German Electronic Music Pioneers Kraftwerk Announce 2023 Australian Tour

The huge tour announcements keep on coming – German electronic and krautrock music pioneers Kraftwerk are returning to Australia for the first time since May 2013.

It’s been a long ten-year wait, but now it’s our turn. Kraftwerk will visit Australia and New Zealand for seven headline dates this November and December, performing in venues in Wellington, Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. You can find all the dates and venues below.

Formed in 1970 by Ralf Huetter and Florian Schneider, Huetter and his former partner were honoured with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. In October 2021, Kraftwerk were rightly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. 

Since their formation, Kraftwerk have popularised the electronic music genre with their catchy melodies, beats and heavy use of vocoders and computer speech software. Although they haven't released an album of new material since 2003, the band have continued to tour all over the world.

Frontier Members can access the pre-sale to witness The Robots in the flesh on Monday, 17 July, at 11 am local time – keep an eye on the Frontier Touring website for more details. The general sale begins on Wednesday, 19 July, at 10 am local time.

When Kraftwerk last landed in Australia, they headlined Vivid LIVE in Sydney. In The Music’s review of their Sydney Opera House set, writer Andrew McDonald remarked that the visuals were just as striking as the music itself.

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McDonald described the visuals as “Retro-futuristic blocky depictions of the band as robots reaching out over the crowd, montages of space, promotions of the band's own Kling Klang studio, sunny panoramas of German highways. All brilliant and all very Kraftwerkian.”

On the music itself, McDonald added, “The beauty of the band's music, played by the stationary foursome behind custom-built keyboard/computer stands, is the line it walks between worlds. Kraftwerk, at their best, slip between the spheres of high-brow intelligentsia art pop, menacing science fiction and utterly naff electronica.”

While the Sydney Opera House wasn’t built for a band like Kraftwerk, McDonald noted that the four-piece sure made it theirs.