Who Can It Be Now? At Grossinger, Thursday, Around 7
Some concert bills are assembled by algorithm. This one feels assembled by a very specific person who was extremely fun at parties circa 1994 and has excellent taste. On Thursday, August 6 at 7 p.m., Grossinger Motors Arena hosts Men At Work and Toad the Wet Sprocket, with Shonen Knife opening — and it is, without much competition, the marquee arena show of BloNo's entire late-summer window.
Let's just savor the shape of this thing. Men At Work: the Australian institution behind "Down Under" and "Who Can It Be Now?", songs so thoroughly embedded in the collective skull that you are, right now, hearing the flute riff whether you wanted to or not. Toad the Wet Sprocket: the '90s alt-radio mainstays whose "All I Want" and "Walk on the Water" defined a very particular flavor of jangly, earnest, cardigan-adjacent guitar rock. And opening the whole affair, Shonen Knife — the beloved Osaka pop-punk trio, patron saints of joyful three-chord noise, a band Kurt Cobain famously adored. That is not a lineup. That is a mixtape someone made you in three different decades.
The genius of this bill is that it refuses to pick a lane. Men At Work and Toad are, on paper, a tidy nostalgia double-header — two acts whose catalogs your local classic-hits and '90s-alt stations have been quietly propping up for years. Perfectly reasonable. Slot Shonen Knife into the opening spot, though, and the whole night tilts sideways in the best way. You arrive expecting a comfortable singalong and get ambushed by a burst of gleeful Japanese pop-punk about, historically,. It's a palate-cleanser you didn't order and will be glad you got.
Here's why it matters for the room it's in. Grossinger Motors Arena is the top of BloNo's food chain — the roughly 7,000-seat building that lands the biggest touring names, with a 2026 calendar that also includes the Goo Goo Dolls, Keith Sweat & Ginuwine, and, well, this. The arena's job is to import the acts that can fill a hockey-sized barn, and a triple bill of this pedigree is exactly the kind of booking that justifies having a building this size in a metro this size. You don't get Men At Work stopping in Bloomington without a room that can hold the crowd, and you don't sustain a room like Grossinger without bills people actually want to leave the house for.
And people should leave the house for this one. There's a low-stakes joy to a show where the singles are guaranteed and the deep cuts are a bonus — nobody's here to be challenged, everybody's here to sing "It's Not Enough" and "Overkill" at a volume their teenagers would find deeply embarrassing. Bring the teenagers anyway. Let them witness three eras of pop-craft in a single evening, and let Shonen Knife blow the doors off the openers-are-skippable myth while you're all still finding your seats.
Doors and set times being what they are, the practical advice is simple: get there for 7, get there for Shonen Knife, and do not be the person strolling in during the second song of Toad the Wet Sprocket's set. This is a bill that rewards the early arrival and punishes the fashionably late. Thursday. Grossinger. A flute riff, a jangle, and a burst of Osaka pop-punk. Who can it be now? It can be you, in the good seats, on time.
Sources: Grossinger Motors Arena — Events & Calendar