Kasabian announce the five-date ‘Nothing Better Than This’ UK arena tour for December with The Vaccines, ahead of ninth album ‘Act III’
Kasabian are not letting the summer’s momentum cool. Days after playing to 45,000 people at London’s Finsbury Park, their biggest headline crowd in the capital to date, the Leicester band announced a five-date December UK arena tour titled Nothing Better Than This, with The Vaccines along as support. The run opens at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena on December 11, moves through Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on December 13, Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on December 16 and London’s The O2 on December 18, and closes at Manchester’s Co-op Live on December 19. Artist pre-sale begins at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, July 15, with general sale following at the same time on Friday, July 17.
The tour takes its name from a track on Act III, the band’s ninth studio album, now due September 4 after being pushed back from its original July date for what the band called a few final adjustments, reasoning that albums are forever and the wait would be worth it. Frontman Serge Pizzorno has described the song’s origins in typically surreal fashion, tracing it to a meme of four upside-down bats that resembled goths dancing in a club, and building it around a filthy, instantly recognizable bassline with a strange gothic edge.
Chasing an Eighth Straight No. 1
The stakes around Act III are quietly enormous. Both of the band’s previous records with Pizzorno as frontman, 2022’s The Alchemist’s Euphoria and 2024’s Happenings, topped the UK albums chart, and the new record has Kasabian chasing their eighth consecutive No. 1, a streak stretching back two decades that puts them in genuinely rare company among British guitar bands.
Produced by Pizzorno and Mark Ralph at The Sergery and Club Ralph, the album completes the trilogy of what the band has framed as mini-operas, and Pizzorno has positioned it as a distillation of everything in the band’s DNA. Its rollout has already produced the singles “Hippie Sunshine,” “Great Pretender” and the G-Funk-inflected “Superpowers,” which arrived with a trailer starring Stephen Graham.
The Finsbury Park triumph that set up this announcement was itself a statement. In a riff-heavy north London weekend that saw Biffy Clyro and Wolf Alice play their own biggest headline shows at the same site, Kasabian’s Saturday was the only one of the three to sell out in advance, a pointed reminder that their appetite for maximalist, hands-in-the-air rock has survived every trend cycle and the turbulent 2020 departure of original singer Tom Meighan. Pizzorno, who has spoken candidly about learning the frontman job in real time and channeling his imposter syndrome into fuel, promised NME earlier this year that the band’s current live show is relentless, calling it “an excuse to go insane.”
A Smartly Matched Support Act
The Vaccines make elegant sense as the tour’s opener. The indie stalwarts have their own new chapter brewing, having just debuted a brand-new song, “Ten Years Too Far,” on stage at Mad Cool in Madrid this week, and their sharp, economical guitar pop should sit neatly ahead of Kasabian’s arena-rave bombast. The pairing also carries a whiff of British indie’s connective tissue: two bands who came up through the festival circuit’s golden era, still filling the biggest rooms while much of their 2000s cohort has drifted into nostalgia packages.
Before December, Kasabian’s calendar stays punishing. The band will make history as the first-ever Thursday night main stage headliner at Leeds Festival in August, with stops at Boardmasters, Victorious and Mad Cool along the way. By the time the arena tour opens in Birmingham, Act III will be three months old and, if the streak holds, another chart-topper deep into its victory lap. For a band 22 years past their debut, the title of the tour is starting to read less like a lyric and more like a thesis.
