The Stews bring their Southern-fried indie rock to The Lyric Oxford next Thursday

The Stews play The Lyric Oxford on Thursday, Nov. 12, with The Back Alley opening, one night before their fall run winds down in Birmingham.

There's a particular sound a Thursday makes on the Square in November: football weekend still a couple of days off, the bars filling up early, and a line forming on Van Buren Avenue for whoever's playing The Lyric. Next week, that's The Stews.

The band plays The Lyric Oxford on Thursday, Nov. 12, with The Back Alley opening. The show starts at 7 p.m., and tickets are through See Tickets via the link on our show page. The Lyric holds about 600, which is a good size for a band like this: big enough for the room to get loud, small enough that you can still see the guitarist's hands from the balcony rail.

Oxford sits near the end of a Southern swing. The Stews play Chapel Hill–Carrboro on Nov. 6 and Asheville on Nov. 7, then come here, then head to Birmingham on Nov. 13 and Charlotte on Nov. 14. If you've got friends in Birmingham who can't make the drive, they get their own shot the next night.

The Stews have built their following the slow way, on the road and through two full-length records. Their debut, What Was, came out in 2022, and the follow-up, Chicken Fight, arrived on July 12, 2024. That's still the most recent full-length; nothing new has been announced, so expect a set built on those two records, the songs that have been carrying them through festival fields and club rooms for the last couple of years.

And they've played some fields. The band turned up on the Bonnaroo 2026 lineup in Manchester, Tennessee, in June, and they've worked the festival circuit before that, from Okeechobee in Florida to the 30A Songwriters Festival on the Gulf Coast. They've also sold out rooms on their own; Charlottesville's Jefferson Theater billed an earlier Stews date as sold out. The tag on their listing here is simply "indie," but the reputation they've built is as a guitar band that leans into the Southern side of rock and plays it loud.

The room matters too. The Lyric at 1006 Van Buren started life in the early 20th century as a livery stable owned by William Faulkner's family, and was converted into a theater in the 1920s. In 1949 Faulkner walked down from Rowan Oak for the world premiere of MGM's Intruder in the Dust in that building. It went through decades as offices and a health center before a restoration brought it back as a theater; it began operating again on July 3, 2008, and has hosted concerts on the Square ever since.

Faulkner walked down from Rowan Oak for a premiere in this building; next Thursday it's a rock show.

That kind of history is part of why a touring band's Oxford stop tends to feel like an event rather than a Tuesday on the calendar. The crowd is a mix of students, townies and folks who drove in from Tupelo or Batesville, and The Lyric's floor rewards getting there early.

A few practical notes. Seven o'clock is an early start by Square standards, so if you want to catch The Back Alley, plan dinner accordingly. Parking around the Square on a weeknight is easier than on a Saturday, but not by much; walking from home or the dorms is the move if you can. Tickets for a 600-cap room on a band's Southern run don't usually hang around until the day of, so if you're on the fence, decide this weekend.

Then go stand under that old stable roof and let a loud guitar band shake the rafters. Faulkner might not have cared for it. Everyone else will.

Sources: The Stews – First Avenue performer page (first-avenue.com); The Stews – Okeechobee Fest (okeechobeefest.com); The Stews – 30A Songwriters Festival (30asongwritersfestival.com); The Stews – SOLD OUT – Jefferson Theater (jeffersontheater.com); The Stews Concert History (Bonnaroo 2026, fall dates) (concertarchives.org); About – The Lyric Oxford (thelyricoxford.com); Intruder in the Dust – HottyToddy (hottytoddy.com); John Cofield's Oxford And Ole Miss: The Lyric On Van Buren Avenue (hottytoddy.com); Lyric Theater (Oxford, Mississippi) – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); The Stews at The Lyric Oxford – JamBase (jambase.com)