J. Cole plays The O2 arena on 19 and 20 October and 2 November 2026, his first solo headline tour in five years.
Jermaine Cole was born on an American army base in Frankfurt in 1985, raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and moved to New York to read communications at St John’s while making beats. He waited outside Jay-Z’s office with a demo and was turned away; Roc Nation signed him anyway in 2009, as its first artist. Every album since has gone platinum, and 2014 Forest Hills Drive did it without a single guest feature, which for a mainstream rap record was close to a provocation.
He has run his own label, Dreamville, for most of that time, and the thing people say about him is that he is a writer first: long verses, ordinary lives, an unfashionable seriousness. The Fall Off has been announced, delayed and rumoured for the better part of a decade and finally came out in February 2026. Dreamville ran its own festival in North Carolina for years and its compilation records went platinum, which is an unusual amount to have built alongside the machine that signed him.
The Fall-Off Tour is his first solo headline run in five years and his first full global tour in nearly ten. He takes The O2 arena on Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 October and again on Monday 2 November 2026. Three nights in one room, a fortnight apart, is the shape to read.