Portland alt-rock veterans The Dandy Warhols will return to New Zealand this November, adding Auckland and Wellington shows to a broader Australia/New Zealand run announced this week in support of their new record, Pin Ups — a covers album that sees the band reworking songs that shaped their own sound, released as part of a career now closing in on three decades.
The New Zealand leg is compact but notable: a Friday-night show at Auckland’s Powerstation on 27 November, followed by Wellington’s Meow the next night. Both are mid-sized venues well suited to a band whose appeal has always leaned more toward devoted cult following than mainstream chart presence — frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s group broke through in the late 1990s and early 2000s with singles like “Bohemian Like You” and “We Used to Be Friends,” the latter later reaching a whole new audience as the theme song to teen noir series Veronica Mars. The band’s blend of shoegaze-indebted guitar fuzz, deadpan vocal delivery and pop hooks made them an unlikely commercial success story out of the Pacific Northwest indie scene, and they’ve built a reputation as reliable, frequent visitors to Australia over the years, regularly describing the region as something close to a second home.
New Zealand dates have historically been rarer than their Australian ones, which makes this run notable for local fans who’ve had to cross the Tasman in the past to catch a show. The wider tour is also more ambitious than a standard club run: it opens in Hobart with a one-off collaboration alongside the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, before working through major Australian cities and wrapping at Meredith Music Festival in Victoria, one of the country’s more prestigious boutique festival bookings. That orchestral pairing, combined with the covers-album framing of Pin Ups, positions this less as a conventional album-cycle tour and more as a career-spanning victory lap, a chance for a band now well into their third decade to reinterpret both their own influences and their back catalogue for audiences who, in many cases, first discovered them via Veronica Mars reruns or a 2000s indie playlist.
For New Zealand fans specifically, it’s a rare opportunity to catch a band that doesn’t tour the country often, in rooms small enough to make the shows genuinely intimate rather than arena-scale spectacles.
On sale: Tickets go on general sale Tuesday 25 August at 10am (AEST) via sbmpresents.com. Two presales run ahead of that: a Spotify presale on Friday 21 August at 10am AEST (code DWAUS), and a promoter presale on Monday 24 August at 10am AEST (code DW27).