Alt-J have booked four UK shows for next July, starting outdoors at Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl on July 2 and ending at Cardiff Castle on July 18. The Then Again Tour was announced November 13. It also stops at London’s O2 and The Piece Hall in Halifax.
Source: Stefan Brending (2eight) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Alt-J drummer Thom Green at Rock im Park on June 2, 2018. Archive photograph, not a 2027 tour performance. Cropped; this adaptation is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
London gets the biggest gap in the schedule: the O2 show is July 14, twelve days after Manchester. The band then plays Halifax on July 17 and Cardiff the following day. Ticketmaster lists all four dates, along with the booking windows. General sale opens at 10am GMT on Friday, November 20.
When the tickets go on sale
Ticketmaster lists Wednesday presales for London, Halifax and Cardiff. If you’re looking at the London show, the O2’s promoter has named one eligible group: O2 and Virgin Media broadband customers can use Priority Tickets from November 18. Venue and ticket-provider details matter here. That Priority announcement covers London, while Halifax and Cardiff have their own listings and Manchester has its own venue and billing.
For anyone choosing where to see the band, the venues tell a story of their own. London is the arena date. Halifax is in the courtyard of The Piece Hall, and the other two shows are billed at Castlefield Bowl and Cardiff Castle. The four-city announcement leaves only one date in Wales and one in London. The promoter has not listed second performances at either venue.
The debut turns fifteen during a catalogue tour
Fifteen years will have passed since the release of An Awesome Wave by the time the tour opens. That record won the Mercury Prize in 2012. The next two albums, This Is All Yours and RELAXER, arrived in 2014 and 2017. The billing points to material drawn from across the catalogue, leaving plenty of room for songs from later records. There’s no published setlist or promise of a full run through the debut.
That leaves alt-J in a different position from The Wombats, whose 2027 anniversary plans spell out two parts to the show. Fans hoping to hear a less frequently played alt-J track will have to wait to see what makes the running order. The announcement confirms four dates and a broad catalogue brief. It gives no song-by-song breakdown.
The O2 has its own anniversary to celebrate. Alt-J last headlined the venue in 2017, ten years before the new booking, and AEG put the July 14 show in its twentieth-birthday programme. Jamiroquai’s 2027 dates also appear in the venue’s birthday plans. For the other three alt-J shows, the date and booking page for the individual venue are the details to use.
