Noah Kahan spent the last two years turning sad-boy folk into sold-out arenas, and now he's going bigger.
The Vermont singer announced a new leg of stadium shows for 2025, including stops at Fenway Park, Madison Square Garden, and a handful of amphitheaters that hold more people than the entire population of his hometown.
The announcement arrived with the usual cryptic teaser video: grainy footage of a dirt road, a snippet of an unreleased song, and a caption that just said "see you soon." Within minutes, the replies were a war zone.
Longtime fans who caught him at 500-capacity clubs in 2022 are posting receipts and complaining that the artist they "found first" is now charging prices that require a payment plan.
Newer fans are simply trying to figure out how a presale code works.
Meanwhile, the resale market did what it always does — tickets appeared on secondary sites before the general sale even opened, marked up by hundreds of dollars.
Kahan hasn't addressed the pricing backlash directly, but his team did announce a limited number of $25 tickets held back for each show, plus a registration system meant to cut down on bots.
It's the same playbook used by other artists who got swallowed by their own success, and it rarely quiets the complaints.
The people who get shut out still feel shut out, and the people who get in still feel like they paid too much.
Part of the frustration is that Kahan's rise has been so fast it's almost disorienting. "Stick Season" came out in 2022 and slowly became a phenomenon, then a deluxe version, then a collaboration with Post Malone, then a Grammy nomination.
He went from opening for others to headlining festivals in about eighteen months.
That kind of trajectory usually comes with a messy middle period where the fanbase splits into before-and-after camps, and that's exactly what's happening now.
Kahan has been rotating in new material, and fans are debating whether the stadium shows will lean on the hits or debut a full album's worth of unreleased tracks.
He's hinted in interviews that the next record is more stripped back, which has some people worried that a 40,000-seat venue is the wrong room for it.
Others argue that a big crowd singing every word is the whole point, and that intimacy is overrated when you can hear an entire stadium hit the bridge of "Dial Drunk." The tour also raises a question the music industry keeps dodging: how big is too big?
Kahan is not the first artist to jump from theaters to stadiums in a single cycle, and he won't be the last.
Streaming rewards scale, labels reward scale, and promoters reward scale.
The artist just has to stand on a stage the size of a football field and pretend it feels the same as a bar in Burlington.
For now, the discourse is doing what it does best: generating more attention.
Every complaint about ticket prices is another post, and every post is another reminder that the tour exists.
Kahan may lose a few diehards along the way, but the stadiums will fill.
The honest take: Kahan is a genuinely great songwriter who got caught in a machine that rewards growth over everything else.
Fans aren't wrong to be annoyed about prices, and he isn't wrong to take the rooms he can sell.
The real test comes when the new album drops — if the songs hold up, nobody will remember the presale drama.
Final Thoughts
If they don't, all those stadium seats are going to feel very quiet.