An outdoor performance photograph by Ray Roa showing the band Peli Gene playing Sparkman Wharf during Gasparilla Music Festival in Tampa, Florida on April 12, 2026. Captured in a medium shot on an outdoor stage, the musician stands center stage singing into a microphone attached to a stand with a guitar strapped across their body. They wear a short-sleeved light blue short-sleeved collared shirt with a subtle floral print, blue jeans, and has curly dark brown hair and a mustache. In the background behind a wooden slat backdrop, a drummer sits at a drum kit on the left while a Hartke amplifier head rests on a cabinet on the right under outdoor stage lighting.Peli Gene plays Sparkman Wharf during Gasparilla Music Festival in Tampa, Florida on April 12, 2026. Credit: Ray Roa / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay

Last April at the Sparkman Wharf stage, Peli Gene made its Gasparilla Music Festival debut with anthemic, bouncy indie-rock that sounds like the feeling of pulling off a sweatshirt on a cold day turned perfectly-sunny.

The Tampa-based band headlines Rock the Park in support of an April release, Dream Estate. Songwriter Sunde returns to the park after getting rained out last month, with Geoff Abraham & Finn Walling playing a set of bluesy rock in the opening slot.

There’s no cover to see Peli Gene, Sunde, and Geoff Abraham & Finn Walling Rock the Park at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park in Tampa on Thursday, Oct. 1.

Dream Estate by Peli Gene

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This article appears in Sept. 24 – 30, 2026.

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Read his 2016 intro letter and disclosures from 2022 and 2021. Ray Roa started freelancing for Creative Loafing Tampa in January 2011 and was hired as music editor in August 2016. He became Editor-In-Chief…
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