Dexys' LOVE hits the Top 20 as October gigs near

The first studio album under the band name since 1985 is already shaping the autumn calendar — Brighton and the opening Hackney Empire night sold out, tickets thinning elsewhere.

Dexys Midnight Runners have returned to the UK Top 20 with LOVE, the album released on 4 September 2026 through Heavenly Recordings. The record entered the chart in mid-September, giving the Birmingham band's first new studio album under the original name a high-profile berth only days after it reached shops and streams.

It is the first full studio set issued as Dexys Midnight Runners since Don't Stand Me Down in 1985. Produced by David Holmes, LOVE draws on themes from frontman Kevin Rowland's autobiography. Rowland has described the record as tying up loose ends, and the project has been framed as a possible final chapter in the band's long journey. Lead-in singles included My Life In England Pt.1 and You've Got The Love.

Soul rebels, then and now

Dexys Midnight Runners emerged from Birmingham as an English pop-rock band with a pronounced soul streak, and they became one of the defining commercial forces of the early to mid-1980s. They are still best known in Britain for Geno and Come On Eileen, both of which reached No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart, and for six further top-20 singles. Come On Eileen also topped the US Billboard Hot 100; heavy MTV rotation tied the group to the Second British Invasion of that decade.

The studio sequence that built that reputation began with Searching For the Young Soul Rebels in 1980, followed by Too Rye Ay in 1982 and Don't Stand Me Down three years later. The catalogue has never gone quiet — session releases, live documents and a 2022 revisiting of Too-Rye-Ay under the title Too-Rye-Ay (As It Should Have Sounded) kept the work in circulation — but a new album carrying the original band name had not appeared for more than forty years. LOVE closes that gap. The decision to issue it as Dexys Midnight Runners rather than under the shortened Dexys moniker Rowland has used in later years underlines the sense of a circle being drawn.

Holmes's production places the new songs in a contemporary frame without discarding the brass-and-voice identity that made the early singles unmistakable. For listeners who came in on Come On Eileen or who discovered the band through the 1980s albums, the chart placing is less a surprise than a confirmation that the material still travels. For those who have followed Rowland through the intermittent returns and reissues of the intervening decades, it is the first time in a generation that a fresh Dexys Midnight Runners studio record has been tested against the weekly chart.

October dates already under pressure

A UK and European tour follows in October 2026. The shows at Brighton Dome and the first night at London's Hackney Empire — 27 and 28 October — have sold out. Tickets are running low for the second London date and Cambridge Corn Exchange. Further dates across the UK and Europe complete the run; capacity on the remaining London and Cambridge shows will decide how quickly the rest of the itinerary tightens.

The combination of a Top 20 entry and a tour that is already selling fast gives the autumn a clear shape. LOVE is not a catalogue reissue or a live document of an earlier era: it is new work, released under the name that carried Geno and Come On Eileen, and it is being taken straight to the stage. Whether it proves to be the last studio chapter, as Rowland's own remarks allow, will only be settled by what follows. For now the facts are simpler. The album is out, it has reached the Top 20, and the October gigs are the immediate next step.

The band announced the chart position and the state of ticket sales via their official channels. The record itself is available on Heavenly Recordings; the tour continues through the rest of the autumn.