The concert clock is ticking: South Florida pop acts you have to see before they’re gone (or sell out!)

As part of our 2025 Guide to the Arts in PRIME Magazine, entertainment writer Ben Crandell offers his Critic’s Picks for the best in pop shows coming up in South Florida. Want to see the full issue? Go to SunSentinel.com/prime.

Jon Batiste

Oct. 9 at Broward Center, Fort Lauderdale. BrowardCenter.org.

The Oscar-winning cultural avatar comes to South Florida on a 33-city tour supporting his acclaimed new album, “Big Money,” a beautiful and deeply personal statement, told in the Louisiana native’s signature synthesis of R&B, Americana, soul, jazz, country and gospel music. In an Instagram post, Jon Batiste explained the title: “Money is valuable because we collectively have decided it to be so. But the things that are eternally valuable and enduring last forever even when the currency changes. That’s where the BIG money is.” In a statement about the tour, he described these shows as a “creative church,” meant to uplift the spirit. “We’re living in a complicated time, and music has this incredible ability to reframe what we’re feeling, to help us keep going,” Batiste said. “These shows are meant to be healing, liberating and unforgettable.”

Billie Eilish

Oct. 9 and Oct. 11-12 at Kaseya Center, Miami. Conventional tickets are sold out, but get updates at KaseyaCenter.com. 

It’s been more than five years since Billie Eilish last performed in South Florida — she opened The Where Do We Go? World Tour in the former AmericanAirlines Arena on March 9, 2020, and ended it days later when COVID-19 hit — so three nights of sellouts in Miami are no surprise. The captivating singer and songwriter has been on the road for a year with music from her brilliant album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft” (somehow shut out at the Grammys this year despite seven nominations), a tour that has encouraged rapturous praise for its authenticity, intimacy and moments of cinematic grandeur. A Billboard magazine review lauded the tour’s opening night at Madison Square Garden as a display of her “remarkable growth as a musician, vocalist, and performer, as well as her almost singular ability to cultivate intimacy in spaces that are diametrically opposed to that feeling.”

The Magnetic Fields

Nov. 1-2 at Arsht Center, Miami; ArshtCenter.org.

The Magnetic Fields and creative majordomo Stephin Merritt are on the road celebrating the 25th anniversary of the gloriously eclectic and influential double album “69 Love Songs,” a 1999 release that prompted even the prickly arbiters of cool at Pitchfork to bend a knee: “There’s only one question that really needs to be asked of ‘69 Love Songs’: Is it a brilliant masterpiece or merely very, very good?” The band will bring the show — performances of the album in the entirety of its three hours of music over two nights at the venue — to South Florida, tucked between
several European dates. Who says we’re not cool?  For more on the tour, visit HouseOfTomorrow.com.

David Byrne

Dec. 5-6 at The Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater. Ticketmaster.com.

The enigmatic Talking Heads frontman announced his 2025 tour with the release of “Everybody Laughs,” a single from his Kid Harpoon-produced album “Who Is the Sky?” As a tone-setter for the tour, the song is a subversive balm — Byrne in celebration of our shared experience, the relentlessness of the human spirit, with his uncanny ability to distill the joys, sorrows and idiosyncrasies of day-to-day existence into a danceable musical elixir. The concept of his fall tour is “unlike anything I’ve done before,” he says on Instagram. “You’ll just have to come and experience what that involves.”

Bill Murray & His Blood Brothers

Dec. 7, Broward Center, Fort Lauderdale. BrowardCenter.org.

The band is a mashup of actor Bill Murray, also a vocalist of wide-ranging musical interests (he has performed with John Prine and famed cellist Jan Vogler); Canned Heat icon Jimmy Vivino (also once Conan O’Brien’s musical director); and Blood Brothers, the award-winning collaboration between Wilton Manors-based guitarist Albert Castiglia and acclaimed bluesman Mike Zito. Blood Brothers’ self-titled debut album won the award for Blues Rock Album of the Year at the 2024 Blues Music Awards. But what to expect? Along with a sprinkling of Blood Brothers songs, sets have featured covers of The Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” blues standards such as Howlin’ Wolf’s “Goin’ Down Slow,” Wilson Pickett’s soul classic “In the Midnight Hour” and random modern tracks including Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and Radiohead’s “Creep.” If you follow Castiglia on social media, you know that a tour with Bill Murray is as much fun as you’d expect. Cult-y ’90s Gainesville jammers Big Sky will open.

Originally Published: October 8, 2025 at 8:00 AM EDT