Radiohead lock in Australia and Japan for 2027

Radiohead have set a run of shows across Australia and Japan for May and June 2027, the band’s first announced dates for 2027 and a clear sequel to the European work completed in late 2025. Ticket registration opened immediately through the band’s official site.

The itinerary begins in Western Australia with four nights at Perth’s RAC Arena on 3, 4, 6 and 7 May. Melbourne follows with six nights at Rod Laver Arena between 13 and 20 May. Sydney takes five nights at Afterpay Arena from 25 to 31 May. The tour then crosses to Japan for five nights at Saitama’s GMO Arena between 8 and 13 June. No further cities have been named, and no United Kingdom or European dates appear on the 2027 list.

A continental pattern, not a one-off

Guitarist Ed O’Brien has described the plan as the opening move in a model of roughly twenty concerts a year, with each cycle on a different continent. That framing places the Australia and Japan block directly after the twenty-date European run the band finished in late 2025: not a full world tour in the old sense, but a deliberate, limited run that can be repeated elsewhere without the scale of a multi-year global campaign. For an audience that has grown used to long gaps between Radiohead live chapters, the language matters as much as the calendar. It suggests continuity rather than a sudden reunion spike.

The absence of home-territory dates for 2027 is equally plain. Fans in Britain and Ireland who saw the late-2025 European shows will have to wait for a later cycle if the continental model holds. Nothing in the announcement closes the door on a future European or UK return; it simply does not schedule one for next year.

Where the dates sit in the work

Radiohead formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985 and have held the same five-piece core throughout: Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway. From the mid-1990s they worked with producer Nigel Godrich and cover artist Stanley Donwood, a partnership that shaped the look and sound of the records as much as the songs themselves. Their path from the early 1990s through the experimental turn of the late decade is still the standard reference for how alternative rock widened its palette without abandoning the stage.

The studio catalogue runs from the Drill EP and Pablo Honey in the early 1990s through to A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, with the archival and reconfiguration set KID A MNESIA arriving in 2021. In 2025 the band issued Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009), a live document that sat beside the European dates rather than replacing new studio work. The 2027 shows therefore arrive against a recent pattern of selective live activity and catalogue attention, not a fresh album campaign. That makes the venues and the duration of each residency stand out: multi-night residencies in large arenas, rather than a single-night dash through secondary markets.

Perth, Melbourne and Sydney in sequence give Australian audiences a concentrated stretch of May dates; Saitama then anchors the Japanese leg in one arena over five nights. For a band whose live reputation rests on careful pacing and a deep catalogue, the multi-night format is the practical choice: room to rotate setlists without the pressure of a one-off greatest-hits stop.

What remains open

Registration is live on the official channels. Exact on-sale windows, pricing tiers and any local partners beyond the named arenas have not been specified in the material to hand. Support acts, if any, are unannounced. Whether the annual continental model will next point toward North America, South America or a return to Europe is, for the moment, a matter of O’Brien’s stated intention rather than a published calendar.

What is fixed is the shape of May and June 2027: four nights in Perth, six in Melbourne, five in Sydney, five in Saitama, ticket registration already under way, and a band treating the run as the start of a working method rather than an isolated comeback. For listeners who have followed Radiohead from Pablo Honey through A Moon Shaped Pool and the more recent live and archival releases, the news is less a surprise return than the next measured step on a stage they have never entirely left.