Barenaked Ladies are coming back to Australia after more than 25 years, as Train’s support act, and Perth gets the first night

Train are bringing the album that made them to Australia for its 25th birthday, and they are bringing a band Australian audiences have waited a generation to see again.

The San Francisco band’s Drops of Jupiter: 25 Years In The Atmosphere Tour will play four Australian dates in May 2027, opening at Perth HPC on Sunday 2 May before Margaret Court Arena in Melbourne on Wednesday 5 May, the TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney on Friday 7 May and Sandstone Point Hotel, north of Brisbane, on Saturday 8 May.

Special guests on every date are Barenaked Ladies, the Canadian band behind One Week and the theme song to The Big Bang Theory. The shows will be their first in Australia in more than 25 years.

When can I get tickets?

An early-bird presale opens at 9am local time on Tuesday 17 November, with registration through the promoter, Destroy All Lines. General sale starts at 9am local time on Thursday 19 November.

Because times are local to each city, the sales open at different moments: 9am AEDT in Sydney and Melbourne, 9am AEST in Brisbane (10am AEDT) and 9am AWST in Perth (12pm AEDT), so Perth fans are the last in the queue. No ticket prices have been announced.

Why Drops of Jupiter?

Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me), the title track of the 2001 album, was Train’s breakthrough: a piano-and-strings ballad that won two Grammy Awards in 2002 and made the band a fixture of radio around the world. Later hits including Hey, Soul Sister and Marry Me kept them there.

The tour is built around that record, giving fans who have known it for 25 years a night of songs they can sing word for word.

Why is the Barenaked Ladies news bigger than it looks?

For a band of their size, more than 25 years away from Australia is a long absence. Barenaked Ladies were at their peak in the late 1990s, when One Week went to number one in the United States in 1998, and a generation of Australians later met their music through The Big Bang Theory, which used their song as its theme for 12 seasons.

Putting them on the same bill as Train turns a nostalgia show into a double headline for fans who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Who else is playing?

The Queensland show at Sandstone Point Hotel, a large outdoor venue on the Pumicestone Passage, has a longer local line-up: Boy & Bear, Kate Miller-Heidke, Busby Marou and Kiani Jazz.