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Dance Yourself Clean with LCD Soundsystem Under a Starry Ballroom Ceiling With a new album slowly taking shape, James Murphy and company return to the historic Aragon for another four-night stand.

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by Dylan Weinert
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Three people sit on a bench against a brick wall. The person on the left wears a dark jacket, white shirt, and sunglasses. The person in the middle adjusts sunglasses. The person on the right wears a plaid shirt and sunglasses.

LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem will be returning to the Aragon Ballroom to celebrate the venue’s centennial anniversary, two years after their last four-night stand in Chicago. The city’s role as a reliable and committed lover of the New York-native indie-dance troupe persists, a job fans such as myself greedily embrace. The band’s residency run has been quite consistent since 2022, and the selection of the Aragon as their stage in Chicago twice within the last three years unveils an interesting pattern.

The Knockdown Center (a former glass factory in Queens built in 1903) has played host to LCD Soundsystem’s annual New York residencies since 2023—often as part of a multi-venue, eight-to-twelve-show run. They’ve run an eight-night residency in the same period in the Bay Area, split between San Francisco’s The Warfield (built in 1922) and Oakland’s Fox Theater (built in 1928), and have played the O2 Academy Brixton in London—a legendary concert hall and former cinema built in 1929. All of these venues can accommodate approximately 2,300-4,800 fans, all are quite old, and most of them have been repurposed multiple times. For example, from 1926 until 1964, the Aragon Ballroom was a genuine ballroom dance club, before becoming a roller rink, a boxing venue and finally, for the last fifty years, one of Chicago’s preeminent music halls.

While their current tour includes a four-night New Year’s Eve run at the ritzy, more modern Belly Up Aspen (a venue that can support 450 guests and is intentionally intimate, similar to the original Belly Up Solana Beach, both based in two of the most expensive zip codes in the country), generally, James Murphy and company seem to favor historical depth and eccentricities as prerequisites to hosting their residencies. The band is at a juncture where they—and their rabid fan base—are living within their own lore. The legendarium has been established; it’s been documented in detail, cataloged on camera, and has now reached multiple generations since the release of “Losing My Edge” over twenty years ago. But it’s also still unfolding in real-time. The group’s feature on Idles’ 2023 single “Dancer” and the release of their own single “x-ray eyes” (2024) point to a potentially imminent follow-up to their lauded 2017 record “American Dream.”

A man with short brown hair and a beard is wearing a dark sweater over a white collared shirt and tie, standing in front of a blue and white patterned wallpaper.

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

This was confirmed by Murphy himself in 2024 across LCD Soundsystem’s social channels, citing “x-ray eyes” as “the first single of what’s shaping up to be a new album,” noting that “we’re still working on it.” In the same statement confirming they were in the process of recording a new LP, Murphy framed the new record as something they’ve been producing in between tour legs, rather than one they’re taking a full stop from live shows to record. “x-ray eyes” harkens back to the dubby roots of “Losing My Edge” and drifts from some of the dreamier, slow-dancier progressions in “american dream,” a hybrid of which was struck precisely and sublimely in “This Is Happening” (2010). This leaves fans wondering, and perhaps hoping, whether they can expect something similar in the upcoming album.

To date, Murphy has refused to put a timetable on when that album may arrive—particularly after Primavera Sound erroneously announced the band would play their festival with the new album in hand in 2025 (they did not). Murphy has subsequently denounced any reported release dates as “bullshit speculation.” That said, “American Dream” and “This Is Happening” both took between twelve to eighteen months to record. In the spirit of bullshit speculation, and being familiar with how cagey the band and their surrounding apparatus is about any and all new information (“x-ray eyes” was released entirely unannounced on London’s NTS Radio as an exclusive play, about fourteen months ago), it would be very on-brand if, with no preamble, press release or fanfare, the new record dropped in the months after this current tour ends on May 24.

Chicago has spent a lot of time with LCD Soundsystem. The group has played five (soon to be six) times in our city since 2020. Our town shares company with London, New York, San Francisco and Boston as the only cities to have hosted LCD Soundsystem for multiple four-night residencies since their run began in 2022. As a fan, part of me would like them to take a breather, so they can churn out their new album as quickly as possible before ripping an eighteen-month global tour.

But for the thousands of Chicagoans who were at the Aragon in 2024 dancing themselves clean under that ancient building’s starry ceiling, it will not matter. The same people who were there in 2024 will be there in 2026 (myself included), often for multiple nights watching the same setlist and wishing each night could go longer than the last. Because that’s just the way it works with this band. They’ve intoxicated a generation of indie fans in perpetuity, and the band takes a special pride in delivering every live performance with a level of precision, consistency and passion that most bands can only hope to nail a handful of times.

LCD Soundsystem plays four nights, March 5-8, at Aragon Ballroom, 1106 West Lawrence. For tickets and more information, visit aragonballroomchicago.com.