Travis Scott is hitting the road for the first time since the 2021 Astroworld tragedy that left 10 attendees dead.
“UTOPIA TOUR SOON US AND EURO DATES SOON TO BE ANNOUNCE I MISS THE ROAD I MISSS YALLLL,” Scott, 32, wrote via Instagram on Tuesday, August 8, alongside a poster that revealed the tour will be named the Utopia Presents Circus.
While the exact show dates have yet to be announced, the rapper plans to perform his Utopia album — which dropped last month — in cities around North America including Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Vancouver and more, according to Pitchfork. The outlet cited Chicago’s United Center on Monday, September 25, as the first performance date, with the tour wrapping up on Monday, November 27, at Miami’s Kaseya Center. (Tour dates were initially announced by Live Nation on Tuesday but the posts have since been deleted.)
News of the upcoming tour comes one day after his Monday, August 7, performance in Rome, where Scott performed songs from Utopia for the first time and brought out Kanye West for a performance of his hits “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and “Praise God.” Scott also paid tribute to West, 46, saying, “There is no Utopia without Kanye West. There is no Travis Scott without Kanye West. There is no Rome without Kanye West.”
Scott has performed at festivals and one-off concerts over the past few years, but the Utopia Presents Circus Tour will mark his first major run of U.S. dates since the Astroworld Festival tragedy in November 2021. Scott was performing in Houston, Texas, at NRG Park when the crowd surged toward the stage, creating a massive crush that, left 10 people dead and more than 100 injured.
Following the event, a source told Us Weekly that the crowd surge “was from panic because people were running for safety.”
During the show, Scott paused his performance “three times” to ask what had happened. “He asked for everybody in the area to go help them and bring them to the front,” a second insider told Us at the time. “As soon as they were made aware of what was happening, they ended the performance in the interest of public safety.”
Scott later addressed the tragedy in a lengthy December 2021 YouTube discussion with Charlamagne tha God, claiming he “didn’t know the exact details [of the incident] until minutes before the press conference [after my set].” He also claimed he was unaware of the nature of the attendees’ injuries because he couldn’t see the entire crowd from the stage.
“And even at that moment, you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ People pass out, things happen at concerts, but something like that,” he continued. “It’s so crazy because I’m that artist too — anytime you can hear something like that, you want to stop the show. You want to make sure fans get the proper attention they need. Anytime I could see anything like that, I did. I stopped it a couple times to just make sure everybody was OK. And I really just go off the fans’ energy as a collective — call and response. I just didn’t hear that. You can only help what you can see and whatever you’re told, whenever they tell you to stop, you stop.”
Scott, who shares daughter Stormi, 5, and son Aire, 18 months, with ex-girlfriend Kylie Jenner, also revealed that the incident catapulted him onto an “emotional roller coaster.”
“It gets so hard because, you know, I always feel so emotionally connected to my fans,” he explained in the YouTube clip. “I went through something and I feel like fans went through something and people’s parents went through something. It really hurts, it hurts the community, it hurts the city. It’s just been a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings about, and a lot of grieving and just trying to wrap my head around it.”
