Pixies have announced their return to Australia and New Zealand, taking to stages this December for their long-paused ‘Come On Pilgrim… It’s Surfer Rosa’ tour – get tickets here.

It’ll be the band’s second time taking the run Down Under, after an attempt in 2020 was cut short by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They played four of the dates on that tour – two headliners in Melbourne, one in Auckland and a set at that year’s Golden Plains festival in regional Victoria – but were forced to cancel shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Perth.

All three cities are featured on the new itinerary, which is set to kick off in Brisbane on December 2. They’ll play Sydney next, before returning to Melbourne, playing their first show in Adelaide since 2010, then hitting the stage in Perth. Wellington will be the first of three Aotearoan cities to see the tour, with gigs in Auckland and Christchurch following shortly thereafter.

Tickets for all eight shows go on sale at 2pm local time next Tuesday (April 5), with a pre-sale open to Live Nation members starting at 1pm this Friday (April 1). You can find tickets to the Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Wellington and Auckland shows here, with those for the remaining three dates available here.

In a press statement, Pixies said: “We are thrilled to be able to announce our return to Australia and New Zealand in December 2022, following the untimely postponement of some of these shows back in 2020.”

As its title implies, the ‘Come On Pilgrim… It’s Surfer Rosa’ tour will see Pixies celebrate both their 1987 EP ‘Come On Pilgrim’ and their ’88 album ‘Surfer Rosa’, with all 21 tracks from the records (as well as an encore of assorted hits from Pixies’ other releases) played at the majority of shows.

The band won’t perform those sets in Melbourne and Auckland, as they were able to deliver them in 2020. Instead, those cities will be treated to “a brand new set featuring songs from across our catalogue, including some oldies and some brand new tracks”.

Since the release of their seventh and most recent album, 2019’s ‘Beneath The Eyrie’, Pixies have released an EP of scrapped demos from that album’s studio sessions, and two standalone singles – ‘Hear Me Out’ in September 2020, and ‘Human Crime’ earlier this month.

The band are well underway with the writing process for their eighth studio album; last month, frontman Black Francis told The Guardian that he’d already penned close to 40 tracks for it.

In a four-star review of ‘Beneath The Eyrie’, NME’s Andrew Trendell said: “They’ll probably always live in the shadow of their impeccable ’88-91 purple patch, but ‘Beneath The Eyrie’ is still arguably [Pixies’] most consistent body of work since their 2004 reformation and certainly their most inventive in 28 years.”

Pixies’ 2022 Australian and New Zealand ‘Come On Pilgrim… It’s Surfer Rosa’ tour dates are:

DECEMBER
Friday 2 – Brisbane, Fortitude Music Hall
Saturday 3 – Sydney, Opera House Forecourt
Wednesday 7 – Melbourne, The Forum
Thursday 8 – Adelaide, Thebarton Theatre
Saturday 10 – Perth, Fremantle Arts Centre
Wednesday 14 – Wellington, Opera House
Friday 16 – Auckland, Town Hall
Saturday 17 – Christchurch, Town Hall