At a quarter to eight the field was already full enough that the people arriving had to go up rather than in, and the red smoke the production uses before the first downbeat had started drifting over the lower bowl. Foo Fighters went on at eight and opened with "All My Life", which is the most obvious possible choice and worked for exactly that reason — a stadium that has waited forty minutes wants recognition, not a deep cut.
Three bands, descending in volume and ascending in age. Mannequin Pussy played first to a field that was maybe a third full, which is the hardest slot in live music, and played as though it were not. Queens of the Stone Age followed and did the thing they have done for twenty-five years, which is to make a very large room feel slightly unwell.
Tickets ran fifty dollars for the upper deck and up past six hundred for the floor packages, with a tier at a hundred and another at three. Sixty thousand people. Sold out by the week of the show.
What The Openers Got
Mannequin Pussy's set was the most interesting eleven minutes of the night, partly because eleven minutes is roughly what a stadium opener gets and partly because they treated the gap between their audience and that stage as a problem to be attacked rather than apologised for. A three-piece on a stage built for a nine-piece production is an absurd physical proposition. They leaned into the absurdity.
Queens of the Stone Age do not play loud so much as play dense — the guitars sit in a band of frequency that makes the air feel thicker than it was. In a stadium that mostly flattens everything, their set came through with more low-mid intact than anybody else's.
Opening of the set, August 8
The Foos played the catalogue. "The Pretender" landed the way it always lands, which is as a reliable piece of engineering rather than a surprise. "Times Like These" got the full sixty-thousand-voice treatment and was better for the volume, which is not true of most of their ballads.
Stadium wide, from the upper stands
From the postSaw tha foo fightas w/ @bigmoplaysmusic in chicago. It was alright i guess, totally didnt fundamentally change the way i see live shows
A Bowl That Fights You
Soldier Field is a 1924 colonnade with a stadium dropped inside it, and the acoustic consequence is that sound escapes upward and the back of the field hears everything a beat late unless the production spends real money on delay. This one did. The lake was close enough to feel on the skin by eleven, which at a Soldier Field show is the only reliable sign of how late it has got.
The merch tables were out of the tour shirt in the 2XL and 3XL sizes by the time the headliner went on, which is a small fact that says something about who actually turned up: a crowd that has been coming to see this band for twenty-eight years and has aged accordingly. The show was built for them and did not condescend to them.
Late in the headline set
From the postQueens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters, live in Chicago, 8/8/26 @queensofthestoneage @betterlivingthroughqotsa
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Two photographers were credited across the fan galleries by name, Andi K Taylor and Sean Cox, which is more credit than most stadium shows generate. Sixty thousand people, one stage, nobody left early.
Cover image: Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters at Soldier Field Saturday, Aug. 8, 2026, in Chicago. (Vincent D. Johnson/for the Chicago Tribune)