If you haven’t caught Giovannie & The Hired Guns live yet, Tuesday, April 28 at Empire Live in Albany is a good time to fix that. Tuesday night shows in smaller rooms have a way of delivering — less posturing, more music, and an audience that actually showed up for the set.
The five-piece out of Stephenville, Texas formed in 2015 and spent years grinding honky-tonks before radio caught up to them. Their breakout came with “Ramon Ayala,” a number-one country radio hit that pulled in an audience nobody quite predicted: cowboys, metalheads, punk fans, and everyone in between. Their 2022 album Tejano Punk Boyz tells you everything you need to know about the sound — Red Dirt country running headfirst into alt-metal, with Latin pop and Americana woven through. It doesn’t sound like it should work until you hear it loud. Their latest single, “I HATE ME TOO,” dropped in June 2025, and by all accounts the live show has only gotten sharper since.
Support comes from The Lacs, a hick hop duo out of Baxley, Georgia who blend Southern hip-hop with country instrumentation and rural themes. A fitting warmup for the kind of genre-blurring night the Hired Guns deliver.
Empire Live is at 93 N. Pearl Street in downtown Albany — one of the more consistent rooms in the Albany/Capital District for catching touring acts before they move to bigger stages. Doors open at 7:00 PM with the show at 8:00 PM. Tuesday evening downtown tends to be forgiving on parking — arriving around doors gives you time to settle in before The Lacs kick things off.
Tickets are $27.50–$30. Get your tickets here — this one is worth the Tuesday night drive.