THE THE have announced four major UK headline concerts for September 2024, their first since the hugely successful The Comeback Special world tour in 2018. The UK run includes a show at London’s historic Alexandra Palace. The band will also head out globally next year on their Ensouled world tour, full details of which will be announced shortly.
The 2018 shows marked the first time THE THE had played live in 16 years and included a trio of London shows at The Royal Albert Hall, Brixton Academy and The Troxy – all of which sold out in minutes – followed by a world tour encompassing venues in Europe, North America and Australia. The live show at The Royal Albert Hall was also made available as the eponymous The Comeback Special, a multi-format release which included a double live album, art book and a Tim Pope-directed concert film.
The band’s music inhabits a genre of its own: it is music of long shadows, high hopes, channelled anger, feverish passions and sweetly disturbing poignancy. It is pop and rock, blues and folk, soul and polemic. It spans alienated electronics to twisted cinematic soundtracks, guitar tumbling swing to crimson ballads, rants and prayers to diaries and hymns.
Having released six studio albums since forming in 1979, THE THE are one of the country’s most cherished bands. Always unpredictable, recent years have seen Matt and THE THE make diversions into film soundtracks on Hyena, Tony, Muscle and Moonbug; in 2018 a beautiful and moving 84-minute film, The Inertia Variations and biography; and Long Shadows, High Hopes: The Life and Times of Matt Johnson & THE THE
BUY ENSOULED WORLD TOUR TICKETS
Watch ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’ from The Comeback Special tour HERE
PRAISE FOR THE 2018 SHOWS:
“When you combine the right songs with the right musicians and an audience that never forgot, it’s like coming home.”
– Pete Paphides
“Part comeback, part requiem, all extraordinary”
– James Hall, The Telegraph
“Johnson’s great achievement is to have made a body of work that is completely original, yet flows smoothly into the slipstream of accessible, socially conscious alternative rock.”
– Will Hodgkinson, The Times
“Johnson retains a gravel-voiced gravitas, and his band are taut and kinetic on barbed missiles such as ‘Armageddon Days (are here again)’… THE THE really shouldn’t leave it 16 years until their next tour.”
– Ian Gittins, The Guardian
“THE THE sound very much like a band revitalized… Johnson may not have sung publicly for years, but there’s little doubt he’s been practising his scales in private.”
– Jeremy Allen, The Independent
Photograph by Prudence Upton