Dinosaur Jr. Announce 2027 Australian Tour Dates

Celebrating the release of their latest album, 'There Near', the iconic alt rockers will visit Australia for the first time since 2024 this January.

Dinosaur Jr Profile

Revered alt rockers Dinosaur Jr. will be making their return to Australia next year, with the iconic grunge outfit announcing their latest run of local tour dates.

Kicking off in Auckland on January 16th, the trio will head west soon after, launching their Australian jaunt at Brisbane's Fortitude Music Hall, before hitting up Sydney's Hordern Pavilion, Melbourne's Forum, and Adelaide's Hindley Street Music Hall before wrapping proceedings at the Ice Cream Factory in Perth.

News of the trek comes just weeks after the group released their 13th studio album, There Near, which has received widespread acclaim and serves as something of a sonic return to their earliest work.

This new tour is the band’s first since 2024, and is a testament to their longtime relationship with Australia, having been a constant presence on local stages since their first visit to the country back in 1989.

“I've always liked Australia,” vocalist and guitarist J Mascis tells The Music. “It’s so far away, but it doesn't seem that far off from America. It's maybe the country that's most similar to America that we go to, so it doesn't feel very foreign to go there.

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“Except there’s better coffee everywhere in Australia than in America, the quality of life is a bit better and a lot of towns are by the beach, which is fun.”

That first tour of theirs took place in October 1989 in support of the previous year’s Bug album, and saw the group playing a batch of east coast dates which they did the old-fashioned way. In modern times, the Dinosaur Jr. team – completed by bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Murph – won’t be packing up the van like they used to.

“I remember on our first tour we drove everywhere in a car, which was pretty far,” Mascis remembers. “Every gig was 12-hour drive or something.

“But it was the first time we saw koalas and that it was pretty cool. But yeah, we haven't driven really on a tour since then.”

While Mascis notes that fans will be treated to plenty of fresh tracks (“the new songs seem a lot easier to play than a lot of other albums,” he explains), he also notes that recent years seem to have seen something of a resurgence of Dinosaur Jr. amongst younger audiences – something he seems eager to note while down in Australia.

“We’ve noticed a lot younger kids,” he says. “But we did a tour this summer with Band Of Horses, who are younger than us, but their audience was older, which was odd. We were like, ‘Where are all the kids?’

“But we’re getting a lot of younger kids, which is great, 'cause a lot of people our age don't want to go out any more, so the audience would dwindle,” he adds with a rare laugh.

Tickets for Dinosaur Jr.'s upcoming Australian tour go on sale from 12pm local time on Tuesday, October 27th, with a Frontier Member presale running 92 hours from 3pm local time on Friday, October 23rd.