Before 2005, music acts weren’t exactly clamoring to come to Chicago in January. Braving the tri-state corridor during a Midwest winter had about as good odds as expecting more than a dozen people to leave home and show up to a gig. This temporary dip was just an accepted part of the biz every year until talent booker Matt Rucins came up with a solution: a multidate, indoor winter music festival called Tomorrow Never Knows.
“January is pretty slow for tours, which means it’s pretty slow for competition. … I looked at it as an opportunity to have everyone’s attention,” said Rucins, the former booker for Schubas Tavern in Lake View, where his idea for TNK was born. His pitch to agents: “The band will be playing in front of bigger crowds and might sell 20% to 50% more tickets than if they came here three months later.”
Initially, TNK’s focus was on up-and-coming artists, with the festival taking its moniker from a Beatles song to symbolize the fact that tomorrow never knows who the next headliner will be — so you should see the acts in small clubs while you can.
TNK has been incredibly successful in that tastemaker vision. Bon Iver played his first Chicago show as part of the festival in 2008; that year also brought The Walkmen, who returned in 2013 with a young Father John Misty. Other notable TNK alums that have gone on to topline billing include Sharon Van Etten (2010), Chelsea Wolfe (2013), Kevin Morby (2015) and Geese (2022).
Every new year, the goal for TNK has been to grow it just a little bit more. In the beginning, all events were solely at Schubas over just three days. When sister venue Lincoln Hall in Lincoln Park became part of the portfolio in 2009, the offerings expanded. By 2012, comedy was part of the lineup at The Hideout in West Town. At some point, five full days of programming were scheduled. Metro and Gman Tavern in Wrigleyville came on board early on, too, and organizers arranged trolleys for music fans to go back and forth.
This year, Sleeping Village in Avondale, Color Club in Irving Park and the Ramova Theater in Bridgeport are also partner venues with the extra space becoming very necessary for TNK’s biggest venture yet: four full weekends of programming for the first time, with shows kicking off Thursday and running through Jan. 31. The upgrade is in honor of the festival’s 20th anniversary in 2026, taking into account the COVID gap year.
“We talked about what kind of things we might want to do to make it extra special and feel as big as that number feels,” said Dan Apodaca, talent booker for Lincoln Hall/Schubas. He took up the TNK torch when Rucins left in 2015 and up until recently was with the Auditorium in the Loop.
“We thought, if people are maybe not getting as many options for things to do, let’s just give them the whole month,” Apodaca added.
Among some stellar offerings, like chamber rock whiz Perfume Genius (Jan. 22), two nights of comedy from Ramy Youssef (Friday and Saturday), dreamy shoegazers DIIV (Jan. 17) and electronic act Austra (Jan. 16), there’s a strong showing of local talent, which has been a priority for TNK since day one.
One homegrown act is the five-piece Smut who plays Jan. 23 with headliner Bad Bad Hats. Smut is just coming off a banner year after its solid 2025 album, “Tomorrow Comes Crashing,” got industry tongues wagging for its rock swagger and ‘90s alt influences that aren’t a far cry from the Smashing Pumpkins/Veruca Salt/Liz Phair lineage. Smut even has a song called “Touch & Go,” which some have assumed is about the famed Chicago label. (It’s not, but the band likes the connection people are making.)
“It feels like it’s the biggest year we’ve ever had as a band. So much stuff has happened in a short amount of time as far as awesome opportunities — the videos, doing interviews, going on multiple tours. It seems like we fit five years of memories into one year,” said vocalist/lyricist Tay Roebuck.
Smut (originally from Cincinnati, but they have rooted themselves in Chicago since 2020) first played TNK last year and saw its discovery mechanisms at work.
“We run into people every once in a while who recognize us from the band, and a handful of them have said they saw us at TNK,” Roebuck added. “It feels like people in Chicago are very open to discovering new things and are very enthusiastic about music generally.”
Another local appearing at TNK is prolific rapper femdot. — also a festival veteran. He first opened for Open Mike Eagle in 2017 at Schubas and will headline the Ramova Loft on Jan. 16 . The rapper, born Femi Adigun, will have a new curated experience for his set, including a stage set up in the middle of the crowd. It’s to promote his latest release, “King Dilla 2,” but the vibe also taps into an immersive spirit he fostered when teaching a new first-year-student-level course at his alma mater, DePaul University, in fall 2025, called “Chicago Culture Through Hip Hop.”
“It went really well. The students were excited. The guests were excited. I was excited,” Adigun said of the course, which has now wrapped. A few years ago, he also established the Delacreme Scholars to provide funding for DePaul students.
For the college course, Adigun developed a syllabus analyzing classic Chicago albums tied to neighborhoods in Chicago.
“We used that as a lens into the social climate and historical elements of a neighborhood, all through a Black lens,” Adigun said. “Hip-hop became an entry point into the larger conversations that exist, like talking about redlining and someone from the West Side [Lupe Fiasco] who named their album ‘Food And Liquor.’”
Students also ventured out, visiting spots like studioSHAPES, Lsd Studios and Classick Studios, and met featured guests like rappers GLC and Saba as well as the team behind Lyrical Lemonade and Folded Map Project artist Tonika Lewis. This winter, around the time of TNK, Adigun will adapt the curriculum for Michele Clark Magnet High School in Austin.
It’s these kinds of branches into the greater Chicago community that are at the heart of what TNK is all about, too. The bookers believe what sets it apart and has kept it going for 20 years, even as the festival landscape gets more crowded, is precisely its local DNA. “It’s truly a Chicago thing. It’s all Chicago venues, all owned by longtime Chicagoans, all run by people who’ve been doing this for years,” Rucins said. “It doesn’t need to turn into like South by Southwest. It still stands out.”
Apodaca agreed.
“I think we are able to fill a nice niche. TNK is a great resource to give a snapshot of the Chicago music scene,” he said, noting the team may keep the four-weekend model in the years ahead as they keep evolving the event. As he added, “I think my dream would be that when people think of concerts in Chicago in January, the first thing they think of is Tomorrow Never Knows.”