137K likes, 2,126 comments - livenationaustralia on October 7, 2024: "To get Felix and Bang Chan excited for their return to Australia with @realstraykids this month, we sent some classic Aussie Snack...

Robyn announces The Sexistential Tour, her first major tour since 2019 and biggest headline shows to date, arriving alongside her ecstatic new album Sexistential and a renewed grip on pop’s emotional centre.

Aotearoa roots-reggae favourites Corrella are heading back across the Tasman in 2027, this time bringing Boston outfit The Elovaters along for a summer run through Australia. The co-headline tour kicks off at Geelong’s Wool Exchange on January 24 before rolling through Wollongong, Newcastle, Burleigh, the Sunshine Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Fremantle. It wraps up at The River in Margaret River on February 7. Corrella arrive with serious momentum behind them. The band’s breakthrough ‘Blue Eyed Māori’ spent more than 50 weeks at number one on the Official NZ Top 20 Singles chart, while debut album Road From 26 and 2024 follow-up Skeletons established their blend of roots-reggae, funk, soul and pop.

Polish DJ and producer VTSS is heading to Sydney this November, bringing her headline show to Plaza Hotel for one night of high-speed electronic music. Born Martyna Maja in Warsaw, VTSS has built her reputation on refusing to stay neatly within techno’s borders. Her sets move rapidly between techno, industrial electronics and harder strains of club music, with sudden shifts in tempo and direction making unpredictability part of the appeal. That approach has helped VTSS become a distinctive presence in contemporary European club culture. Rather than treating genre as a set of rules, she uses it as raw material, pushing between sounds while maintaining the physical momentum required of a dancefloor.

Rising indie artist Sydney Rose will make her Australian live debut in March 2026, performing in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. The Georgia-born songwriter, who first won hearts with intimate YouTube covers, brings her debut album One Sided to the stage for the first time down under.

Kodaline have released ‘Vultures’, the latest single from their fifth and final album ‘We Were Only Young’, due October 2 via Concord. Arriving while the Irish band are in Australia on their Farewell World Tour, the track finds them looking back at the pressures surrounding their career without allowing those memories to weigh the song down. Instead, ‘Vultures’ comes with a buoyant folk-pop bounce, uplifting guitars and rousing percussion. Steve Garrigan approaches the subject with humour, reflecting on those moments when outside expectations and industry noise threatened to become a distraction.

Queens of the Stone Age have spent three decades making the crooked, strange and occasionally sleazy sound irresistible. Now Josh Homme and company are heading somewhere new again with ninth studio album ‘Perfecth’, arriving October 30 via Matador Records and Remote Control Records. The announcement comes with ‘Insignificant Other’, the second taste of the album following ‘Easy Street’, featuring Nikki Lane. Recorded in only two takes, the new track captures Queens playing loose rather than chasing studio perfection, leaving space for the five members to react to each other as the song unfolds.

The legendary Split Enz – featuring Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner, Neil Finn, and Noel Crombie – will reunite for their first tour in nearly 20 years on the Forever Enz Tour through Live Nation, confirmed for May 2026. Antipodean pioneers in make-up and self-designed clothing with a zany form of art rock, and later transitioning to more accessible indie pop maestros, the Enz always were the archetypal quirky rock band, while their mastery of melody and bittersweet melancholy saw some of their biggest global hits such as 'I See Red' (possibly one of the first singles I ever bought) and from the album True Colours (still so listenable today) with the hit 'I Got You'.

It is a cold, rainy Sunday night in Sydney, but inside the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall there is barely a spare seat to be found. Agnes Obel is back in Australia for the first time since her sold-out 2022 tour, and tonight's packed room suggests the intervening years have done little to diminish the pull of her quietly singular music. First, though, comes Peter Gregson. Appearing alone with his cello, the British composer delivers a beautiful opening set that moves between his own compositions and reinterpretations of other artists. The surprise comes at the end when Gregson takes on Charli XCX's 360, reinterpreting one of contemporary pop's most recognisable tracks and finding something entirely different inside it.

Baxter Dury will return to Australia & NZ in 2026 with his Allbarone Tour, bringing his most melodically direct and stripped-back album yet to local stages.

A countdown ticks across the enormous screen at Afterpay Arena as insects crawl through the visuals and roadies get busy building a house onstage. It has a porch and front door and looks as though a piece of rural Vermont has somehow landed in the middle of Sydney. A circular catwalk reaches halfway into the arena, wrapping around a pocket of very lucky fans who are going to have Kahan and his band playing almost on top of them for much of the night. Noah Kahan arrives and launches into American Cars, followed by Doors and All My Love, and the singing starts immediately.

At the Hordern Pavilion, the Pixies remind Sydney why their sound has endured. Sharp, taut, and emotionally charged, their set feels less like a throwback and more like a statement of continued purpose.

There are sailor suits everywhere. Thousands of them. Sydney’s Afterpay Arena looks briefly as though it has been commandeered by a particularly emotional navy, while down the front one guy has gone completely off-script and arrived dressed as a clown. The Coneheads are here, and subtlety is clearly not on tonight’s agenda. Backseat Mafia last caught Conan Gray when he toured Australia in 2024, but this is a very different proposition. The Wishbone World Tour is bigger, stranger and far more theatrical, built around Gray’s fourth album Wishbone and a stage shaped, naturally enough, like an enormous wishbone.

The second Split Enz walk onto the stage at the TikTok Entertainment Centre, the atmosphere feels almost archetypal, like something pulled straight from Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. Thousands of people erupt simultaneously, not just in recognition of songs they know, but in response to something lodged far deeper in Australasian cultural memory. Nearly two decades since their last major reunion, the Forever Enz Tour arrives carrying the weight of nostalgia, but what unfolds tonight never feels trapped in the past. Instead, it feels strangely eternal, as if these songs and these strange, theatrical figures have always existed somewhere just beneath the surface, waiting to reappear.

Sydney Opera House is throwing open the Forecourt again this December, with the first wave of On The Steps 2026 revealing a lineup that jumps gleefully between punk, indie, electronic music, hip-hop, country and metal. The first announcement brings Rise Against, James Blake, DMA’S, Wolf Alice, Dizzee Rascal, Dylan Gossett, Spacey Jane and The Amity Affliction to one of Sydney’s most spectacular outdoor stages, with each artist appearing as part of the summer concert series. It is a deliberately broad first hand. Rise Against bring decades of politically charged punk rock, while The Amity Affliction represent the considerably heavier end of the equation.

Kodaline are back in Sydney tonight, but this time everyone in the room knows there will not be another tour waiting somewhere down the road. After more than a decade under the Kodaline name, the Irish band are saying goodbye, and Sydney is part of that long final lap. Before they arrive, Isobel Knight has the job of welcoming a steadily filling Enmore. Accompanied by Esther Lukin on violin, the Sydney singer-songwriter keeps things beautifully simple, her acoustic guitar and voice given room alongside the violin. Then comes Kodaline, and the significance of seeing Steve Garrigan, Vincent May, Mark Prendergast and Jason Boland together on an Australian stage for the final time is impossible to ignore.

Mumford & Sons have added an exclusive Brisbane date to their 2026 Prizefighter Tour, expanding their Australia and New Zealand return to five arena shows as anticipation builds for their forthcoming sixth album.

The Forever Enz Tour is gathering pace, with Split Enz announcing additional New Zealand dates and a brand new Brisbane show in response to growing demand. What began as a tightly mapped run has quickly expanded into something more fluid, a tour stretching to meet its audience across both sides of the Tasman, with Hamilton and Christchurch added alongside an extended Australian leg. The expanded run sees the band, featuring Tim Finn, Neil Finn, Eddie Rayner andNoel Crombie, deepen their return across both sides of the Tasman.

Lady Gaga’s first Sydney show in over a decade erupts into a colossal, stadium-shaking spectacle, as 70,000 Monsters witness The MAYHEM Ball in full surreal, electrifying force — a career-spanning triumph from pop’s most fearless performer.

Rising star F3miii is heading to Australia for the first time this December, announcing headline shows in Melbourne and Sydney as his international breakthrough continues to gather pace. The Nigerian-Irish singer-songwriter arrives following the rapid ascent of ‘Noble’, the alternative R&B track that turned a viral moment into something considerably bigger. Released in December 2025, the song folds electronic production into a soulful, cinematic arrangement, introducing F3miii to an audience far beyond his home turf. By the end of April, the official ‘Noble’ sound had appeared in more than 

Clementine Douglas is stepping out from behind some of dance music’s biggest records and into the headline spot, with the British singer, songwriter and producer set to return to Australia this September for her first-ever headline tour. The BRIT Award-winning artist will play shows in Sydney and Melbourne, bringing a voice Australian dance audiences may already know particularly well. Douglas has become an increasingly prominent presence in electronic music through collaborations with artists including Dom Dolla, Calvin Harris and David Guetta, building a career that places songwriting and vocals at the centre of the dancefloor.

Twenty-five years after first emerging from Melbourne's south-east with a sound that would conquer radio stations and festival stages around the world, Jet are proving there's still plenty of fuel left in the tank. Following a successful run through regional Australia earlier this year, the band have announced a second leg of their Rumblin' Regional Revue Tour, taking in 11 centres across the country this October and November. Beginning in Canberra before rolling through Wollongong, Erina, Hobart, Forth, Toowoomba, Coolum Beach, the Gold Coast, Traralgon and Ballarat, the tour will conclude at Frankston's Pier Bandroom, bringing one of Australian rock's most enduring acts back to audiences beyond the major capitals.