Dopapod will say goodbye for the foreseeable future with a five-night 2024 New Year’s run in Michigan and Ohio. The veteran four-piece progtronic jam band has stated that these will be its last shows before going on indefinite hiatus in 2025.
The year-end celebration will kick off with two nights at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, MI on December 27th and 28th. On December 29th, Dopapod will cross into the Buckeye State for a one-off show at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom. Finally, the band will close out 2024 with two nights at Columbus’ Woodlands Tavern before entering its second (and allegedly indefinite) extended hiatus beginning in the new year.
“This run takes us through some of our favorite places to play and culminates at a place we consider a second home: Woodlands Tavern in Columbus, Ohio,” the band wrote on social media. “These nights will be very special and bittersweet, so don’t miss your last chance to celebrate the music and the beginning of a new orbit with us.”
Tickets for the Dopapod 2024 New Year’s run in Michigan and Ohio go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. ET here.
Though Dopapod was born at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and its members are now scattered across the country, Columbus has indeed become the band’s second home. The Ohio state capital’s beloved Woodlands Tavern has hosted many D-pod shows of not including the band’s 2023 New Year’s run (featuring a Creed ball drop gag), a Woodstock-retrospective Halloween run in 2021, and many multiple-night stands throughout the years including some of the last shows before the band’s 2018–2019 hiatus.
After Dopapod’s planned headlining set at Woodlands’ 2020 St. Fatty’s Daze celebration was thwarted at the onset of the pandemic, the band gave its last pre-lockdown concert at Columbus’ Weird Music Studios. In addition to headlining shows at Woodlands and the former Park Street Saloon, Dopapod was a regular at the Legend Valley festival grounds in nearby Thornville. The band often appeared on lineups curated by its peers, including The Werks’ The Werk Out and Papadosio’s Resonance. The close-knit trio of bands came together at The Werk Out 2014 for a full performance of Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon, followed five years later by a recreation of The Wall.
Following 16 years of rigorous touring and nine studio albums of mind-bending, number-crunching prog rock, Dopapod announced in June that the band would go on indefinite hiatus at the end of the year. Citing the mental, financial, and physical price of touring clubs and festivals around the country, the band feels “deep down in our guts and our hearts that this is the best possible thing not for the band, but for four dudes who truly love each other and want the best for each other.” Quoting Homer Simpson, the members of Dopapod—guitarist Rob Compa, keyboardist Eli Winderman, bassist Chuck Jones, and drummer Neal “Fro” Evans—expressed immense gratitude for “The dizzying highs, the crushing lows, the creaaaaamy center” of their experience as a band.
Dopapod still has an impressive amount of dates on the Best Friends Tour scheduled through the end of the year, and the group has encouraged fans to come see the band while they can. Find tickets and a full list of tour dates here.
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