It’s all happening this month: a Halloween-themed cover-band blowout, a citywide birthday bash for one of the great American composers, a festival spotlighting Arabic artists and yes, the Strokes, a quarter-century on from their emergence as NYC’s greatest rock hope.
Read on for our picks for the best live local music October has to offer.
Robtober and Ron-tober
Blue Note, Oct. 1-Nov. 1 and Birdland, Oct. 7-31
Savvy local jazz fans know that October signals the arrival of a pair of similarly named monthlong residencies featuring major names in the genre born more than 40 years apart. For his residency at the Blue Note, Robert Glasper, arguably the contemporary musician most responsible for building bridges between jazz and the broader world of hip-hop and R&B, mines his golden Rolodex, presenting collaborations with Wyclef Jean, Questlove, and singer-songwriters Lalah Hathaway and Kem. Meanwhile, at Birdland, Ron Carter, the eminent bassist who has worked with everyone from Miles Davis to A Tribe Called Quest across his glorious six-decade-plus career, settles in for Ron-tober, featuring stints by two of his small combos, his Great Big Band and his duo with outside-the-box guitar genius Bill Frisell.
Strokes + Beach House + TV on the Radio + Fcukers
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Oct. 2
Having recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of their game-changing debut, “Is This It,” the Strokes could have easily spent 2026 reveling in nostalgia. Instead, they’re touring behind “Reality Awaits,” their resolutely weird seventh LP, filled with languid tempos and gratuitous Auto-Tune. Still, we’d be surprised if they don’t mix a good amount of early-aughts bangers into the set list for this splashy hometown gig alongside their illustrious Y2K-era art-rock contemporaries TV on the Radio, beloved Baltimore dream-pop vibesmiths Beach House, and Fcukers, a young NYC duo who channel the dancefloor-geared insouciance of early-2000s electroclash.
Steve Reich at 90
Few contemporary classical works could rightly be considered hits, but “Music for 18 Musicians” is the rare exception. Steve Reich’s minimalist masterpiece is a perennial crowd-pleaser, and for good reason: Its pulsing, interlocking patterns stimulate the brain while landing easily on the ear. A staged 50th anniversary revival of that work at the Park Avenue Armory (Oct. 14-18) is just one of a slew of gigs commemorating Reich’s 90th birthday this month. Elsewhere, you can hear Bryce Dessner of the National take a crack at multilayered guitar classic “Electric Counterpoint” as part of an all-star showcase of new and old pieces at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 22); Sō Percussion tackling the iconic “Drumming” at the 92nd Street Y (Oct. 28); and a career-spanning survey of vocal works at Trinity Church (Oct. 7).
Habibi Festival
Launched in 2021, the Habibi Festival showcases what it terms the “complexity, vitality, and beauty of music from the Arab world” and SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa). As demonstrated by the lineup of this year’s sixth annual installment, that could mean a bunch of different things, from jazz informed by Arabic maqām music, to neosoul and hip-hop, a new spin on Arabic classical music or Judeo-Arabic cabaret. Each of these gigs promises to bring deep heritage to life.
June McDoom
June McDoom draws on a broad constellation of influences: Simon & Garfunkel; her grandfather Colin Smith, who specializes in the Jamaican folk style of mento; her time studying jazz vocals at the New School. The mix gives her own work an uncommonly artful quality, in league with first-rate contemporary singer-songwriters like Mitski. This month, she’ll release “Follow the Light,” her debut album and first release via Jagjaguwar, the influential indie imprint that helped break modern indie standouts such as Bon Iver, Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten. People will be talking about this record; see her in the relatively intimate confines of National Sawdust while you still can.
Unsound New York
The stateside sister to a long-running experimental-music fest in Krakow, Poland, Unsound New York is the kind of description-defying showcase where it’s probably best just to dive in rather than try to decipher too much ahead of time. We’re especially intrigued by the collaborations and happenings going down this month at various Lincoln Center venues, including the team-ups of self-proclaimed “emo ambient” luminary claire rousay and Polish composer Martyna Basta (Oct. 22nd at the Atrium at Lincoln Center), and mind-bending vocalists and sound artists FUJIIIIIIIIIIITA and Ka Baird (Oct. 21 at Alice Tully Hall), as well as a large-scale orchestral work by another Polish composer, Hania Rani (Oct. 23 at Geffen Hall).
Gutterween
Like pretty much everyone else, rock bands love to dress up on Halloween. Lucky for us, their masquerade often takes a musical form, giving rise to a hallowed seasonal tradition: the Halloween covers show. These sorts of gigs are pretty much always a blast, no matter the details, but this one, going down at Williamsburg bowling alley the Gutter, looks downright historic. From Thursday through Saturday, leading up to the big night, the venue is hosting a whopping 10 cover acts per evening, each paying tribute to a single legendary band or artist. The lineup skews toward punk and alternative rock, with outfits channeling Bikini Kill, Green Day, Pixies, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blink-182 (a group calling itself Blink 212) and more. There’s plenty of pop in the mix, too, especially on Saturday, where you can catch Pink Phony Club busting out some Chappell Roan and, ahem, It’s Britney Bitch paying homage to you-know-who.
Neurosis
This past spring, Neurosis, the venerable art-metal outfit formed some 40 years ago in Oakland, stunned the heavy-music world with the surprise drop of their 12th LP, “An Undying Love for a Burning World.” Few could have foreseen a way forward for the band after 2022, when it split with an integral co-founder, but the album — which welcomed aboard Aaron Turner, a giant of 21st century metal in his own right, known for his work in Isis and Sumac — lived up to the band’s towering legacy. Few groups in any genre convey big, ugly feelings with more grandeur than these guys, and these local gigs — among only a handful they’re playing nationwide in support of the album — ought to feel especially transcendent following their absence from the scene.