LCD Soundsystem singer James Murphy paused two songs into the band’s set at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday to welcome the crowd to the second of two nights at the historic amphitheater.

“Oh, hi, hello, everyone,” Murphy said at the finish of “Tonite.” “This is a very special night – we like this venue very much; we’ve played here a lot.”

Normally, he continued, the band prefers to play places without seats, the better for fans to dance to LCD Soundsystem‘s relentless dance-rock grooves. But at the Bowl, people rose from the box seats and benches anyway to get their groove on all night long.

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Britpop band Pulp with singer Jarvis Cocker performs at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday, Sept. 26, 2025 on the second of two nights co-headlining there with LCD Soundsystem. (Photo by Randall Michelson/Live Nation-Hewitt Silva)

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An hour earlier, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, which played the Hollywood Bowl for the first time this week as co-headliners with LCD Soundsystem, took a beat of his own to admire the view from the stage.

“This might be the last time we play the Hollywood Bowl, so we want to get a good look at you,” Cocker said as he caught his breath at the end of Pulp’s “Do You Remember the First Time?”

The two bands might not seem to have many obvious similarities, but dig a little deeper and you find a shared kinship in music that makes you move your booty and your brain. The rhythms and beats are irresistible. The lyrics tell stories of people doing their best to get by.

It’s dance rock for artists, art rock for dancers, and if you looked around on Friday when the lights flashed into the crowd, waves of people were on their feet and moving nonstop.

LCD Soundsystem opened with “Tribulations,” the fuzzy synthesizers and rolling bass and drum beats flowing beneath Murphy’s vocals. “Tonite” followed, and while Jarvis Cocker of Pulp is rightly celebrated as a particularly literate songwriter – we’ll get to him in a moment – Murphy’s a terrific storyteller too, as in this song.

The set, which included 11 songs over 90 minutes, only repeated three songs that LCD Soundsystem had played the night before. In fact, the first five songs were new picks for Friday, with tunes such as “On Repeat” and “Yeah” all giving fans who might have been at both nights a fresh start to the show.

“Someone Great” was the first repeat from Thursday for good reason – it’s one of the band’s most moving songs, a slower number to match the melancholy tone of Murphy’s lyrics, which go through his real-life feelings of loss and grief at the death of his therapist and end with the mantra-like repetition, “When someone great is gone,” over and over.

“Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s debut single from 2002, is another wordy groove, an ironic expression of Murphy’s sense that his self-aware coolness is slipping as other cool-finders slip past him.

The final run of the set focused firmly on the band’s best-loved numbers, with “Dance Yrself Clean,” “New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” and the band’s frequent set-closer “All My Friends” taking the audience to a cathartic finish, the lights turned toward the audience, which rose and fell in waves of dancing.

Tucked into the middle of those last songs was something special, the debut live performance of LCD Soundsystem’s 2018 cover of Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.” Pulp joined LCD for the song, with Cocker and LCD Soundsystem keyboardist Nancy Whang sharing the vocals.

In Pulp’s opening set, the English band thrilled fans who don’t get a lot of chances to see them in the United States. Prior to 2024, Pulp hadn’t played here in a dozen years, and while they’re considered one of the iconic bands of Britpop along with bands such as Oasis and Blur, their impact on U.S. airwaves and music venues has always been much more limited.

Pulp opened with “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” and “Disco 2000,” with Cocker a live wire on stage, his gangly frame all askew angles, dragging his microphone cord around the stage, banging on a marching band bass drum, and otherwise captivating the audience.

The core band of Cocker, keyboardist Candida Doyle, drummer Nick Banks and guitarist Mark Webber have all been together since the mid-’80s except for Webber who joined in the early ’90s. Four touring musicians flesh out the sound with percussion, violin, bass, guitars and more, making a song almost as big as LCD Soundsystem’s but with more traditional rock instruments and fewer electronics.

“This is Hardcore” opened with Cocker lounging in an armchair beneath a massive, ornate chandelier, his microphone slung over his shoulder, until the band had the song well underway and he descended to sing at the front of the stage.

Cocker, a particularly chatty frontman, delivered brief segues between most of the songs.

“You’ve been at Disco 2025 all night long and now you can’t get to sleep as the sun comes through the curtains,” he said by way of introducing “Sunrise.” “What am I going to do, oh!”

Or for “Babies”: “This song gives you kind of an impression of where some of us come from,” he offered.

Their signature song, “Common People,” closed out their 75-minute set, again Cocker singing its song-story lyrics as the band blazed behind him, finally ending with the repeated chorus – “I wanna live with common people like you” – sung over and over by the singer and the fans to the finish of the set, the night, and Pulp’s North American tour.

Originally Published: September 27, 2025 at 12:54 PM PDT