After the Upside Down, Finn Wolfhard Brings Fire From the Hip to the Fonda

Finn Wolfhard spent a decade in Hawkins, Indiana. On Tuesday, October 13, he spends a night on Hollywood Boulevard, when the Stranger Things star plays the Fonda Theatre on his fall run of U.S. and Canadian dates, according to the tour routing published by BroadwayWorld. LAist picked the show for its weekly guide.

He arrives with a second solo album. Fire From the Hip came out in July on Night Shift Productions and AWAL, a 12 track record recorded in February and inspired by the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. and Beggars Banquet, BroadwayWorld reported. His 2025 debut, Happy Birthday, has passed 64 million streams. On October 2 he added an Amazon Music Original cover of Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World.”

A Band From Chicago

Wolfhard produced the new record himself, Billboard reported, working with engineer Andrew Humphrey and four members of the Chicago band the Slaps, who have doubled as his live band since last summer. They decamped for two weeks to Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota in February and came back with what the magazine called a remarkably sunny record. It was the Slaps who talked him into producing. “Dude, just do it,” he remembered them saying. “You know what you want.”

“As a 23-year-old, I’m not gonna sit here and say that I have figured anything out, in any way,” he told the magazine. Music has run alongside acting for years. Billboard traces it through the Vancouver band Calpurnia, its offshoot the Aubreys with Malcolm Craig, and Happy Birthday, which he made with Kai Slater of the Chicago band Lifeguard. His link to Chicago came from a castmate. Joe Keery, who records as Djo, steered him toward the band Twin Peaks, and that scene took him in.

Country by Way of the Stones

The new songs bring in honky-tonk piano, mandolin and steel guitar. When Billboard suggested “country-adjacent” as a fair description, Wolfhard agreed. “Totally,” he said. He named the first two Wilco records, A.M. and Being There, as a big influence, along with the Stones. He is a student of the canon who has covered Pixies, Weezer, the Velvet Underground and Mac DeMarco live, which makes the timing neat, since DeMarco plays the Bowl four nights earlier, as Velvet covered in Home Songs Under the Shell, Mac DeMarco Headlines the Hollywood Bowl.

His favorite band of all is the Replacements. He wore a vintage shirt of theirs when he hosted Saturday Night Live earlier this year, Billboard noted, and he holds the film rights to Trouble Boys, Bob Mehr’s 2016 biography of the band. He and his father, Eric, are writing the screenplay. “I just want to make something that is authentic to them, as people,” he said.

Music First

Stranger Things ended on New Year’s Day, and Wolfhard told Billboard he had turned down or paused other work this year to put music first. “I’ve kind of been playing the same character for 10 years,” he said. “If I am gonna act, I want to do something that is really super different.” The magazine also pointed to his other breakout role, Richie Tozier in the 2017 film It.

The live show has been growing up fast. In 2025 he finished a sold out U.S. tour and sold out Electric Brixton in London for his first solo headline show there, and this year he played Lollapalooza and Osheaga, BroadwayWorld reported. He plays Austin City Limits on October 10, then Phoenix on October 12 before the Fonda. Billboard reported that the summer leg behind the album launched July 17 as the Common Side Effects tour.

The Fonda is the only Los Angeles date on this run. The tour moves on to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco the next night, and the published routing ends October 20 at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, his hometown.