3 Days in the Life of Rosegarden Funeral Party on Their Euro Tour

Dallas's Rosegarden Funeral Party, a post-punk band fronted by Leah Lane, announced in July that they would end the summer of 2025 with the second leg of their European/UK tour. The first part began in May and wrapped in June. The second part started on Aug. 29 in Prague and moved through Eastern Europe, hitting cities such as Bratislava, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, Augsburg, Deutzen and Hamburg.

I dropped in on three of their shows and brought back a diary of the life of a young band hitting cool destinations while on the road. These pictures take you behind the scenes of Rosegarden Funeral Party's tour, as they let me hang out with them for a few days.   At the shows, there is no introduction. There is never an introduction. Just three quick taps of a wooden stick on the metal edge of Dean Adams' snare drum to set the tempo and align that first power cord of Lane’s guitar to the start of the background track. And they always start with a banger, designed to pull the folks who have been out getting a drink or having a smoke back to the stage. It works every time.

I talked to the fans at the shows in Bratislava, Budapest and Vienna. While most had heard Rosegarden Funeral Party’s music, none of them had ever seen the band play live. In addition to the tour, the band's newest single, "Blame and Burden," has dropped and most of the audience is already familiar with the track. It's an encouraging sign. 
Rosegarden Funeral Party is also billed as a goth band, and while that might be true in some respects, what you get on stage has the unmistakable Texas edge that comes from honing your craft in Deep Ellum venues like Three Links and Trees. The audience seems both surprised and mesmerized in equal measure. Every night, at the end of the first song, Lane will tell the audience two things: “Hi, we are Rosegarden Funeral Party, and we’re from Dallas, Texas.” Then they play another banger.

Based on our statistically random polling of the audience (i.e., asking people we met at the show), most of them know as much about Texas as we know about Slovakia. If you asked those people to draw a picture of our state, it would probably include guns, cows with big horns and MAGA hats.

Before the last two songs, Lane will deliver another two-part message: “Be kind to each other” and “We love you.” It’s a message that is included in every Rosegarden Funeral Party set that has ever been performed, from Dallas to Krakow, and if you have seen the band play, you have heard it spoken before. And if you are thinking that this sounds trite or naive, just know that it is spoken with conviction, and it’s changing people’s perception of our home state and our city. Is it the message you would get from every Texas band? No. Does it erase all the other facts and myths about Texas? Also no. But it does add depth and context to people’s ideas about the big, complex place we call home. I know this because fans will talk to the band after the show and tell them exactly that.
The audience reaction to seeing Rosegarden Funeral Party play live for a foreign audience is one of the things I was most interested in when I arranged to drop in on part of their tour. I wanted to see with my own eyes how they would be received by a brand new group seeing them play live for the first time.

For Rosegarden Funeral Party, tours are arranged around larger festivals where they have been invited to play. This year, they kicked off in Prague, at the Prague Gothic Treffen and then bounced down the Iron Curtain before heading to the Nocturnal Culture Night Festival in Germany. The festivals are larger affairs. They bring in larger crowds, attracted to any number of the bands on stage, and Rosegarden Funeral Party is just part of the larger appeal. In between those bigger events, the band will fill the days with smaller shows where they are the headliners.

This year, those smaller club shows were in Krakow, Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna and Hamburg. Although each of the club shows has an opening band, attendance is primarily dependent on Rosegarden Funeral Party and local promotional efforts. In the captions for the pictures, I tried to give you a sense of what this is like for the band. Each club is different, and in each of the countries where I saw the band, the locals speak a different language. The one constant was that they were there to see Rosegarden Funeral Party.

Lane says one other thing before the end of every show. After thanking them for making the band feel so welcome, she notes that she and Adams will be hanging around at the merch table, and “would love to meet every single one of you.” And it seemed to me they actually did meet every single one of the fans in attendance, or pretty darn close. In Budapest, the bar was closed, the floors had been swept and the garbage taken out, and there were still a dozen people in line to get a vinyl LP, take a picture or to thank them for coming to their town.

Below, Rosegarden Funeral Party takes us through three days in a life on tour.

Bratislava, Slovakia

Žalár
Aug. 30

Budapest, Hungary

A38 Club
Sept. 3

Vienna, Austria

Chelsea
Sept. 4