Royal Blood are heading back out on the road. The Brighton two-piece, Mike Kerr on vocals and bass, Ben Thatcher on drums, announced a seven-date UK headline run this week, timed to land just after the release of their new album, Dead Company, due out 13 November. It’s their first dedicated UK headline tour since they toured 2023’s Back to the Water Below, and comes as the band mark well over a decade together.
The tour opens at The Prospect Building in Bristol on 24 November and moves through Newcastle’s O2 City Hall, Manchester’s O2 Apollo, Glasgow’s Barrowland, Wolverhampton Civic Hall, and Olympia’s Grand Hall in London, before closing at the Brighton Centre, a homecoming show in the city where the band formed back in 2013 — on 4 December.
Royal Blood built their reputation on a stripped-back but enormous sound: just bass and drums, run through octave pedals, fuzz and heavy distortion to fill the sonic space a full band usually would. It’s a formula that shouldn’t work as well as it does live, and it’s made them one of the more distinctive acts to emerge from the UK rock scene of the early 2010s. Since their self-titled 2014 debut went straight to number one in the UK, a rare feat for a rock act with no prior chart history, they’ve become one of the country’s most dependable arena and festival draws, headlining Reading & Leeds, picking up a Brit Award for British Group, and earning two Grammy nominations along the way. Dead Company will be their fifth studio album, and the band have described the material as written “with the stage in mind,” pointing to a sound they say is faster and heavier than the more polished, dance-inflected direction of 2021’s Typhoons.
That description lines up with the venue choices, which are notably more intimate than the arenas the band filled on previous UK runs. Barrowland and the Brighton Centre both hold under 5,000, and several of the other rooms are similarly sized theatres and civic halls rather than 10,000-plus arenas, suggesting a deliberate return to sweatier, more club-like spaces after the Typhoons era took them into bigger venues. For a band whose entire appeal rests on volume and physicality in a room, that’s a meaningful choice, and it likely means these will be among the hardest tickets to get on the UK’s autumn gig calendar.
Fans who pre-order Dead Company from the band’s official UK store by 3pm on 18 August receive access to an artist presale, which opened Wednesday 19 August at 9:30am. General sale opens Friday 21 August at 9:30am via Ticketmaster.