For the second stop on their summer 2025 tour to celebrate Better Dreaming, their sixth studio album which gets released on all streaming platforms on May 16, the Tune-Yards will be playing at Assembly in Kingston with Jaywood. Tune-Yards has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 per ticket goes to supporting Street Spirit and their work as an independent newspaper dedicated to covering homelessness and poverty from the perspective of those most impacted. The paper is sold on the streets of Berkeley and Oakland by unhoused people, who keep 100% of the donations they receive. A two piece alt/indie band founded by Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner in Oakland, California, the Tune-Yards employ an irregular musical structure to their songs; when mixed with Garbus' use of loop pedals, ukulele, and lofi percussion, their performances allow metaphysical connection between audience, song, and social consciousness. The New York Times praised their first album BiRd-BrAiNs in 2009 as “a confident do-it-yourselfer’s opening salvo,” and relentless touring established Garbus as a commanding live performer. Their third album Nikki Nack was released in 2014, with its first single, "Water Fountain," being picked up by Google Pixel for an advertising campaign. The album I Can Feel You Creep into My Private Life was released in January 2018, which gained enough notoriety that they landed the opportunity to single-handedly score the satiric, science-fiction film Sorry to Bother You later that year. Garbus then was offered to composed the theme music for "The New Yorker Radio Hour" and in 2021, Tune-Yards appeared as the opening performance for Google I/O with Artificial Intelligence powered vocal accompaniment.
