Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Announce ‘Wild God’ Tour for Australia and New Zealand, 2026.

Nine years is a long silence, especially for an artist like Nick Cave whose very presence seems to rattle the air. In January and February 2026, that silence ends. The Bad Seeds are finally returning to Australia and New Zealand, carrying with them The Wild God Tour – a production that has already left Europe and North America stunned, not by spectacle alone, but by its uncanny ability to turn a live show into something closer to mass hypnosis.

The choice of venues is no accident. Rather than locking audiences into cavernous arenas, Cave and his cohorts have opted for spaces that breathe – Fremantle Park, Adelaide’s Entertainment Centre, Sydney’s Domain, Brisbane’s Victoria Park, and Melbourne’s Alexandra Gardens. Each location feels less like a stage and more like a natural extension of the performance itself, a place where the music’s tension between intimacy and grandeur can unravel under an open sky. Wellington’s TSB Arena, as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, provides a fittingly dramatic New Zealand chapter.

Australia’s most elegant apocalypse salesman is back - and he’s setting up shop in your local park.

At the heart of this tour lies Wild God, the 2024 album Cave created with Warren Ellis, mixed by David Fridmann, and greeted as a late-career revelation. It isn’t a collection of neatly packaged anthems, but a work that swerves and stumbles with intention – shifting from moments of hushed reverence to eruptions of chaos. On stage, those contradictions expand into something volatile, with the band leaning into improvisation and dynamics that feel alive and unpredictable.

Those who’ve already witnessed The Wild God Tour abroad describe evenings that swell and contract like weather systems. Two and a half hours that can veer from a whisper to a storm, from moments of almost unbearable tenderness to explosive ferocity. The Bad Seeds, after four decades, remain less a backing band than a living organism, each member locked into a kind of telepathic conversation that Cave steers with the flick of a hand or a sudden lunge towards the audience.

For Australian and New Zealand fans, this isn’t simply a tour – it’s a rare return, a reminder of why Cave has become a figure whose live shows are spoken of with a kind of reverence usually reserved for pilgrimages. To stand in a park as dusk falls and thousands of voices are pulled into his orbit is to feel part of something at once sacred and unsteady, part funeral, part revival, part fever dream.

Tickets go on sale Friday 29 August at 10am local time from nickcave.com. But entry is less about buying a night of music and more about stepping into an atmosphere where beauty and menace hold hands, and where the line between audience and congregation collapses.

Tour dates:

• 17 Jan – Fremantle Park, Perth

• 20 Jan – Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Adelaide

• 23 & 24 Jan – The Domain, Sydney

• 27 Jan – Victoria Park, Brisbane

• 30 & 31 Jan + 1 Feb – Alexandra Gardens, Melbourne

• 5 & 6 Feb – TSB Arena, Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts)

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Words by AW.