Rock Singer Alemeda Brings Her Meow-Powered Sound to Milwaukee's Newest Venue

Alemeda is heading to Milwaukee's Deer District next Tuesday, September 1, to open for label brother Isaiah Rashad at Landmark Credit Union Live, part of a 29-date run that finds the 26-year-old singer treating the tour as her strongest source of career momentum yet. The stop puts her in a brand-new 4,500-capacity room barely six months old, and puts her voice — including a viral meow she tucked into the first ten seconds of one of her songs — in front of an entirely different audience than the one she built online.

Alemeda is the sole opening act on Rashad's tour, dubbed “Lil Sunny's Awful Road Trip,” which was announced in June to support his album “It's Been Awful,” according to The FADER. As OnMilwaukee reports, Rashad is described as Alemeda's label brother and mentor, with the two having been on the same label, Top Dawg Entertainment, for about seven years. Tickets for the September 1 Milwaukee show are on sale now.

A New Room in the Deer District

Landmark Credit Union Live, the venue hosting the show, is an 83,000-square-foot indoor ballroom-style facility that opened in February through a partnership involving Live Nation, FPC Live and Landmark Credit Union, sitting adjacent to Fiserv Forum in the Deer District, per the Deer District. The venue has already made local labor news of its own — the same report notes more than 200 of its hospitality workers secured union representation with the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Organization in May.

For Alemeda, the tour arrives as she works on her debut full-length album, which the OnMilwaukee interview says she plans to release next year with 11 to 13 songs, working with producer Stint. She has described experimenting with rock and pop sounds she grew up listening to, and she sometimes co-writes with Tyler Cole, according to the same interview.

From TikTok Virality to TDE's Third Woman

Alemeda's path to a major-label tour slot started far from arenas. Her independently released 2021 single “Gonna Bleach My Eyebrows” went viral on TikTok and racked up tens of millions of streams, according to Wikipedia. Born Rahema Shifa Alameda on December 13, 1999, in Ethiopia, she was raised between Ethiopia and Phoenix, Arizona, in a conservative Muslim household where music was restricted until she turned 10, the same entry notes.

Her September 2024 joint signing to Top Dawg Entertainment and Warner Records made her only the third female artist ever added to TDE's roster, following SZA in 2013 and Doechii in 2022, as reported by Complex. Since then she has released the garage-punk single “Broken Record” in February and a November 2025 EP, “But What The Hell Do I Know,” which included a collaboration with TDE labelmate Doechii, according to antiMusic. She also completed a festival run in 2025 and previously toured North America as an opening act on indie-pop artist Rachel Chinouriri's “All I Ever Asked For” tour in May of that year, per First Avenue's performer page.

Reclaiming Rock, On Her Own Terms

Alemeda has framed her genre-hopping as a deliberate act, telling OnMilwaukee she aims to reclaim rock as a Black artist and that she supports other Black artists entering diverse genres. She has cited Black rock history broadly along with specific inspirations like Alabama Shakes and Lenny Kravitz. That framing extends to her personal life: in an October 2024 interview, she said she maintains strict adherence to her Muslim principles — avoiding alcohol, drugs and partying — while keeping full creative control over her imagery and music videos, according to Polyester Zine.

Her national profile has been building steadily. In February, Alemeda made her network television debut on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” performing “Happy With You,” then launched her own headlining “But Where The Hell Should I Go” tour, inviting local emerging acts to open via Instagram submissions, the antiMusic report notes. She has also performed with Halsey, per the OnMilwaukee interview, and uses meowing as a vocal warm-up — a quirk that traces back to the meow she included in the first ten seconds of a song, which the interview credits with helping that track go viral.

With the Rashad tour underway and a debut album taking shape, Alemeda's Milwaukee stop functions as something of a proving ground — a chance to win over an arena crowd that may not yet know her TikTok origin story or her label's unusual bet on a genre-blending, faith-guided artist from Phoenix by way of Ethiopia.