ANAHEIM, Calif. — KROQ-FM 106.7 and its parent company Audacy announced the return of the station’s long-running Almost Acoustic Christmas holiday concert on Wednesday.
After three years without it, the Los Angeles-based rock station revealed that Imagine Dragons, The Black Keys, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Death Cab For Cutie, Jimmy Eat World, Yungblud, Maneskin, The Interrupters and Wet Leg will all perform at the 2022 Almost Acoustic Christmas taking place Dec. 10 at Kia Forum in Inglewood.
“We’re so glad to be back at Kia Forum and to bring back Acoustic Christmas after being away for three years now,” Kevin Weatherly, senior vice president of programming at KROQ said during a recent phone interview. Weatherly, who had worked at KROQ since 1992 and left in 2020 to work as head of North American programming at Spotify, returned to the station in June of this year.
“Ever since then, it’s been a priority to bring back this Southern California tradition,” he said of the annual holiday show, while also noting KROQ’s beloved summer shindig, Weenie Roast, could make a comeback as well.
Almost Acoustic Christmas tickets go on sale at noon Nov. 11 on Ticketmaster.com. KROQ listeners can also win their way into the event by tuning into the station as various on-air personalities will be giving away tickets leading up to the event. For more information, go to kroq.com/xmas.
The show, which started back in 1989 as the KROQ Christmas Bash, last took place in 2019 at Honda Center in Anaheim over two days with performances by Angels and Airwaves, Young the Giant, Jimmy Eat World, Beck, Cage the Elephant, The Raconteurs, The 1975, Twenty One Pilots, Mumford & Sons and more.
Coming back following the COVID-19 shutdown of live events, plus a lot of shakeup and personnel changes at the station, Weatherly said there were challenges in booking the acts for 2022 with so many artists attempting to tour at once and busy making up concerts to fans promised in 2020 and 2021. While typically a two-day affair, the 2022 concert will be a single night, but Weatherly said he’s proud of its solid lineup.
“I think we curate this show to always reflect sort of the state of current alternative music and with bands like Wet Leg, The Interrupters and Maneskin, that’s a taste of up-and-coming artists that are newer to the scene, and bands like The Black Keys, Imagine Dragons, Death Cab For Cutie and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, all of these bands could play the Forum by themselves, so we just try to put together a lineup that’s reflective of what the state of KROQ is today.”
It was also important, he said, for the station to continue the Acoustic Christmas tradition of donating a portion of the proceeds to local charities. This year, that will benefit two Los Angeles-area charities: Para Los Niños and the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center.
“When we started Acoustic Christmas, that was always the intention was to give back to our local community,” he said.
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