

John Craigie With special guest Lucy Clearwater - Keep It Warm Tour 2026

Nov 17, 2026 $35 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Some people buy a ticket for the songs and leave quoting the stories. You know the friend who will do that, the one who repeats a stranger's bit for a month. John Craigie plays like a man who got distracted on the way to the chorus. A song starts, a story wanders in, and ten minutes later the whole room is laughing at something that turns out to be about something else entirely. Then the song comes back and lands harder, because nobody was braced for it. It is a seated show with tables, which matters: the night is built for listening, not for standing at the back behind a phone. Lucy Clearwater opens. One dollar from every ticket goes to the Pet Project Foundation, the animal rescue working San Clemente and Dana Point, a small and specific kindness very much in the spirit of the evening. Tuesday, November 17. Doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m., 21+. Music Box, 1337 India Street. $35 advance. The folk crowd that fills a room like this on a weeknight always knows where the next one is.

Belly Up & Casbah Present Pretty Sick + sex week

Coming Soon

46 days away

Belly Up & Casbah Present Pretty Sick + sex week

Nov 23, 2026 $25 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Monday is the night a show tells you who actually loves a band. Nobody wanders in on a Monday. Everyone in the room chose to be there. Pretty Sick make loud, bruised guitar music that sounds like a basement even in a nice room: fuzz up front, a singer who sounds done explaining herself, choruses you are shouting back by the second listen. Their sophomore record, Anarchy, landed in September, so this run is the first time most of these songs meet a crowd that has had just enough time to learn every word. sex week open, and the pairing makes sense the moment the first chord hits. Bring the friend who still keeps the band shirts from high school folded in a drawer and pretends not to. They will act like a Monday show is no big deal right up until the lights go down. Monday, November 23. Doors 7 p.m., show 8 p.m., 18+. Music Box, 1337 India Street, San Diego. $25 advance, $30 day of. Half the people up front will be in bands you have not heard of yet.

Coming Soon

56 days away

Ripe — Play the Game Fall Tour

Dec 3, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

You know the feeling when a horn section hits and your body moves before your brain gives permission — that involuntary shoulder thing, the one you cannot fake. Ripe has been weaponizing that reflex for years, blending funk, rock, and pop into sets that turn every venue into a dance floor whether there is one or not. The seven-piece from Boston plays with the kind of tight, sweaty energy that only comes from a band that grew up performing in basements and college parties before graduating to proper tours. Their Play the Game Fall Tour rolls into the Music Box on a Thursday, which means the crowd will be people who specifically chose this over an early night — and they will be right. The Music Box's low ceiling and wood-paneled walls were built for exactly this volume, and the kind of funk Ripe plays rewards a room where nobody can stand still. Tickets available at musicboxsd.com. Music Box, 1337 India St, San Diego. Thursday, December 3, 2026, 8:00 PM.

Coming Soon

61 days away

The Womack Sisters

Dec 8, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Their grandfather was Sam Cooke. Their father was Cecil Womack, their uncle was Bobby Womack, and that is an inheritance heavy enough that most people would either lean on it entirely or refuse to mention it. They have done neither. Zeimani, Kucha and Bookie sing together the way only siblings raised inside a specific harmonic tradition can — the blend is not learned, it is structural. The material sits between old soul and something looser and more current, and live it stays deliberately unpolished; there is no click track holding it together, which means the tempo breathes and occasionally somebody laughs mid-phrase. A Tuesday in Little Italy, in a room that holds a few hundred. Weeknight shows self-select for people who genuinely wanted to be there. Doors at seven on Tuesday the eighth of December; they sing at eight.

Previously at Music Box 14

Plini: An Unnameable Desire Tour — Music Box, San Diego

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Plini: An Unnameable Desire Tour — Music Box, San Diego

Oct 6, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

There's a kind of guitar playing that doesn't ask you to headbang or sing along. It asks you to close your eyes and let the melody do something your playlist never quite manages — take you somewhere you haven't been yet. Plini is the reason a very specific subset of people check concert listings in cities they don't live in, just in case. The Australian instrumental progressive guitarist launches the North American leg of An Unnameable Desire right here in San Diego, with Night Verses and Portraits opening. Music Box is 705 people and a low ceiling and the kind of sound system that lets you feel the dynamics between quiet clean passages and full-band eruptions the way the recording only approximates. This is the tour opener — the first night the new material breathes in a room. If you've ever stayed up too late listening to Handmade Cities or Impulse Voices and felt something loosen behind your ribs, this is where that feeling gets a body. Music Box, 1337 India St, San Diego. Doors 7:30 PM. All ages.

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LAUNDRY DAY, 10xTANTRUM

Oct 2, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Five kids from Manhattan started a band in high school because one of them owned a laptop, and the thing that should have stayed a group chat became a real catalogue. LAUNDRY DAY make records that refuse to pick a lane — a bedroom-pop verse, a chorus that would work at a festival, a bridge that sounds like somebody left a window open in Brooklyn. They have grown up in public across five albums, which means the early songs and the recent ones sit next to each other in a set and you can hear every year that passed in between. The Music Box is three floors of balcony wrapped around a room in Little Italy, and the second-floor rail is the best seat in San Diego for a band this size. You are looking down at the top of the drummer's head from about fifteen feet up. Bring whoever sends you songs at one in the morning with no context. This is their show and they do not know it yet. India Street in Little Italy, Friday the second of October, eight o'clock.

Satin Jackets with Beard & Stache — Music Box San Diego

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Satin Jackets with Beard & Stache — Music Box San Diego

Sep 18 – Sep 19, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Some nights the city gets quiet enough that you can hear what it actually sounds like, and it sounds like a bassline at 118 BPM with a French filter over it. Tim Bernhardt built Satin Jackets out of Hamburg on a single premise: nu-disco does not have to be ironic. It can be earnest. It can be warm. It can sound exactly like the end of a summer night when you were nineteen and everything ahead of you was still unspent. The production is lush and unmistakably analog, slow-building grooves and warm synths, the kind of set where strangers start talking on the floor because the room feels safe enough for it. Music Box is the right room for that, two stories in Little Italy with a sound system touring DJs specifically request because it handles low end better than anything else in town. San Diego's nu-disco crowd is small and deeply loyal, the people who know every venue by its speakers. Bring whoever you would want to be dancing beside at one in the morning.

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Elder with Blackwater Holylight

Sep 17, 2026 $28+ Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

There's a corner of heavy music where doom, psychedelia, and prog melt into long, sun-warped odysseys, and Elder are its reigning architects: sprawling, gorgeous, riff-driven epics that reward anyone willing to get lost for ten minutes at a time. Paired with the hazy heaviness of Blackwater Holylight, this is a night for the heads who like their metal cosmic and their song lengths generous. Thursday, September 17, 2026, at Music Box in San Diego's Little Italy. Music Box is an intimate, great-sounding room, exactly the kind of place where a band this enveloping can swallow you whole. Come for the towering riffs, stay for the trippy comedowns, and bring the friend who says modern metal has no soul. This is the underground proving them beautifully wrong. Let it wash over you.

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Devin The Dude at Music Box SD

Aug 26 – Aug 27, 2026 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Somewhere in your contacts list there is a person who has been quoting Doobie Ashtray since 2002 and has never once felt the need to explain who Devin The Dude is to anyone who did not already get it. Houston's most unhurried poet has spent decades perfecting the art of saying absolutely nothing urgent in the most essential way possible — weed, women, grocery runs, the quiet dignity of being completely unbothered while the rest of rap sprints past him chasing trends he never acknowledged. He is at Music Box on a Wednesday night with VON DREAAM, DJ MATROX, MAX VIZION, and T-CHRONIC. The room will be small, the bass will be heavy, and nobody in there is going to ask you if you have heard the new Drake. This is the church of rap's best-kept secret, a man who collaborated with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Andre 3000 and somehow remained more underground than any of them. Music Box on India Street is the kind of venue where you can feel the kick drum in your sternum. Doors at 9 PM. If you know, you already cleared your Wednesday.

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The Midnight Pine + The Color Forty Nine

Aug 21, 2026 $20-$25 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Soul-leaning songcraft from one band, jangle-forward melody from the other, and neither one needs an opener to warm up a Friday -- that's the co-headline you build when you actually respect both the room and the catalog. The Midnight Pine has been the San Diego soul-pop project to know for over a decade; The Color Forty Nine works the jangle-pop side with the same care. Music Box is the right place for a bill like this: five hundred capacity, downtown, the room that fills without anybody padding the lineup. Bring the friend who's in two other local bands. The crowd is the SD indie circuit -- players from three other groups, the tape-trader contingent, the people who heard the demos on the right SoundCloud and showed up specifically for this combination. Friday, August 21. Doors at seven, music at eight. Twenty to twenty-five at the door.

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Earlybirds Club Dance Party

Aug 14 – Aug 15, 2026 $15-$20 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

The wanting never went away. What went away was your willingness to be destroyed by it — to lose an entire Tuesday to a Monday night that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. Nobody was building the party for that person. So somebody did. Doors at nine, last call at one, aimed squarely at people who never stopped loving a good record and simply outgrew the two-in-the-morning version of loving it. The format stays loose: vinyl-only some nights, vinyl-mostly on others, occasionally a live set, always a playlist somebody actually thought about. The crowd runs largely thirties, people who learned to dance to the right records and never quit — they just moved the whole thing earlier. Music Box on a Friday is the correct room for this, a downtown space that books touring acts most other nights of the week. Cover at the door. Bring the friend who keeps announcing they are too old for this. Watch them stay till last call.

Monthly

21h away

House of Funk Monthly Residency

Monthly · Next Oct 8 $18-$22 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

San Diego turned out to have room for exactly one night like this: a live band working Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, and Earth, Wind and Fire deep cuts without apologizing for the format. House of Funk has made it a monthly residency at Music Box on Saturdays -- the same group, with rotating singers and horn players who know the catalog by heart. August 8 is the next one. Five hundred capacity, downtown, doors at eight and music at nine, twenty dollars at the door. The crowd is the SD funk faithful -- the people who own the original pressings and the people who learned the catalog from them. By Saturday night, dancing breaks out and the bar staff knows to clear space for it.

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The Strike + Kids That Fly at Music Box

Aug 7, 2026 $18-$22 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

A horn section in an indie-rock band shouldn't still feel like a small act of defiance, and yet -- and yet, when the trumpet line comes in on a Friday night, the whole room lifts. The Strike have been arriving in full five-piece configuration for ten years out of Salt Lake City, the catalog built to fill exactly this kind of night. Kids That Fly opens, and it's the right opener -- Salt Lake again, sibling band, same energy pitched at a different volume. Music Box downtown is the room for it: five hundred capacity, twenty dollars at the door. Bring the friend who dances the second the brass hits. The crowd is the Mormon-circuit indie kids who travel for shows like this plus the SD regulars who heard the trumpet line on Spotify and needed to see it live. Doors at seven, music at eight. Friday in San Diego.

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Willis + Zzzahara

Aug 6, 2026 $20-$25 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

There is a record you would put on at three in the morning when anything cleaner would feel like a lie, and for a certain crowd that record is Willis - Atlanta-rooted, a little sad, indie pop that keeps its hooks intact under a layer of fuzz and a layer of synth and whatever the bedroom recording session produced that week. Zzzahara opens, and it is the kind of opener that elevates the whole night: LA-based shoegaze with the real heavy reverb, the kind of band whose fans drive between cities for the small rooms. Music Box on a Thursday is the room for this - five hundred capacity, downtown, the crowd made of the catalog people for both bands plus anyone who follows the right dream-pop accounts. Twenty dollars at the door.

clipping. + Open Mike Eagle + Pedestrian Deposit

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clipping. + Open Mike Eagle + Pedestrian Deposit

Aug 4, 2026 $25-$30 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Imagine a rap album where the beat is a sample of broken machinery and the verse is a whole short story about the apocalypse -- and then imagine it's actually good. That's clipping., the trio of Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, who decided rap could share a stage with horror movies and harsh noise and nobody had to apologize for either. Open Mike Eagle is on the bill tonight, which is the right pairing: ten years of the funniest, saddest, most articulate underground rap in California. Pedestrian Deposit opens with their harsh-noise duo set -- exactly the warmup this room needs. Music Box on a Tuesday is the place that books the shows nobody else in San Diego will -- about five hundred capacity, downtown. Bring the friend who taped Open Mike's mixtapes off Bandcamp before he had a Wikipedia page; the whole room did. Doors at seven, music at eight. Twenty-five dollars.

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Rio Da Yung OG

Aug 3, 2026 $30-$40 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

There is a rapper who can take a story about owing somebody money and turn it into a beat-by-beat masterpiece, and if you already knew that, you have been waiting for him to clear customs and make it to a California stage. Rio Da Yung OG needed Flint, Michigan to have that rapper, so he became him - roughly fifty projects since 2015, the kind of catalog where the people who know the deep cuts know them with the unhinged loyalty that underground rap audiences specialize in. Music Box in San Diego on a Monday is the room that fills with the catalog people specifically: the folks who have been holding out for exactly this show. Five hundred capacity, downtown, doors at seven and music at eight. Thirty to forty at the door depending on when you walk in. A Monday, which is to say only the people who really wanted to be there are in the room, and that is the best crowd this music can ask for.

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Moonchild + Brittney Carter

Aug 2, 2026 $25-$30 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Somewhere out there is the person who put a Moonchild record on at three in the morning during 2020 and let it hold the room together when nothing else would. This is the night they finally stand in the same room with everyone else who did the same thing. Amber Navran, Andris Mattson, and Max Bryk have spent over a decade recording warm, jazz-leaning vocal arrangements that work as background music or close listening or both at once - neo-soul that kept its specificity without ever losing its smoothness. Brittney Carter opens, and it is the right pairing: a Chicago rapper with melodic flows and a catalog that fits the exact room Moonchild is filling. Five hundred people, one small downtown venue, the songs you streamed alone now moving through a crowd. Sunday, August 2 at Music Box in San Diego. Doors at seven, music at eight. Twenty-five to thirty dollars.

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Black Moth Super Rainbow + Giant Day

Aug 1, 2026 $25-$28 Music Box, 1337 India St, San Dieg…

Run psych music through enough analog synthesizers and a vocoder that sounds like a tape deck remembering a dream, and you keep the menace instead of losing it - that is the trick Tobacco built Black Moth Super Rainbow on, and the records still turn into different records depending on which stereo you play them through. Over two decades in and somehow still touring, the band remains the one the radio missed, which is exactly why the heads guard it. Giant Day opens - LA shoegaze with the heavy reverb chops. Music Box on a Saturday is correct: five hundred capacity, downtown San Diego, the room that books the bands nobody else will. Doors at seven-thirty, openers at eight, headline around nine-thirty. The crowd is the people who collect cassettes and reissues and follow whichever Bandcamp drop Tobacco posts next. Tickets through Music Box's own site. Twenty-five dollars.

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