The much-hyped Australian electronic dance trio might be Grand Rapids’ Acrisure Amphitheater’s most daring and impressive booking thus far. Columnist Todd Ernst digs into the Rüfüs Du Sol phenomenon.
Returning to West Michigan: Rüfüs Du Sol — shown here at Electric Forest 2016 — plays GR on Tuesday. (Photo/Todd Ernst)
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This summer, three Australians known as Rüfüs Du Sol sold out Madison Square Garden, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.
Tonight (Tuesday, Sept. 1), they play Grand Rapids.
I’ve said for almost two decades now that Grand Rapids is either the largest small city or the smallest large city in the United States, usually determined by whatever concert or conference happens to be in town that particular week. Anybody who’s lived here a while has had some version of that argument — at a bar, at work, or with a relative from Chicago who says it kindly and means it otherwise.
Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.
If you’re still trying to figure out what Rüfüs Du Sol even means, you’re not alone. The name is a magic trick, and almost nobody knows it.
The band has said they wanted something that felt “familiar, yet foreign.” “Rufus” stuck in their heads like an earworm — a word they were certain they’d heard somewhere but couldn’t place. The two umlauts finished the job. Rüfüs reads as imported from somewhere colder and more mysterious than Sydney, which was precisely the idea. They liked the anonymity. Early press photos kept their faces in shadow. Three guys from Australia went to considerable trouble to seem like they might be from anywhere at all.
The “Du Sol” is considerably less romantic.
In January 2014, while swaggering into the American market, they collided with an existing funk band called Rufus — the one that made Chaka Khan a household name — and had to become something else on this side of the ocean. So for four years they were Rüfüs Du Sol here and Rüfüs everywhere else, which is exactly as confusing as it sounds. In May 2018, they leaned into a full branding pivot and adopted the longer surname worldwide.
Incidentally, the first time I saw them perform live, at Electric Forest in 2016, a fair share of that crowd still wasn’t certain how to pronounce it.
What I remember from that night has little to do with the name. I noticed something in Rothbury I’d never quite seen, and I’d been DJing close to three decades at that point. Standing backstage at Sherwood Court during their set — and during Bob Moses’ set the same weekend — I watched a sea of women in boho chic attire, eyes closed and arms up, slithering in unison more than dancing. I’ve called it the swagger dance ever since, for lack of a better term. Guys do it too, just less pronounced. A side-to-side head bob, one knee bending in time with the drummer.
You don’t see that at most electronic shows. You see jumping, fist pumping, sometimes with the enthusiasm reserved for fellow Aussie rockers AC/DC. This was something else entirely — closer to what a room does when a song is genuinely moving people, rather than simply moving air.
That Was Then, This Is Now: Rüfüs Du Sol (Photo/Boaz Kroon)
They’d earned it. Their hit single “Innerbloom” had arrived the previous November, and “Bloom” landed that January and went straight to No. 1 in Australia. For months prior to Electric Forest, SiriusXM’s Chill channel had been playing “Say a Prayer for Me” in constant rotation. Not a club banger, but a mid-tempo proclamation touching on a theme of uncertainty and vulnerability.
Which brings me to that famous synth line.
To my ear, the riff running through “Innerbloom” is the second most recognizable in modern dance music. It sits behind Darude’s “Sandstorm,” and only because Darude has a 16-year head start on it. Ubiquity compounds. Ask me again in 2042.
The two records are opposites in every other respect. “Sandstorm” is pure adrenaline, hands in the air, no subtlety requested or required. “Innerbloom” unfolds over the better part of ten minutes and takes you on a slow burn. Both are identifiable inside of two seconds.
And here’s the part I find genuinely great: Nobody outside that band knows what created that synth riff.
Jon George told MusicRadar in early 2016 that they’d pushed themselves to track “Bloom” on hardware — a Roland Jupiter-8, a Korg MS-20 Mini, a Dave Smith Mopho x4, a Nord Electro — while cheerfully admitting he sometimes couldn’t tell the real instruments from Ableton’s emulations of them. Producers have spent a decade trying to reverse-engineer that lead. The three men who made it have never said a word.
A riff that famous, and it’s still an open case.
A GRAMMY AWARD, HEADLINE SLOTS AND A MAJOR WORLD TOUR
What came after Rothbury in 2016 is the part that reads like a press release, so I’ll keep it brief. Five studio albums. A Grammy Award in 2022 for “Alive.” Another nomination for their most recent record, “Inhale / Exhale.” A headline slot at Lollapalooza in Chicago last year. A 2025 world tour that ran nearly 50 dates, moved north of 750,000 headline tickets and played to more than 1.5 million people.
Numbers like that are easy to print and hard to feel. So let me tell you personally how I actually understood what had happened to this band.
Last August my son, then 23, had tickets to see them at Pine Knob Music Theatre outside Detroit, and he invited his dad. It was the first concert I ever attended with him.
I’ve spent 35-plus years in this industry, the bulk of them explaining to people why the music I love is worth their time. I have never once had to explain it to him. He simply understood the assignment.
Somewhere in the middle of that set, flanked by great friends and watching lasers cut through the August humidity, I realized the band I’d discovered as a professional curiosity in a field in Rothbury had become the band my kid brings his father to see.
That’s not a small thing, not in my household anyway. That’s what a decade looks like that can’t be measured in ticket sales alone. (Naturally, I’m still trying to work out why they didn’t play “Say a Prayer for Me.” I’ve let it go, mostly.)
Now, before Tuesday in Grand Rapids, let me clear up something for anyone who hears “electronic music” and pictures one guy behind the decks pressing play. That is not what’s coming to Market Avenue.
Rüfüs Du Sol is what I’ve long referred to as an electronic hybrid — a band that happens to use electronic instrumentation, rather than a DJ who happens to own instruments. Tyrone Lindqvist plays guitar and sings. Jon George plays keys and synths. James Hunt plays drums. They wrote it, they sing it, and on Tuesday they will perform it. (The 7:30 p.m. show opens with Fcukers; doors open at 6 p.m.)
George has described their lighting rig as a fourth member of the band, and having watched what they do with it at Pine Knob, that isn’t marketing talk. The lighting sequences are written into the arrangements rather than bolted onto them. In basketball vernacular, you might call it the sixth man.
What arrives Tuesday is closer to a rock show that behaves like a dance floor. If you’ve spent your life assuming this genre isn’t for you, this is the one to test that assumption on. Which is the long way around to the thing I touched on earlier.
Rüfüs Du Sol’s stop here is the 21st on the largest North American headline run of their career. Look at what surrounds it on the itinerary. Madison Square Garden. Wrigley Field. Fenway Park. The Kia Forum. Petco Park. Folsom Field. Rogers Centre. A show on the beach in Atlantic City.
And Grand Rapids, Michigan — routed between Atlantic City and Cincinnati, on a run that carries on to Pittsburgh and Toronto. That is not a filler date on the way to a real market. That is a headline stop, in a building that didn’t exist 15 months ago. Kudos to the talent buyers and routing team on this one.
And here’s the number I’d underline for anyone still treating this as just another concert announcement: It sold out on a Tuesday. Not a Saturday in July. A school night, six days before Labor Day, in a 12,000-seat room, for a band a sizable share of this market might have struggled to name five years ago.
For years, when people asked why acts of this magnitude skipped Grand Rapids, the honest answer had nothing whatsoever to do with appetite. The appetite has been here the entire time — as evidenced by Electric Forest, Breakaway Music Festival and shows at The Intersection — and I’ve spent a decade in this column documenting it, occasionally to the point of nagging. What we lacked was the proper room.
We have the proper venue now. Tuesday is the receipt.
For a sense of where this band sits at the moment: When XS Nightclub at the Wynn reopens in November following a full redesign, it hands opening night to Rüfüs Du Sol — ahead of Calvin Harris, The Chainsmokers and Diplo. And Las Vegas is only getting a DJ set.
Grand Rapids gets its first shot at this Aussie trio live, outdoors, full production. Might I suggest we came out ahead on that one. Only resale tickets are available at this juncture.
One tip worth having: George told the Boston Globe that the band actively pushes promoters for sunset slots, because their music carries a nighttime feel that an afternoon set flattens. Sunset in Grand Rapids on Sept. 1 falls right around 8:15. Plan accordingly, and don’t be the one still hunting for parking when the light goes.
A last thing, and it’s the reason I’d have written this column even if the show hadn’t sold out. The band is donating 50 cents from every ticket on this North American tour to Notes for Notes, funding a music studio that will be free and accessible to kids. Run that against a full house on Market Avenue and it’s real money, generated on a Tuesday night in West Michigan.
Which brings us back around to where we started. Largest small city, or smallest large city? This week, we’re the smallest large city, emphasis on large city.
I’ll be the guy on the lawn doing a swagger dance, perhaps to the embarrassment of his son, who will also be in tow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Todd Ernst has been an electronic music DJ and promoter for 35-plus years, and performs as the artist TELLURIUM. While his days are spent as the owner of an indie real estate brokerage, he also owns EXSIGN, an experiential entity that designs and manages corporate, non-profit and nightlife events like Irish On Ionia and TEDxGrandRapids. He regularly provides insights into the electronic music world with his ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’ columns at Local Spins.
VIDEO: Rüfüs Du Sol, “Pressure”
VIDEO: Rüfüs Du Sol, Live in Boulder
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