Towa Bird North American Tour Announced in Support of Gentleman

The Towa Bird North American tour in support of her new album Gentleman kicks off on 13 September at The Independent in San Francisco, running through to 3 October at The Foundry at The Fillmore in Philadelphia. It is the kind of itinerary that reads like a full account of the record itself: cities associated with noise, style, and a certain self-invented romanticism. Mother Soki will open all dates.

Gentleman: Production, Collaborators and Release

Gentleman was released on 15 May via Interscope Records, according to FEMMUSIC Magazine. The album is the follow-up to Bird’s 2024 debut American Hero, recorded in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and finds her turning inward after a period of heavy touring. Where American Hero was shaped, by her own admission, around how best to present songs to an audience, Gentleman asks a different question entirely.

Patrick Wimberly produced the record and, as the New York Times notes, helmed all 11 tracks. Wimberly’s previous credits include work with MGMT and Blood Orange, and his influence here seems calibrated to pull Bird somewhere more expansive and less comfortable. The album features collaborations with Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and, as Dork reported, Reneé Rapp, a pairing that gestures at a broader cultural conversation the record seems to want to be part of.

Bird, Wimberly, and several additional writers began work on the album in February of last year, with the stated goal of pushing Bird ‘out of my comfort zone’, she told the New York Times in a piece written with Phoebe Reilly. ‘I spent a lot of time on my first record thinking about how I can best package it for the audience,’ Bird said during a drive to Echo Park. ‘This one I was like, what do I want to do?’

The Gentleman as a World, Not a Costume

The distinction Bird draws is worth sitting with. The album’s title character, she insists, is not a stage persona in the conventional sense. ‘The Gentleman isn’t a stage persona,’ she says. ‘It’s a cultural lifestyle (e.g. Ziggy Stardust, IGOR, Silk Sonic) that represents a whole world that I want this album, myself and my fans to live in. The boys want to be the gentleman and the girls want to be with the gentleman.’

The references she reaches for are instructive. Bowie’s Ziggy was not a mask so much as a full alternate cosmology; Tyler’s IGOR bent genre and gender into something new; Silk Sonic conjured a past that may never quite have existed. Bird is positioning Gentleman in that tradition of world-building through sound and image rather than biography. ‘If the last album was a pub, this is a cocktail bar,’ she continues. ‘If the last album was a white tank, this is a double-breasted suit.’

There is something considered about that image, a certain deliberateness that extends to how Bird talks about the record’s relationship to her own body and identity. ‘In a lot of ways this record feels like a conversation with me, and a reflection of my personality and the body I inhabit,’ she says. ‘I love that all these songs sound like how I look.’

Towa Bird North American Tour: Full Routing

After the San Francisco opening, the Towa Bird North American tour moves through Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago before heading north to Montreal. The run then takes in New York, Cambridge, and Washington, DC. All dates feature support from Mother Soki. The tour wraps in Philadelphia on 3 October, a city that feels like an appropriately unglamorous final stop for an album that keeps referencing glamour while remaining, in its emotional core, something more provisional and self-questioning.

Bird’s comments in the New York Times interview suggest that the shift from American Hero to Gentleman involved a genuine recalibration of intent, working through what she actually wanted to make rather than what might land best. Whether the live run, built around a record this considered, matches that ambition will start to become clear from 13 September in San Francisco.