Token's 'I'm Leaving Soon' Tour Ends Its Run in Boston. The Marblehead Kid Who Rapped Outside the Middle East Is Coming Home

If you came up on Boston rap YouTube, you remember Token. Kid from Marblehead, rapping on the sidewalk, wordplay so dense you had to run it back. Now he's a grown artist with five albums, and his new tour finishes in Boston: Saturday, Nov. 28, 7 p.m., at Brighton Music Hall on Brighton Avenue, according to Live Nation.

The routing, per Live Nation's tour listing: it opens Nov. 1 at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco, then Reno, Chico, Spokane and Boise, then Minneapolis on Nov. 15, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor and Cleveland's Grog Shop on Nov. 21, before the Brighton date. Clark D is on most of the bill, with Delivery Boys on the early West Coast dates and DJ Lucas listed in Ann Arbor. Boston is the last date Live Nation lists right now.

Quick history for the people who just found him. Token is Benjamin David Goldberg, born Sept. 24, 1998, raised in Marblehead, according to his Wikipedia biography, which draws on a 2017 Boston Globe profile. He started writing raps at 10. The first time he rapped in public, he was 13, outside The Middle East in Cambridge, after a show downstairs, with about 30 people gathered around. He picked the name Token because he felt different from the other emcees, as a white Jewish kid from Marblehead.

The breakout came in October 2015, when he dropped a video of himself rapping while walking through a Marblehead neighborhood for the "No Sucka MCs" contest. It passed 500,000 views in three days, per Wikipedia, and his label's bio says it eventually topped 1 million. A national radio freestyle in 2016 got him called one of the best performances of the year by XXL, according to the album announcement.

From there he did it his way. Mixtapes "Eraser Shavings" (2016) and "Between Somewhere" (2018), the second of which his team says generated more than 100 million streams. In 2020 he started his own label, Never Too Different, and signed a distribution deal with Atlantic Records. Then "Pink Is Better" in 2022, "I'm Not Supposed to Be Here" in June 2025, and "I'm Leaving Soon" on July 24 of this year, released through Never Too Different.

That last album is why the tour has that name, and it's heavier than the title sounds. In the announcement, his team said that while riding the success of the 2025 album, he received "a string of abnormal blood results" and found himself facing his own mortality. Token's words: it "had me wondering: will this moment be leaving soon? And writing this album I was also wondering if I will be leaving soon."

He said it also pushed him out of his shell. "I've always been an introvert. When it comes to my personal life and my career, it's difficult for me to be social," he said. "I felt in this moment right now, before it goes away, it's time to push myself to make new friends and make music that will reach more people than just my current base. It resulted in a long album with bangers, a lot of features, and a lot of words about how long I will be here." The lead singles were "Locomotive" and "Locomotive – Part II."

And he reaches way past Massachusetts now. The announcement says he has passed 6 million monthly listeners and landed sync placements in movies, video games and the Hindi-language film "Dhurandhar: The Revenge," which it calls one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time. Wikipedia lists him on two songs from that soundtrack. He's toured headline runs across North America and Europe, his team says.

Dez's take: Token is one of the rare Massachusetts rappers who built a national fan base without leaving the state's sound behind, and Boston doesn't always claim him the way it should. Ending the tour in an Allston club, back in the same part of the state where the sidewalk video that started it all was shot, is a homecoming, plain and simple, and I'd bet on a hometown crowd that knows every word. The part I'm curious about: an album built on "will I still be here" ending its tour where he started. That's a story you can't write for him.

If you're going: Brighton Music Hall is presented by Citizens, at Brighton Avenue in Allston. Doors and ticket info are on the Live Nation listing.

Unknown: whether more dates get added after Nov. 28.