Kygo Once Considered Quitting Touring — Now, His Biggest Run to Date Is ‘Quietly Winning’
In the earlier days of his career, touring wasn’t necessarily Kygo‘s favorite thing to do.
“It was like every show was life or death,” says the Norwegian producer. “I was always very nervous. It was like, ‘This is the most important [thing ever], and if I mess up tonight, my career is over.'”
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With this extreme self-imposed pressure, the artist “wasn’t really able to enjoy the shows that much. At one point I was like, ‘I’m probably never going to tour again,’ because it was just so exhausting.”
Flash forward to the present moment and Kygo — whose real name is Kyrre G?rvell-Dahll — has a fresh approach and attendant attitude, calling his current world tour “definitely my favorite that I’ve done so far.”
Starting last September, the 35-date tour has hit arenas and amphitheaters in North America, Europe and Central America, averaging slightly over 10,000 tickets and $838,000 in revenue per show, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The run is continuing into 2025, with shows in Asia and Australia. Additionally, the producer plays this Thursday (Jan. 23) in Toronto and Saturday (Jan. 25) in Mexico City, where Kygo will play what he calls “the biggest show of the tour by far.” See exclusive behind the scenes footage of this tour below.
Despite this success, Shear acknowledges that the run hasn’t made the same headlines as other recent marquee dance tours, such as Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s 2024 Sweat Tour. “We’ve quietly been doing this unbelievable tour that’s sold over a half a million tickets,” he says. “There are a lot of tours out there. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and there’s a lot of new artists. But we’re going out there and doing the business. Kygo is just quietly winning in the dance music world.”
This current run is behind Kygo’s 2024 eponymous album, the artist’s fifth studio project that hit No. 97 on the Billboard 200 after its release last June. The tour is also his first in six years, since the run behind 2017’s Kids in Love. (Golden Hour and Thrill of the Chase came out in 2020 and 2022, respectively, although Kygo wasn’t able to tour behind them because of the pandemic.)
While the Kids in Love tour required 12 trucks to move it from city to city, this current tour requires 17 trucks and a crew of 58. When brainstorming the production, Kygo and Shear decided the music and visuals would lean into the fact that Kygo has been making music for a decade, with this kind of looking back approach inspired, Shear says, by Dead & Co.’s nostalgia-laced run at Sphere in Las Vegas last summer. As such, set lists featured visuals that nod to entirety of Kygo’s career thus far, while the setlist spans albums and hits. Vocalists including Justin Jesso, Zak Abel and Parson James are on the tour to sing their parts on “Firestone,” “Freedom” and “Stole the Show,” respectively.
“Kyrre told me that doing a tour was extremely important to him,” says Shear. “It’s not like every dance artist goes out there like a rock band or a pop star and does hard tickets in arenas or stadiums. “He was like, ‘The fact that I’m able to do it, I want to do whatever it takes to make this tour happen.'”
Kygo himself credits his ability to tour such big rooms — an option available to only a handful of dance acts including Illenium and Odesza — is a function of he and his team “not skipping any steps” while he was building his career. (Kygo is represented by Rob Markus at WME.) His earliest U.S. tour had him playing 200-700 capacity rooms, with each run getting progressively larger.
“We were living with my parents at the time, and Kyrre was staying in my brother’s room,” Shear says of these early days. “I went in my brother’s room, and was like, ‘Hey man, we found this guy who used to work with Disclosure and other big artists. He knows how to build live shows, and I think we should build one. We emptied the bank account making that show.”
This groundwork and investment has paid off, with Shear citing “the most tickets we’ve ever sold” on this current run. “I know so many people focusing on streams or on this or that, but the fans follow you as long as you do them right, take care of them and keep bringing an elevated show.”
Sometimes, this elevation requires some extra effort. The Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles doesn’t have the space to erect a B stage where Kygo typically performs his encore. As such, the team improvised for the Oct. 17 show, setting up a riser in the middle of the amphitheater amid the seats. Getting there from the stage just meant, Kygo says, “that we just had to run a little bit.”
Outside the tour, Kygo and Shear’s multi-faceted Palm Tree Crew brand continues expanding. Its first brick and mortar space, the 115-room hotel and restaurant Palm Tree Club Miami, opened last December. Meanwhile, Palm Tree Festival has happened in Aspen, The Hamptons, Southern California and beyond over the last several years. Some of these festivals feature Kygo on the lineup, and some don’t.
“I was with him in Paris a few weeks ago when he was playing Accor Arena, one of the biggest shows on tour,” says Shear. “At the same time, we opened a restaurant and club in Miami the night before and we were also throwing a music festival in Australia with 30,000 people and The Chainsmokers, and Kyrre isn’t even at either of them. I think that’s a true testament to a great brand we’ve brought to the world, and one that just sort of feeds off his demeanor.”
This demeanor is one that’s also changed as Kygo has become more experienced, and over time more relaxed, about touring.
“There’s definitely been some f–k-ups on the on the road and some songs where I’m like, ‘Oh, that did not sound good at all,'” he says with a laugh. “But I think that’s just part of it being live. Knowing that, I’m more confident and better able to enjoy myself on stage and not always just nervous about everything that could go wrong.”
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