LIVE REVIEW + PHOTOS: John Summit in Boston, MA (10.29.26)
American EDM artist John Summit brought the CTRL ESCAPE Arena Tour to a sold-out TD Garden on October 29th, with support from Alok and Jackie Hollander. This is the first arena run of his career, and the Chicago native is using it to tell his own story. John Summit’s sophomore album, CTRL ESCAPE, arrived on April 15th, Tax Day, a deliberate wink from a former CPA who spent his early twenties auditing at Ernst & Young before trading the spreadsheets for turntables.
That past was a common thread running through the whole night. The album is a love letter to leaving the corporate grind behind, and the show carried that idea onto the stage with production built around the office-escape concept and a scale fit for arenas: dancers, lasers, pyro, and a wall of light that made TD Garden feel more like the main stage at Tomorrowland than the home of the Bruins and Celtics.
John Summit slid between house, EDM, and dubstep, working his own hits in with remixes of Sage the Gemini’s “Gas Pedal,” Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” and Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been.” The set was packed with songs everyone knew, flipped in ways nobody expected.
Halfway through, he left the stage entirely. A secondary DJ setup sat in the middle of the crowd, allowing Summit to spend part of the night surrounded by the people who came to see him before returning to the main stage to close out the show. It was a fitting move from an artist who knows what it’s like to be on the other side of the barricade.
When the lights go out and John Summit steps on the stage, the office disappears, the spreadsheets fade, and for a few hours, everyone in the room is free.
Check out John Summit’s latest album, CTRL ESCAPE – HERE.
Photos – John Summit at TD Garden in Boston, MA on October 29th:
