Austin: The Mavericks at ACL Live

The Mavericks bring their genre-blurring mix of country, rock and roll, and Latin rhythm to ACL Live at the Moody Theater in Austin on Friday, August 7, with tickets starting at $39. The show lands as part of the band’s “Music Lives On” tour, a run shaped by a loss the group is still absorbing: longtime frontman Raul Malo died in December 2025 after a long illness, and the surviving lineup — drummer Paul Deakin, guitarist Eddie Perez, keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden and returning bassist Robert Reynolds — is carrying the catalog forward with a rotating cast of guest vocalists standing in on lead.

Formed in Miami in 1989, The Mavericks built their following on Malo’s operatic tenor and a sound that never sat still, sliding from honky-tonk shuffles to bolero ballads to horn-driven Tejano without losing the thread that tied it together. The band picked up two Grammy Awards along the way, plus a stack of CMA and Americana Music Award nominations, and their most recent studio album, 2024’s Moon & Stars, leaned into the same restlessness that’s defined them for three and a half decades.

ACL Live at the Moody Theater has hosted plenty of tribute nights and full-circle moments since it opened downtown in 2011, and this one carries extra weight. The 2,750-seat room’s tight sightlines and warm acoustics suit a band built around vocal interplay and horn charts, and Austin crowds — many of whom caught The Mavericks at their commercial peak in the mid-1990s — are likely to treat the night as part wake, part party.

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The band’s catalog runs from their 1994 breakout What a Crying Shame through 2020’s Spanish-language En Español, and Malo’s death has prompted a wider reckoning with what he built: a body of work that made room for pedal steel and mariachi horns inside the same three minutes. Fans who want more of what this venue does particularly well should look back at Bob Schneider’s annual Valentine’s Day stand at ACL Live, another night built around an outsized vocal personality and a horn section that doesn’t quit.

Doors at ACL Live typically open around 7 p.m. for an 8 p.m. show. Parking is available in the attached garages off Willie Nelson Boulevard, and the venue sits an easy walk from Second Street’s restaurant row for dinner beforehand.