Soda Bar Events

Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San Diego, CA 92104

Here is what is coming up at Soda Bar, 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 14 events

Coming Soon

20h away

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Julien-K with NITE

Tomorrow · Oct 8 $25+ Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Julien-K is what happened when the guitarist behind Orgy and Dead by Sunrise chased the sleek, neon pulse of electronic rock all the way into the future, and their live show is a synth-soaked, leather-clad blast for anyone who misses when alternative music had swagger and a drum machine. With darkwave risers NITE opening, this is an intimate San Diego night for the electro-rock faithful. Thursday, October 8, 2026, at Soda Bar in San Diego. Soda Bar is exactly the kind of small, sweaty, no-frills room where scenes actually live, close enough to see the sweat on the synths. Wear black, bring the friend who never stopped loving moody electronic rock, and come get lost in the glow. This is the good stuff, hiding in a City Heights dive. Come find it.

Coming Soon

8 days away

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Tyler Ballgame, Grace Cummings

In 9 days · Oct 16 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

A dive bar on El Cajon Boulevard is an unglamorous place to have your evening rearranged, which is exactly why it keeps happening there. The pairing is the draw. Grace Cummings sings like something out of a much older and more frightening tradition — an enormous, weathered voice that seems physically implausible coming from one person standing on a small stage, closer to a blues shouter's sense of threat than to anything on current indie radio. Tyler Ballgame works a lighter, wrier register against it. The two together make for a night that swings hard between funny and genuinely unsettling, which small rooms manage far better than theatres ever do. This is the second San Diego-area date on the run, the night after the Los Angeles show, so the set will already be warm. Doors seven-thirty, music eight-thirty, Friday. October 16, Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd. Bring the friend who complains nothing surprises them anymore. This stretch of boulevard has three separate rooms booking touring bands most nights, and the city's own residents drive past all of them.

Coming Soon

10 days away

Edgehill, Appleseed

In 11 days · Oct 18 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Sunday night shows are attended almost exclusively by people who wanted to be there, which changes the room more than any other single variable. No obligation crowd, no work-week bravado, nobody killing time before something else. Two acts, a dive bar, and maybe eighty people who each made a small deliberate choice to end their weekend standing up in front of a stage rather than lying down in front of a screen. Bands notice it and tend to play differently — looser, more talkative, more willing to try the new one. Doors at seven, music at eight, which means you are out and home at a defensible hour. October 18, Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd. Bring whoever has been saying you two should do something. There is live music in this city literally every night of the week, and the Sunday and Monday versions are consistently the warmest rooms of the seven.

Coming Soon

12 days away

Faux Real, Kyra Machida, Bryce Xavier

In 13 days · Oct 20 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Two brothers in matching outfits treating a dive bar stage like a Vegas residency is not what most people mean by a rock show, and it is considerably more entertaining than what they do mean. The act is built on total commitment to a bit that would collapse instantly if either of them blinked — choreography, costume changes, direct address to individual audience members, art-school French-disco songs underneath all of it. It is genuinely funny and also genuinely good, which is a much harder combination than either one alone. Two openers, both working stranger angles than the venue's usual booking. A Tuesday. Doors seven-thirty, music eight-thirty. October 20, Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd. Bring the friend who is hard to impress and secretly loves a spectacle. The performance-heavy end of this city's music scene mostly happens in rooms that hold under a hundred, on nights nobody expects anything to be on.

Coming Soon

15 Gathering

28 days away

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Alex Cameron at Soda Bar San Diego

Nov 5, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Alex Cameron writes songs about the worst version of every man you've ever met, and somehow you root for all of them. The Australian singer-songwriter is a character actor who happens to play synth — his albums are populated by deadbeat dads, failed businessmen, and internet creeps who all believe, sincerely, that they are the hero of the story. Live, he performs with the commitment of someone who has fully become the person in the song, and his saxophone player Roy Molloy stands beside him like a man who has seen too much and chosen to keep playing anyway. Soda Bar on El Cajon Boulevard is the kind of room where you stand close enough to see the sweat and the joke lands harder because nobody's checking their phone. If you've ever described an artist to a friend and watched their face go from skeptical to 'wait, play that again,' Cameron is the artist you were talking about. Thursday, November 5, 2026, 7 PM at Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd in City Heights. There are three more rooms like it within walking distance, worked by the same crowd.

Coming Soon

36 days away

Sparta, Public Opinion

Nov 13, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

When a band you loved splits in half, you do not get to keep both halves. You pick, usually without meaning to, and twenty years later the choice still says something embarrassing about who you were at nineteen. At the Drive-In broke apart into two bands. One went sprawling and experimental and got most of the critical attention. Sparta went the other way — tighter, more direct, actual choruses — and spent two decades being the one people forgot to mention. Jim Ward has kept it going through breakups and long silences, and the live show has the particular intensity of a band with nothing left to prove and no interest in nostalgia sets. Soda Bar is small, loud, and on El Cajon Boulevard, which is exactly the right scale for this. Public Opinion open. Doors at half seven on Friday the thirteenth of November, music at half eight.

Coming Soon

45 days away

The Goddamn Gallows, King Sickabilly

Nov 22, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Picture a banjo, a washtub bass, an accordion and a drum kit being played by people who look like they arrived on a freight train, and you are most of the way there. The rest is volume. The Goddamn Gallows have spent close to twenty years touring relentlessly through a genre that barely has a name — gypsy-punk, psychobilly, hellbilly, take your pick — and building an audience the old way, one van-driven show at a time. Their crowd overlaps almost perfectly between punks and people who own a lot of Johnny Cash, two groups who do not otherwise share rooms. That overlap is the whole event. A Sunday night on El Cajon Boulevard for a band that has never once played a set at half effort. Doors at seven on Sunday the twenty-second of November, music at eight.

Coming Soon

50 days away

Hippie Death Cult

Nov 27, 2026 ✨ New $18.54 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Thanksgiving leaves a dead day behind it. You are two pounds heavier, somebody has floated the idea of outlet shopping, and the house still smells of a bird that is somehow being eaten for the fourth time. What the situation calls for is volume. Portland sent down a trio who play the slow heavy kind: fuzz, an organ, long patient builds, the sort of thing that works best when your head is already a little swimmy and you want to stand still and let a riff do all the thinking for forty minutes. Eighteen dollars, which in late November is comfortably the cheapest decision available to you. Soda Bar is small enough that the low end reaches you through the floor instead of the air. Take the one relative who would rather be anywhere else. They will not say thank you but they will remember it. Doors seven, November 27, 3615 El Cajon Blvd.

Coming Soon

53 days away

The Meteors

Nov 30, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Psychobilly is a genre almost nobody stumbles into by accident — you get handed it, usually by one person, usually around sixteen, and then it stays. This is the band that invented it, in England, in 1980, out of rockabilly played too fast and horror movies watched too often. The rule their following adopted decades ago is that only the band matters and politics stay outside, which produced one of the most stubbornly self-contained scenes in music. Forty-odd years on the founder is still leading it and the upright bass is still doing the heavy lifting. Rooms for this are full of quiffs and people who have flown in. The San Diego bar on El Cajon Boulevard is small, dark, and exactly the correct scale. Music at 8:00 PM, doors an hour earlier, twenty-one and over. Monday nights in this city are usually dead, and the people who fill one for a band like this all know exactly who else is going to be there.

Coming Soon

56 days away

KUMO 99 - CALI ‘26

Dec 3, 2026 ✨ New $24.72 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Thursday is the sleeper night. Friday arrives with expectations attached and Saturday has an unspoken dress code, but nobody has ever planned anything for a Thursday, which means whoever turns up genuinely chose to be there instead of being carried along by a group decision. This is a California run stopping at a converted bar in City Heights, which is not where touring electronic acts normally end up, and that mismatch is the entire appeal of it. No barricade, no booth raised above the crowd, just a PA at one end of a long room and a hundred or so people who read about this somewhere and made a note. The first week of December in San Diego is dead quiet. This is one of perhaps four things happening in the whole county. For whoever sends you links at midnight with no message attached to them. Thursday December 3, doors at seven in City Heights.

Coming Soon

57 days away

The Kinison, UGHH, Stalemate

Dec 4, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Bands that were locally enormous and nationally invisible leave behind a very particular kind of loyalty, and Southern California is full of it — people in their forties who can still recite records that never sold outside a two-county radius. This bill gathers that energy: a reunion of one of those bands plus two current acts working the same seam of loud, fast, unfussy rock. Nights like this function as reunions in both directions, for the people on stage and the people watching. The San Diego bar on El Cajon Boulevard is a long narrow room where the stage is barely raised and the sound is genuinely loud. Music at 8:00 PM, doors at seven, twenty-one and over on a Friday. A local scene that never quite got recorded properly survives entirely in rooms like this one, and everybody in it knows that is what the night is for.

Coming Soon

59 days away

Fraxiom, Saint Misty

Dec 6, 2026 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Hyperpop was never supposed to be listened to at a sensible volume in a car. It was built in bedrooms, for bedrooms, by people who were online too much and turned that into a genre — and for most of its life the only place to hear it was alone, in headphones, at two in the morning. Which makes a small room full of people who also did that genuinely strange to walk into. Everyone there has the same private history with the music and none of them have ever been in a room about it. Soda Bar is the right size for this and that is not a small point. It is a dive on El Cajon Boulevard with a capacity in the low hundreds, which means the distance between the crowd and whoever is performing is about four feet. Hyperpop shows in rooms that size tend to go somewhere unhinged, because the format was never designed to be performed at a respectful distance. Sunday December 6, doors and set times through sodabarmusic.com, ten PM. San Diego gets a fraction of these compared to LA, so they do not sit around. If you know the person who has been saying for three years that nothing good ever comes to San Diego, this is the specific counterexample.

Willi Carlisle - The Universal Bubba Tour

Coming Soon

71 days away

Willi Carlisle - The Universal Bubba Tour

Dec 18, 2026 ✨ New $27.30 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Everybody from a small place learns early to make the joke about it before somebody else can. You get good at the joke. What you stop noticing is that it costs you something every single time you tell it. Willi Carlisle does the opposite standing up: Ozark folk songs, an accordion, and poems recited straight out between numbers with no apology at all for the accent they arrive in. It only lands in a room small enough to hear him breathe, which is precisely what Soda Bar is, a converted bar out on El Cajon Boulevard in City Heights with a back room and a ceiling you could reach up and touch. A week out from Christmas, when the whole county is standing in somebody's kitchen being pleasant for hours. Skip yours. This one goes to the person who still says back home and means one specific road. Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd. Doors seven, Friday the 18th.

Coming Soon

99 days away

Tara Clerkin Trio

Jan 15, 2027 ✨ New $24.72 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Some records are too quiet to survive a crowded room. You put one on low at two in the morning and it becomes the most private thing you own, and then you never play it for anybody, because you would have to explain it and the explaining would ruin it. This is one of those, made in Bristol out of dub space, loose jazz and a voice kept barely above speaking. It falls apart in a big venue and comes properly alive in a small one, which is the entire case for catching it at a converted bar on El Cajon Boulevard where the ceiling sits low enough that the quiet passages actually stay quiet. People will stand very still. Somebody will shush somebody else and will be completely right to do it. This is for the one person you would trust with the record. El Cajon Blvd at 36th, doors at seven, the 15th of January.

Previously at Soda Bar 9

The Black Queen: Fever Daydream 10th Anniversary

This Happened

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The Black Queen: Fever Daydream 10th Anniversary

Sep 10, 2026 $36 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Ten years ago a record slipped out that most people missed entirely and a devoted few never quite recovered from. Fever Daydream was Greg Puciato — better known for screaming his lungs out in Dillinger Escape Plan — turning hard left into lush, aching, synth-drenched pop that sounded like heartbreak lit by a dashboard at 3am. A decade on, The Black Queen is playing it front to back, and the small confines of Soda Bar are perfect for it: a room of people who found this album in a low moment and carried it quietly ever since, finally in one place to feel it together. Expect fog, neon, and a crowd singing along to songs they thought only they knew. Thursday, September 10, 2026, Soda Bar, 21+. Go stand in the glow of a cult record turning ten, surrounded by the other people it saved — the ones who never needed it to be popular to know it was perfect.

This Happened

born at midnite at Soda Bar

Aug 22, 2026 $15-$18 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

One song on every road-trip mix ever burned sounds exactly like this: wistful, guitar-forward, homesick for a summer that may never have actually happened to you. That is the register born at midnite lives in. It started as a bedroom recording project and turned into a real band, an LA trio whose whole catalog carries that ache, the kind of night where you turn up not knowing a single song and walk out humming one. Soda Bar holds three hundred, which puts the room in that narrow band where you can see the drummer's face change. The crowd splits between people who already follow the right Bandcamp pages and regulars who come for whatever the venue books, which is to say a room full of people who had other options on a Saturday and chose this instead. El Cajon Boulevard, a Saturday night, cheap at the door. Bring the friend you always end up in the car with.

This Happened

Will Sheff at Soda Bar

Aug 18, 2026 $20-$25 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

There's a specific kind of embarrassment that the best singer-songwriting earns the right to -- fragile, literary, saying the thing out loud that you'd normally keep folded up -- and Will Sheff has spent his solo records living there. After nearly three decades of Okkervil River, he decided that was enough of one band, and what came next had to be a quieter shape with his own name on it. Soda Bar is the room for that on a Tuesday: three hundred capacity, El Cajon Boulevard, twenty dollars, the crowd who taped Okkervil shows in the early 2000s and now drive across town for an early-bedtime acoustic set. No opener is announced as of this writing, which usually means Will plays longer with the catalog wide open. Bring the friend who still has the burned CD. Doors at eight, music at eight-thirty. Tuesday in San Diego -- the room is small enough that you can read what he's got propped on the music stand.

This Happened

Twin Fin at Soda Bar

Aug 13, 2026 $12-$15 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

It sounds like a summer afternoon at Tourmaline going slightly sideways — surf-leaning guitar, reverb on everything, songs about almost-relationships and bad timing. They write San Diego the way San Diego actually feels when the tide is out and the day has turned a little melancholy. And they keep coming back to Soda Bar on a weeknight because Soda Bar still books locals midweek with the same care it gives touring acts on a Saturday, which is rarer than it ought to be. Three hundred capacity on El Cajon Boulevard. The room is the band's friends, plus the regulars who turn up for whatever is booked, plus the handful of people who heard the demo and came to find out whether the live show held up. It holds up. Bring the friend who taught you to surf, or the one who never learned and always meant to.

This Happened

Alela Diane + Shannon Lay

Aug 12, 2026 $22-$25 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Write a folk song slowly enough and it can carry the whole weight of grief without ever buckling - Alela Diane has been proving that since 2006, records that arrived in indie folk's small, unrenewable years and never once sounded dated. Shannon Lay is the right pairing on this bill: LA-based, on Sub Pop, the kind of voice you mistake for a different decade until the production quietly gives it away. Soda Bar in San Diego on a Wednesday is the room - three hundred capacity on El Cajon Boulevard, the crowd that owns the records and came out on a school night anyway. Two long sets sharing one stage, two singers who do not need amplification but get it because the room expects it. Doors at seven-thirty, music at eight. Twenty-two dollars at the door.

This Happened

Parlour Magic + Teeel at Soda Bar

Aug 10, 2026 $15-$18 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

It is one in the morning and you do not want the night to end — not for any dramatic reason, you just want to keep sitting in the same room as somebody for one more hour. That is the song this duo keeps writing, over and over, in different keys. Patient electronic music that rewards actually listening: analog warmth, layered vocals, dance tracks that carry a narrative if you let the synth lines take their time. Teeel opens — New Jersey, vaporwave-adjacent, a producer's producer — and it is the kind of pairing where both acts walk out looking better than they walked in. Soda Bar on El Cajon Blvd. Three hundred capacity, fifteen dollars at the door, doors at eight and music at half past. It lands on a Monday, which in this town means the room holds only the people who genuinely wanted to be there. Bring the one person you would want to stay up with anyway. That is the entire assignment.

This Happened

Greg Mendez + Maria BC

Aug 9, 2026 $15-$18 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Some songs sound like they were written alone in a bedroom at midnight because they were, and Greg Mendez's are the compliment version of that -- spare, plain-spoken, the kind of writing where a chord change carries more weight than the line over it. He records most of it by himself in Philadelphia, and Maria BC, opera-trained out of the Bay Area, opens with sad ambient pop you've heard if your playlists lean the right way. Both have small, attentive audiences who travel for the show. Soda Bar in City Heights is the tiny indie room that takes touring songwriters seriously without making them play a stadium-sized version of themselves -- three hundred capacity, El Cajon Boulevard, twenty-something at the door. Bring the friend who texts you songs at two in the morning. 21+, doors at eight, music at eight-thirty. Sunday night in San Diego, and the room is small enough that there is no bad spot to stand.

This Happened

Soft Palms

Aug 7, 2026 $15-$18 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Dream-pop only ever has to apologize for being thin, never for being soft. This arrives thick — every guitar tone left hanging in the air a beat or two after the song has already stopped. Julia Kugel writes and sings most of it, which will land immediately if you have ever screamed along to a Coathangers record. Scott Montoya shapes the production with the patience that vintage gear and home-studio sessions demand, and anyone who came up on the early Growlers records will recognize his drum sound before being told whose it is. Soda Bar is the small room they want for this material — three hundred people, El Cajon Boulevard, cheap at the door, the kind of place where the reverb has nowhere to escape to. Bring the friend who loves the Coathangers and the one who can name the drummer. They will hear two completely different bands, and both of them will be right.

This Happened

Zack Keim at Soda Bar

Aug 5, 2026 $12-$15 Soda Bar, 3615 El Cajon Blvd, San …

Garage rock does not have to be loud to be honest, and he has spent a decade proving it at both volumes — the roaring version with the band, and the hushed solo songs under his own name. Same restlessness, pointed two different directions. On a midweek night the quiet one usually wins. That is partly the room: three hundred capacity on El Cajon Boulevard, fifteen dollars at the door, nothing separating the stage from the people standing at it. And it is partly the crowd — the Nightlands catalog people plus the small, stubborn solo following built across a half-dozen releases, none of whom wandered in by accident. A Wednesday in San Diego means everyone present chose this over sleep, which produces a completely different audience than a Friday does. Bring the friend who still owns the tapes. They will know by the second song whether they were right about him all along.

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