Radiohead Announce 21 Concerts for 2027. They Will Not Return to Europe

Radiohead is returning to the stage, but Europe and America won't see them next year. The band announced twenty-one concerts for 2027, which it will perform exclusively in Australia and Japan. At the same time, it warned that no additional dates will be added for next year — though it hopes to "play more concerts elsewhere in the future". SPIN ↗

The series will begin on May 3rd at the RAC Arena in Perth, where the band will perform four nights (May 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th). This is followed by six concerts at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena (May 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 19th and 20th) and another six at Sydney's Afterpay Arena (May 25th, 26th, 28th, 29th and 31st and June 1st). After sixteen Australian nights, Radiohead will move to Japan, where they will perform at GMO Arena Saitama on June 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th and 13th, 2027. Rolling Stone Deutschland ↗

Instead of a classic tour across many cities, the band is performing multiple nights in the same venue. They used the same principle during their European return in 2025, when for example they performed four concerts at Unipol Arena in Casalecchio di Reno near Bologna. OndaRock ↗

Guitarist Ed O'Brien already hinted at this in March this year. "We'll do it so that we visit a different continent each year and play twenty concerts a year. No more, no less," he said at the time — while urging fans to take it with reservation. The reason is more artistic than organizational, according to him: "I don't think we'll play more than twenty concerts. Because we can't: these songs are too powerful. Last year's concerts were really emotional. By the end you were exhausted." He added: "We want to give absolutely everything every night. We never want it to look like we're coasting or that we're forcing ourselves to continue without energy. We're not kids anymore." OndaRock ↗

Both markets had been waiting a long time. In Japan, Radiohead last performed as headliners in 2008, then appeared at Summer Sonic festival there in 2016. In Australia, the band hadn't played since November 2012. The new dates follow the European run in November and December 2025, when Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway returned to the stage after a seven-year break; during twenty concerts they then played 45 different songs. SPIN ↗ 2026 has so far remained without a single performance. OndaRock ↗

Beware of the sales method: tickets cannot be purchased directly. The band introduced a registration system designed to limit bots and resellers, and registration for Australian concerts is open for only three days — from Monday, September 7th to Thursday, September 10th. On Friday, September 11th, registered users will receive emails informing them whether they received an unlock code, and the actual sale will launch on Tuesday, September 15th at 7:00 local time. One registration entitles you to purchase a maximum of four tickets and the applicant also indicates which venues would suit them. The order of registration doesn't matter — according to the band, all registered users will be treated equally. radiohead.com ↗

The question of a new album remains open. Radiohead hasn't released a studio album since "A Moon Shaped Pool", which came out in May 2016 — by 2027 the break will exceed ten years. Jonny Greenwood said in a recent interview that he doesn't know whether a Radiohead album will even be created; the places where new music could be created are often the same ones where band members spend their creative energy on parallel projects — Yorke and Greenwood, for example, in The Smile. OndaRock ↗

The band's activity hasn't stopped this year, it has just moved off the stage. In April at Coachella, the installation Motion Picture House featuring KID A MNESIA debuted, placed in a specially built underground bunker, which then traveled to Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco. It transformed the artistic side, studio artifacts and music of the albums "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" into a physical audiovisual experience, centered on a 75-minute film. It is from these two albums that "Idioteque" and "Pyramid Song" come — songs that originated in a period when the band most clearly moved away from the guitar rock that had previously made them famous with "Creep" and "Karma Police". SPIN ↗



Illustrative photo: Radiohead on the European run at Berlin's Uber Arena, 2025. Photo: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0