Swimming through stars, driving through the desert, shining through trees, and listening through a payphone were all places audience members found themselves at Lord Huron’s concert at The Anthem on August 2, 2026.

For their final stop on the Cosmic Selector Tour, Lord Huron graced Washington, D.C. with their transcendental music and celestial visuals. After releasing their fifth studio album, The Cosmic Selector, Vol. 1, just over a year ago, the band toured the country throughout June and July this year.

They were accompanied by August Ponthier, a nonbinary singer-songwriter with magically calming vocals. The Texas native had only a guitarist – who was from D.C. – with them, but together they filled the arena and set the mood for Lord Huron’s upcoming set.

Back in 2021, Ponthier was featured on Lord Huron’s song “I Lied” from their 2022 album Long Lost. The band invited Ponthier back onstage to sing that song. Ponthier’s vocals mixed with those of lead singer Ben Schneider sounded like angels singing.

Ponthier released an album in February titled Everywhere Isn’t Texas. It is about their transgender identity, connections to their home state, and a reminder that you can leave a place in which you don’t feel comfortable. They wore a homecoming mum, a Texas tradition, that said “TRANS TX.” 

Lord Huron are masters at storytelling. Toward the beginning of the show, Schneider apologized to the audience in advance for not talking to them much between songs, but he didn’t need to. They communicated everything that needed to be said through songs and visuals.

The show began in a glowing white orb, almost like a creation, a conception, maybe even the Big Bang before the world was created. They began with “Who Laughs Last,” a song full of energy and narration by actress Kristen Stewart.

Next, in a blue haze, Schneider sang “Looking Back” through a phone, seemingly trying to deliver a message or urge someone to come back. The phone motif was present throughout the show, and it was very fun. At one point, the phone rang. Schneider picked it up, and a garbled voice began to deliver an eerie message. It got cut off, and he simply shrugged it off.

As Schneider sang into the phone, the camera hiding in the payphone showed his face large and live on the big screen in the back of the stage. The microphone also made his voice sound like it was indeed coming through a phone. The attention to detail in this show design was impeccable. 

After the first two songs, we were then instantly dropped into a red desert under a glowing moon. “Feeling lost?” said a neon road sign as a graphic car drove through the endless sand and mountains. This visual repeated itself later on in the show, but this time in a picture frame, almost like they were capturing the memory of the start of the journey. The first song in this desert setting was “Bag of Bones,” which is the second song on their most recent album. 

After the desert, the background panned upwards into a starry sky as they sang “The Ghost On The Shore” from their album Lonesome Dreams. Later, we entered an unknown land of neon red geometric lines, as if we were on the set of Tron, racing through time and space.

Roughly two-thirds of the way into the concert, Schneider came back to talk to the crowd once more. He cracked some jokes (including a joke about the Reflecting Pool) and thanked the audience sincerely for coming to the show and engaging with their music. He also encouraged the crowd to listen to their most recent album in order, front to back, the way they intended. He jokingly warned that if you listen to it backwards, you may open a portal to another dimension – even though it felt like we had all gone through multiple dimensions throughout the show. It’s clear that the band really loves their fans.

As we descended back to earth, we landed in a sun-filled forest with a stream running through it. It rippled calmly, diffusing light over the crowd. However, every once in a while, there would be a decent amount of strobing, possibly representing lightning. But then, all was calm as they played their last song of the main set.

Hearing “The Night We Met,” the song that introduced me to Lord Huron many years ago, live was an other-worldly experience. It was haunting and ethereal. Draped in green, yellow, and blue light with visuals of a rippling stream and a forest playing behind them, the band drew out the beginning of the song to lengthen the impact of the chilling vocal-only intro. It was pure magic, and the crowd was entranced.

I found it amusing that their song encore began with “The World Ender,” which repeats the phrase “back from the dead” multiple times. They ended the show with “Not Dead Yet,” a reminder to live life to the fullest. It was like they told a whole life’s story in the main act, they had died, and then they revived to bring back a few last moments of musical madness.

Lord Huron played a beautiful blend of music from nearly all of their albums, and for fans who have listened to their music for years must have felt that they were traveling back in time. Overall, Lord Huron’s Cosmic Selector Tour helped the crowd forget about the real world for a little while.