The Proclaimers take You May Offend straight to the stage

The Proclaimers have put their thirteenth studio album into listeners' hands, and the next movement is already set. You May Offend arrived on 11 September 2026, four years after Dentures Out, and the Scottish duo are taking it out on a European tour that runs through December, with UK dates opening in October.

The 12-track set includes the title song, first issued as a single on 26 June with a video directed by Douglas Mackinnon, together with Easy Rhyme, A Little Bit Late and When You Get There. James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers plays guitar on several of the recordings. Craig and Charlie Reid have talked through questions of free speech and cancellation — the territory the album title stakes out without apology. Bradfield's cameo links the set to another strand of guitar music without pulling the duo off their own ground: the writing stays with the twins.

From Letter from America to Dentures Out

The Reid twins formed The Proclaimers in 1983 and made their name in the late 1980s. Letter from America, the 1987 single, climbed to No. 3 in the United Kingdom. The following year I'm Gonna Be went to No. 1 in Australia, Iceland and New Zealand, while the parent album Sunshine on Leith became the commercial peak of their catalogue: multi-platinum in Australia and Canada, more than two million copies sold worldwide and around 700,000 in the United States alone. Across the decades the pair have sold over five million albums.

That run of studio records stretches from the debut This Is the Story in 1987 through Hit the Highway in 1994, the later return with Like Comedy in 2012, Let's Hear It for the Dogs in 2015, Angry Cyclist in 2018 and Dentures Out in 2022. Along the way the live side of the catalogue — The Rockfield Acoustic Session in 2010 and Live at the Belly Up in 2017 among them — has shown how the songs travel once they leave the studio. The studio albums have remained the spine, written and sung by the brothers and rooted in a voice that never needed dressing up. You May Offend sits in that line: a full-length statement rather than a stopgap, and the first since Dentures Out in 2022.

The gigs ahead

What changes now is the simple fact of the songs being out. Listeners who have lived with Sunshine on Leith and the singles that followed can place the new tracks against that body of work and hear where the argument has moved. The title points at friction; the interviews the duo have given this year have not ducked the subject. How those songs land in a room is the next measure, and the autumn and winter dates are where that will be tested.

UK shows begin in October. The European itinerary continues through to the end of December 2026. Pre-orders for the album and the June single were handled through the band's own channels ahead of release. For a duo whose catalogue already runs deep, another studio album is both continuation and fresh argument. The Proclaimers have never been short of either. With You May Offend out and the tour schedule filling for the rest of the year, the work goes back where it has always belonged: on the record and on the stage.