Two Friends will ring in 2027 at Seminole Hard Rock Tampa

The Los Angeles duo behind the Big Bootie Mix series headlines New Year's Eve, Thursday, Dec. 31, in the 7,000-capacity event center at the casino.

Picture the last ten seconds of 2026 in a 7,000-person room off I-4, and the soundtrack is a mashup nobody saw coming. That is roughly the pitch for Tampa's newest New Year's Eve option.

Two Friends play Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Tampa on Thursday, Dec. 31, with the show starting at 9 p.m. The booking was announced Nov. 2 and is billed on Ticketmaster as a New Year's celebration featuring the duo. The room holds 7,000, which makes this one of the larger ticketed countdowns in the Bay area this year.

If the name does not ring a bell, the mixes might. Two Friends is Matt Halper and Eli Sones, best friends from Los Angeles who met in seventh grade at Brentwood School and started making music together as a duo in their senior year, 2011, according to their Wikipedia entry). Their sound folds dance, pop, hip-hop and alternative rock into one set, and they are best known for the hour-long Big Bootie Mix series, which has turned into a franchise of its own.

The newest installment, Big Bootie Mix Volume 27, landed on SoundCloud on May 18, 2026. The duo premiered it in Chicago at a new edition of Big Bootie Land, their own festival brand. They teased that return the summer before in style: a Lollapalooza set that ended with 500 drones spelling out the festival's May 2026 date over Grant Park.

A Two Friends set is built for exactly the moment a New Year's crowd is waiting for: the drop, the singalong, the next drop.

That is the key to why this booking works. A Two Friends set is not a slow build of deep cuts. It is a fast-moving run of recognizable hooks, pop choruses and genre jumps, which is exactly what a crowd counting down to midnight wants. The Big Bootie format, stitching dozens of songs into one long ride, translates naturally to a night when half the room is there for the party and the other half is there for the music.

The room helps too. Seminole Hard Rock's event center is a big, flat-floored space that can hold a full production without feeling like an arena, and the casino-hotel setup means the night does not end when the confetti does. For a lot of Tampa and St. Pete partygoers, that convenience is half the appeal: no hunting for a rideshare at 12:30 a.m. on the busiest night of the year for drivers.

Two Friends have spent 2026 playing club and pool dates on top of their own festival, so a holiday booking like this one tends to move quickly once the year-end plans start firming up. If you are building your New Year's around this, grab tickets early through the Ticketmaster link and sort out hotel or a ride home now.

Doors and set times beyond the 9 p.m. start were not posted when this ran, so check your ticket before you head out. Either way, plan on being on the floor well before midnight.

Sources: Two Friends (DJs) - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Big Bootie Mix on SoundCloud (soundcloud.com); Drop The Spotlight: Two Friends deliver an unforgettable Lollapalooza set with a 500-drone finale (dropthespotlight.com); LIV Miami: Two Friends w. Arden Jones (livnightclub.com); Ticketmaster: NYE Celebration featuring Two Friends (ticketmaster.evyy.net); JamBase listing (jambase.com)