As might be expected from the man who recently broke Spotify streaming records and has returned with a bang to the music scene after a year away, the Tour will be a huge one. Lasting from March until June, in total, Sheeran will play twelve dates in the UK alone, kicking off in Glasgow on the 16^th April and wrapping up in London on the 2^nd May. Ed will hit Ireland for a couple of nights as well, playing back to back gigs at the Dublin 3 Arena in April. He also plans to take in the sights of places as diverse as Lima, Peru and Stockholm, Sweden, with many places in between covered as well – you can check out the full schedule at the bottom of this article.

The Tour will begin in Turin on the 17^th March, which will be just a fortnight after the release of Sheeran’s third album, ‘Divide’, which is slated for release on the 3^rd. This suggests an eagerness to get back on the road; the dates at London’s O2 will be Sheeran’s first in the city since his record breaking shows at Wembley in July 2015. It has come as a surprise to some that he hasn’t decided to plan a stadium tour, at least in the UK, this time around.

Tickets for the UK and European legs of the tour will go on sale at 10am local time wherever you are.

17/3 – Pala Alpitour – Turin
19/3 – Hallenstadion – Zurich
20/3 – Olympiahalle – Munich
22/3 – SAP-Arena – Mannheim
23/3 – Lanxess Arena – Cologne
26/3 – Barclaycard Arena – Hamburg
27/3 – Mercedes Benz Arena – Berlin
30/3 – Ericsson Globen – Stockholm
1/4 – Jyske Bank Boxen – Herning
3/4 – Ziggo Dome – Amsterdam
4/4 – Ziggo Dome – Amsterdam
5/4 – Sportpaleis – Antwerp
6/4 – Accor Hotels Arena – Paris
8/4 – WiZink Center – Madrid
9/4 – Palau San Jordi – Barcelona
12/4 – 3 Arena – Dublin
13/4 – 3 Arena – Dublin
16/4 – The SSE Hydo – Glasgow
17/4 – The SSE Hydo – Glasgow
19/4 – Metro Radio Arena – Newcastle
20/4 – Metro Radio Arena – Newcastle
22/4 – Manchester Arena – Manchester
23/4 – Manchester Arena – Manchester
25/4 – Motorpoint Arena – Nottingham
26/4 – Motorpoint Arena – Nottingham
28/4 – Barclaycard Arena – Birmingham
29/4 – Barclaycard Arena – Birmingham
1/5 – The O2 – London
2/5 – The O2 – London
13/5 – Estadio Nacional – Lima
15/5 – Movistar Arena – Chile
20/5 – Estadio Unico De La Plata – Buenos Aires
23/5 – Pedreira Paulo Leminsky – Curitiba
25/5 – Rio Arena – Rio de Janeiro
28/5 – Allianz Parque – Sao Paulo
30/5 – Esplanada Do Mineirao – Belo Horizonte
2/6 – Parque Simon Bolivar – Bogota
4/6 – Coliseo De Puerto Rico – San Juan
6/6 – Parque Viva Amphitheater – San Jose
10/6 – Palacio De Los Deportes – Mexico City
12/6 – Arena VFG – Guadalajara
14/6 – Auditorio Citibanamex – Monterrey

The album will be released on 7^th April via Sub Pop (Bella Union in Europe). We also have a full track list (shown in full below), artwork (again, keep scrolling) and even an album length (75 minutes, for those of you who like value for money in your albums). It was co-produced by Josh Tillman (aka. Father John Misty) and Jonathan Wilson and is the first album by the former Fleet Foxes man since 2015’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear.’

01  – Pure Comedy
02 – Total Entertainment Forever
03  – Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
04 – Ballad of the Dying Man
05  – Birdie
06 – Leaving LA
07 – A Bigger Paper Bag
08 – When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay
09 – Smoochie
10 – Two Wildly Different Perspectives
11 – The Memo
12 – So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain
13 – In Twenty Years or So

The album announcement wasn’t the only goodness to come from the Father today either, Misty also shared with the world a typically irreverent short-film, documenting the making of the album. Co-directed by Tillman and Grant James, the video features all kinds of antics from shirtless painting to a casual drive around an LA on fire. You can check out the video below. We’re still not done with the news though. The album cover was illustrated by Ed Steed of the New Yorker, and like any good cover, will be available in four different versions – all of which are available at once if you buy the deluxe edition of the LP which comes replete with customizable jacket, fold-out poster, holographic tarot card and aluminium and copper coloured vinyl.

All of this comes on top of the release, yesterday, of the title track from the album, ‘Pure Comedy’, again with an accompanying video, this time directed by Matthew Daniel Siskin, but with equally absurd and surreal content. These include John Cena, Kanye, Trump, Pepe the frog, Obama and even death itself. You can check out the video below:

Tillman has three festival appearances planned so far for 2017, on both sides of the Atlantic, including a set at Coachella, as well appearances in Oslo and Bilbao.

The band will take to the stage at London’s Eventim Apollo on June 14. It will be the first time in over four years the band have played a set on these shores, following the four-date arena tour the band completed in 2012. The band took a break after that tour wrapped up, before coming together again in 2015 to play a series of dates in the US. Last year they again toured the US, playing their classic material. Frontwoman Amy Lee, expressed her delight at once again playing in front of a crowd, telling Rolling Stone, ‘Just when you thought I was off the hard stuff! It’s going to feel amazing to step back onstage with the band this fall [2016]. We had such a tight gel solidifying onstage the last few shows, and were enjoying it so much, we were all lamenting that it was so short and have been on the lookout for more opportunities to play live.’

Although the band haven’t produced any new music, that doesn’t mean Lee hasn’t been busy. She released her first album aimed specifically at children, ‘Dream Too Much’ in September last year, featuring covers of songs as diverse as ‘Rubber Duckie’ from Sesame Street, and The Beatles’ ‘Hello Goodbye.’ The band also released an ‘Ultimate Collection’ compilation album in December. Lee told Forbes that the album had allowed her to reflect on the band’s history and put herself in the position of fans who have watched the band from the beginning, and will presumably be in attendance in June. She revealed that now she, ‘can just stand there with them, ‘‘Okay, I’m a fan of this thing too, it’s a huge part of my life and I can look at it from the outside and appreciate it too.’ Not just be wrapped up in my own head that nothing is ever good enough, which is an easy path to go down for me.’’ She finished, ‘I love our fans, they are just the best people on earth.’

There are no current plans for any new music, but before the band split in 2012, Lee gave NME a clue as to where she might take the group’s sound in the future, saying, ‘I love folk, that’s a big part of my background. I’ve written music that’s a lot simpler and more acoustic and I got into a moment where I’m obsessed with dance music, things like Massive Attack and Portishead. I’d like to do something that’s not driven by loud guitars, I love the aggression they bring, but I’d like to try something out.’

14/6 –     Eventim Apollo – London

It’ll be the band’s only UK Festival date in 2017, and it promises to be a special one. The band have announced that in addition to their hit-filled back catalogue, they’ll also be playing new material at the gig. The new material is the outcome of many months working in Las Vegas, San Diego, LA and Joshua Tree with producer Jacknife Lee, best known for his work with U2. The band have been recording their fifth album which has been a long time in the making; frontman Brandon Flowers spoke to NME about the process of making the album and what it might actually sound like, ‘There are moments that feel heavier than anything we’ve ever done, not that we’re the heaviest band in the world, but they have a finesse because of our experience. There’s also really beautiful things. Lyrically, it’s really close to home. There’s one called ‘Rut’ and we were all kind of excited about what was happening with that. Another is called ‘Run For Cover’ and that comes from ‘Day & Age’. so it’s eight-years-old. It started with Stuart Price and it still sort of has his stamp on it – but we’re funnelling it back through the band eight years later with a different producer. I never got the lyrics right and I think I’m gonna get it right this time. ‘Run For Cover’ looks like it’s got a good shot [of being on the album]. There’s one called ‘Tyson Vs Douglas’. I don’t know why but I think about it all the time and I finally tried to tackle it in a song, what it meant to have this hero of mine get torn down, and then everything that happened after that.’

They’ll be taking to the stage on Saturday 8^th July and if you’re excited about the top of the bill, don’t sleep on the rest of the line-up which will include Elbow, Tears For Fears and White Lies. It will be the first time in 12 years Tears For Fears, whom The Killers have previously credited as a key influence, have played on a UK stage. Meanwhile, Elbow will release their seventh album, ‘Little Fictions’, on the 3^rd February, and have also announced an extensive UK Touring schedule, which will include seven shows held in forests – the Manchester band can now add a park to that list. London punk trio White Lies also have plans to pack their bags and hit the road; they will cross the Atlantic at the start of February to play a series of dates in Canada, the US and Mexico before heading back to start their UK Tour towards the end of the month.

The Killers are the sixth headline act announced for the festival, and join Justin Bieber, Phil Collins, Green Day, Kings of Leon and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

Tickets for this instalment of the festival are available on pre-sale now and will go on general sale at 9am on Friday 27^th January. To grab them, go here. The full line-up for Saturday 8^th July at British Summer Time Festival will be:

The Killers

Elbow

Tears For Fears

White Lies

The band, originally from North Carolina, will play six shows in the UK as part of a wider tour of Europe between April and May, before playing a gig at Iveagh Gardens in Dublin. Two or three years ago such a tour would have been unthinkable for the band, but since their performance on Late Night With David Letterman of their acclaimed and successful single ‘Seasons (Waiting On You)’, they have gone from strength to strength. From playing small town American gigs for ’30 bucks a night, gas money to get us to the next place and have something to eat’ (via The Guardian), they now frequently play sold-out venues and festivals whether that be in their homeland or across the Atlantic.

The last time they played on these shores was in 2015 when they played a host of festival sets, including at Glastonbury, End Of The Road and Bestival. Speaking to the Guardian about his live persona, frontman Sam Herring, revealed he tries, ‘to open up the audience by opening up yourself … The feeling we’re trying to create in our shows is to kind of poke at people. It’s just like, Move! Get going! Do something! Feel something, take my hand, hold on to that person beside you, feel this energy, you know. That’s the hope. It’s all a hope.’ If that sounds like your kind of thing, tickets for the UK dates wll be available from 10am on Wednesday (25^th January) whereas Irish fans will have to wait until 9am on Friday (27^th January) to get their hands on them.

Although their last album was 2014’s singles and there are no official plans for anything this year, members of the band have still been busy with side-projects or contributing on a more ad hoc basis to creating music in a variety of places. Samuel T. Herring appeared on Toronto based jazz collective BadBadNotGood’s 2016 single, ‘Time Moves Slow.’ Meanwhile, another member of Future Islands, William Cashion, released an album, ‘Honey’, last September with Double Dagger’s Bruce Willen, as members of Peals. Herring has even moved beyond the strict confines of making music, and appeared in Clams Casino’s video ‘Ghost in a Kiss’ which follows the Future Island’s frontman through a day in his life (well, not his life exactly, but the life of a normal person…)

The full UK and Ireland Tour schedule is shown below:

27/4 – Barrowlands – Glasgow
28/4 – University Stylus – Leeds
29/4 – O2 Academy – Liverpool
30/4 – Brighton Dome – Brighton
2/5 – Rock City – Nottingham
3/5 – O2 Academy – Bristol
6/7 – Iveagh Gardens – Dublin

The deep line-up will also include Andy C, Jake Bugg, Slaves, Patrick Topping, Wild Beasts, Roger Sanchez, Becky Hill, Solardo, TQD, Theo Kottis, Tom Grennan, Cadenza and Youngr.

Boardmasters’ Andrew Topham expressed delight and eager anticipation for the festival in a statement, saying, ‘We are hugely excited to announce our three headliners and other world-class musical talent as part of what’s shaping up to be the best Boardmasters line up yet. Every year, the biggest names in music and surfing keep Cornwall firmly on the map as the festival continues to go from strength to strength. Boardmasters has an incredible community of dedicated fans who we look forward to welcoming everyone back for another summer of awesome surf and music action on two amazing sites – Fistral Beach and Watergate Bay.’

The news comes just a week after funk icons, if that’s the right word, Jamiroquai announced they would return with a string of overseas dates in Japan, South Korea and continental Europe between May and August. They also shared a teaser video for their forthcoming eighth album, ‘Automation’, which is expected to be released at some point this year. The video features a new item of wacky headwear for the notoriously bonneted and eccentric frontman Jay Kay. You can check out the video below, as well as the full list of the band’s tour dates:

25/5 – Tokyo International Forum – Tokyo
28/5 – Seoul Jazz Festival – Seoul17/6 – Release Athens Festival – Athens
9/6 – North Sea Jazz – Rotterdam
11/7 – Firenze Summer Festival @ Visarno Arena – Florence
14/7 – Pori Jazz – Pori
16/7 – Musilac – Aix-Les-Bains
18/7 – Moon & Stars – Locarno
22/7 – Colours of Ostrava – Czech Republic
5/8 – Sudoeste – Portugal

Jamiroquai aren’t the only Boardmasters headliner with a new album due to be released this year; Alt-J will release their as yet untitled third album later this year. The exact release date is unknown but based on the festival dates the band have lined up this year, speculation is rife that it will be some time before their first set, at INmusic festival on the 19^th June. You can check out the full list of their announced festival dates at the bottom of this article. As for the sound of the new album, drummer Thom Sonny Green was rather cryptic as he told NME, ‘There’s been a lot of ideas. We’re very excited about it, I think it’s going to be pretty interesting. I feel like it’ll be different, but I don’t know. It’s funny – we write together so well and it comes pretty naturally and pretty quick, but I can’t predict it. We write what we feel.’

19-21/6 – INmusic Festival – Zagreb
23-25/6 – Southside Festival – Tuttlingen
23-25/6 – Hurricane Festival – Scheessel
29/6-2/7 – Rock Werchter – Rotselaar
6-8/7 – Mad Cool Festival – Madrid
6-8/7 – NOS Alive – Algés
6-8/7 – Pohoda Festival – Trencin
12-17/7 – Electric Castle Festival – Cluj-Napoca
19-22/7 – Colours of Ostrava – Ostrava
28-30/7 – Panorama Festival – New York
17-19/8 – Pstereo Festival – Trondheim
18-20/8 – Lowlands Festival – Biddinghuizen
1-2/9 – Popaganda – Stockholm

The festival will be held between the 9^th and the 13^th August at Fistral Beach on Watergate Bay in Cornwall. Tickets are on sale now, available from the Boardmasters website here.

The band will begin their outdoor odyssey at Westonbrit Aboretum on the 15^th of June and end the run in Cannock Chase Forest in Staffordshire on the 7^th July. Interestingly, although the band have dates booked in for the Saturday and Sunday of Glastonbury (24^th and 25^th), they’ve left Friday 23^rd tantalisingly free leading to speculation that they might actually be playing eight outdoor sets, including a stop in a certain field in Somerset.

The poster for the Tour also teases ‘guests’ to appear alongside the Mancunian indie merchants but there are no details as to who might be joining them in the woods yet. This announcement comes on top of an already extensive UK touring schedule for the band in March and April. The Tour will support their seventh album, ‘Little Fictions’ which is due to be released on the 3^rd February. The band have already shared a number of tracks from the album, the latest of which was ‘It’s All Disco.’ Garvey recently spoke about his inspiration for the song, revealing, ‘I remember this phrase from Black Francis from the Pixies. I interviewed him for a radio show 10 years ago in Lynchburg Tennessee. I was talking to him about between him being Black Francis and Frank Black and all these different incarnations. I said ‘with all these different styles of music, where are you going next?’ He said something along the lines of ‘you have punk rock, you have rock, you have blues, you have soul, it’s all disco. And I just love that attitude, from one of the most influential people – particularly to me. For him to have this attitude of ‘put everything into it, invest everything into it, but remember it’s not everything. I think that’s a really good way to do it. He’s not having any money but he gave us a really good chorus there.’ You can listen to that ‘really good chorus’ below:

If you like what you hear, then the band’s full tour schedule is below, including their ‘Forest Live’ dates and their previously scheduled February/March Tour. Tickets for the latter Tour are already available, while tickets for the woods will be on presale from Thursday morning (19^th January) at 9am and on general sale from the same time on Friday (20^th).

26/2 – Olympia Theatre – Dublin
27/2 – Olympia Theatre – Dublin
1/3 – O2 Academy – Birmingham
2/3 – O2 Academy – Birmingham
4/3 – Eventim Apollo – London
5/3 – Eventim Apollo – London
6/3 – Eventim Apollo – London
8/3 – BIC – Bournemouth
9/3 – Pavilions – Plymouth
10/3 – Newport Centre – Newport
12/3 – Usher Hall – Edinburgh
13/3 – Usher Hall – Edinburgh
14/3 – Spa – Bridlington
15/3 – Dome – Doncaster
16/3 – De Montfort Hall – Leicester
18/3 – O2 Apollo – Manchester
19/3 – O2 Apollo – Manchester
20/3 – O2 Apollo – Manchester

15/6 – Westonbirt Arboretum – Nr Tetbury, Glos
17/6 – Bedgebury Pinetum – Nr Tunbridge Wells, Kent
24/6 – Dalby Forest – Nr Pickering, North Yorks
25/6 – Sherwood Forest – Nr Mansfield, Notts
29/6 – Thetford Forest – Nr Brandon, Suffolk
30/6 – Delamere Forest – Delamere, Cheshire
7/7 – Cannock Chase Forest – Nr Rugeley, Staffs

The band announced last year that they would be taking a break to pursue new ventures, and Jehnny Beth offered a tease about today’s announcement following the wrapping of their Tour to support their acclaimed sophomore album, ‘Adore Life.’ Beth revealed at the time, ‘I have collaboration I have lined up, really cool stuff, which I can’t talk about now but some are going to be revealed in January,” she said. “So I think it’s going to be for me, collaborating with new people. I’ve kept writing a lot so I’ve got a lot of songs right now that I don’t know what I’m going to do with yet. They’re for something else, not Savages. Pursuing the collaborations where people have reached out and want to work with me, that’s what’s going to happen. I’m very excited.’

Well, now photos posted on the Instagram accounts of Beth, and Johnny Hostile, her partner and other half of duo lo-fi indie rockers, ‘John and Jehn’, confirm that the collaboration will be with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. The photos include the Jehn and Bobby together, with the caption, ‘2 singers hard at work in the studio’, as well as a photo of a reclining Beth, along with a tribute to ‘The lady who never stops writing. Inspirational woman. Lucky me #jehnnybeth.’

Beth took to Instagram to announce she will be performing a one night solo piano show, writing, ‘Dear people of the Netherlands, I am playing the GRAUZONE festival in the city of the North Sea coast of the western Netherlands, The Hague – the 11th Feb 2017. Grab your tickets to see an intimate piano solo performance of exclusively new songs.’

However, Beth isn’t the only one exploring pastures new, with Savages bassist Ayse Hassan’s new side project KiteBase releasing their new album, ‘Latent Whispers’, today. The band will soon be packing their bags to head out on a European Tour, including one show at London’s Kamio; the full schedule is shown below:

15/2 – Festival Hors Pistes @ Le Brise Glace – Annecy
16/2 – Art Gallery Perrin (Generiq Festival) – Montbeliard
17/2 – Consortium (Generiq Festival) – Dijon
18/2 – La Rodia Club (Generiq Festival) – Besancon
19/2 – Le Sechoir Art Gallery – Mulhouse
21/2 – Supersonic – Paris
22/2 – AB Club – Brussels
23/2 – Prinzenbar – Hamburg
24/2 – Music & Frieden (Blue Room) – Germany
25/2 – Ideal Bar – Copenhagen
27/2 – Eldorado – Zurich
28/2 – Freakout – Bologna
1/3 – Magnolia – Milan (Segrate)
3/3 – Sidecar – Barcelona
4/3 – 17 Fest @ Las Armas – Zaragoza
5/3 – Siroco – Madrid
7/3 – Kamio – London

Frontman Jamie Campbell Bower delivered the news with a quietly confident little tease, saying, ‘It is an honour to announce our debut album ‘Together We Are Stronger’. This album has been a long time coming and it is now time for us to unshackle the beast that we have, for so long, tried to contain.’ The album will be a ten-track affair, produced by Thomas Mitchener of Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes renown, and recorded at Broadfields Studio.

1. Washed Out
2. For The Thrill Of It
3.Close To Your Chest
4. As Yet Untitled
5. Romeo
6. You Can’t Rely
7. Lost Everything
8. Addiction
9. Enough
10. Letters To The Lost

Of course, we already have one taster from the album, in the form of ‘Addiction’, which the band premiered last month. Now, the band have shared the track that will follow the all-important opener, with the world. You can check out the new track in all it’s hedonistic, intense and yet cynical glory below. Think Arctic Monkeys’ debut but set in Vauxhall with a chorus provided by Metallica and you’re probably not a million miles away…

It has been somewhat of a wait for the band formed in 2015 with initially just three members. They soon expanded to the current five man line-up consisting of frontman Jamie Campbell Bower; Tristan Marmont on guitar and vocals; Roland Johnson on bass (not synth…); Sam Bower on guitar and Jimmy Craig on the kit. In that time the band have released two EPs, 2015’s ‘Come Get Some’ and ‘Enough’, released last year, and will now try their hand at a full-length release. It does mean, however, that we have heard from the band in person, and in quite intimate detail, before we listen to their debut album. On his inspiration and intention for his music, frontman Jamie Campbell Bower has said, ‘The whole idea of being an artist or a musician is that it’s a really cathartic process. I want to get rid of things that I feel and I want to talk about those things on record. The brutal honesty of it all, that’s what people can connect with. I just have to tap in and stay true. If I’m not doing that, then I think everyone would be able to see. Everyone would be able to call bullshit.’

The band will also head out on a European Tour the week after the album is released, which will finally touch soil back in the UK on the 18^th April and wrap up in Brighton on the 29^th. Campbell Bower has also spoken about the power of live music, saying, ‘For me it’s about connection and seeing people cut loose and get loose. The rest of the band, the people who come to the shows and I, we all carry a lot of unnecessary stress within our lives. To go to a show or listen to a record that’s an outlet is really beneficial, not only for the audience but for us as well.’ So, if you are carrying that unnecessary stress, the full UK Tour dates are shown below:

18/4 – Key Club – Leeds
19/4 – Academy 3 – Manchester
20/4 – O2 Academy 2 – Newcastle
21/4 – Stereo – Glasgow
22/4 – Rock City Basement – Nottingham
23/4 – O2 Academy 3 – Birmingham
25/4 – Fleece – Bristol
26/4 – Underworld – London
28/4 – Joiners – Southampton
29/4 – The Haunt – Brighton

‘Sillion’ will be released on 24^th March. It is Flynn’s first studio album since 2013’s ‘Country Mile’, although he did also release a live album from a gig in Washington DC in 2014, and has also appeared on the soundtrack album for the BBC Four TV series Detectorists. Flynn has enlisted the help of friends for the album, including Cosmo Sheldrake on electronics, and Dave Tattersall on electric guitar. Talking to the London Evening Standard in late 2015, Flynn gave an insight into how he makes his music and the kind of music he wants to make. Flynn admitted, ‘I’m not a fan of taking too long in the studio, I always do one vocal take and jump out of the control room, and people push me back in… It’s a real turn-off to hear things that are too polished. I feel like I’ve almost fought for the right to be that kind of musician — we used to be on a major label and now we’re on an indie.’ On his influences, Flynn revealed that he wasn’t a folk traditionalist at all, instead claiming, ‘I really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock’n’roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness. We’ve been enjoying that groove a lot more.’

‘Raising the Dead’ is an intensely personal release for Flynn; explaining his inspiration for the track he says, ‘My Dad died when I was 18, and that was quite a galvanising experience. There’s often an element of that in anything I’m writing; every big loss that you suffer in life, I think everything comes through the conduit of that. I had a really strong sense of my daughter having elements of my Dad when she came along, and it made me kind of laugh – that cyclical sense, of thinking of my daughter as my Dad.’

Flynn’s Tour will kick off on 24^th March, the same day as ‘Sillion’ will be released, and will take in seven dates in seven UK cities during that last week of March. If you can’t wait that long to see Mr. Flynn up close and personal, he stars in the TV show ‘Lovesick’ (formerly ‘Scrotal Recall’) is available to stream on Netflix now, and is also set to appear alongside Geoffrey Rush in new Albert Einstein TV drama, ‘Genius’. The full tour schedule is shown below:

24/3 – St. George’s Church – Brighton

25/3 – Church – Leeds

26/3 – Gorilla – Manchester

27/3 – Caves – Edinburgh

28/3 – O2 Academy 2 – Birmingham

29/3 – Trinity – Bristol

31/3 – St. John’s Hackney – London