Ayra Starr announced the Starrgirl World Tour today, a day after her halftime set at NFL London, and its biggest rooms are on the other side of the Channel. The 20-city run peaks at the 8,400-capacity Forest National in Brussels and the 6,300-capacity Zénith in Paris. London, where she played yesterday, gets the 2,000-capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
Three years ago, those cities sat close together. On 21: The World Tour, her first headline run, she played KOKO in London on Nov 13, 2023, the Bataclan in Paris nine days later, and the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on Nov 28. KOKO holds about 1,500, the Bataclan about 1,700, the AB 2,000. Next year her Paris room is nearly four times that size and her Brussels room more than four. London grows by 500.
The French-speaking side of her life explains some of it. Ayra was born in Cotonou, grew up between there and Lagos, and speaks French. She spent a good part of the Starrgirl rollout in Paris: a Deezer listening session for the album, a stop at Skyrock, a guest verse from the French-Congolese singer Theodora on “Ms. Paper,” and a surprise walk-on at Aya Nakamura’s Stade de France concert in late May.
The Zénith has become the Paris room for her generation. Tyla plays it tonight on her A*POP tour. Omah Lay has it on Nov 13. Ayra’s night there is Jan 24.
This is also the first time since 2023 that she is selling her own tour. She never took The Year I Turned 21 out as a headliner. In 2024 she opened for Chris Brown across 26 North American cities on the 11:11 Tour, and she was a support act on Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres run. North America grows on Starrgirl too, from the 1,350-capacity Phoenix in Toronto in 2023 to the 2,500-capacity HISTORY on Mar 29, but the rooms there stay theatre-sized. Outside Paris and Brussels, nothing on the routing holds much more than 3,000.
The run opens Jan 20 in Cologne and closes Apr 14 in San Francisco. Presales start tomorrow in North America and Oct 14 in Europe, ahead of general sale on Oct 16 through Live Nation.
Before any of that, the tour announcement promises “a special return to Africa” to close out this year, with details “announced soon.” For now, the home shows are the one part of the plan with no room size attached.