Sixteen years after their final public concert, the five members end the mystery campaign with a direct video message promising shows across the country and full details next week.
Powderfinger have confirmed they will reunite for live shows across Australia beginning in September 2027, ending weeks of cryptic billboards, coded videos and social media clues with a straightforward video message posted to their channels today.
Bernard Fanning and Darren Middleton appear in the clip to deliver the news themselves. Fanning opens with the line fans had been waiting to hear: “We’ve got a little announcement to make to you today. We always said that if we were going to get back together to do some shows that you guys would be the first to know. And so now you’re the first to know. We are going to do some shows all around Australia from September next year.”
Middleton follows immediately: “We are going to build something pretty special just for you guys.” The band directs followers to Powderfinger.com, where full information will appear from 6am Monday 12 October 2026.
The confirmation lands exactly as the earlier mystery campaign had suggested. Over the past week, billboards in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane displayed numbers matching the band’s recorded history: seven albums, five members, 18 ARIA Awards, and the precise date of their last public performance, 13.11.2010. That night at Brisbane’s Riverstage closed the Sunsets Farewell Tour and, at the time, the band’s career as a recording and touring unit.
An Instagram account named @thereturnoftheelectrichorsemen, referencing the closing track of 1996’s Double Allergic, had already begun connecting the dots with language lifted from “My Happiness” and five horse emojis representing Fanning, Middleton, Ian Haug, John Collins and Jon Coghill. The band itself then joined the campaign, clearing its Instagram feed and posting a video that treated the group’s entire history as a set of variables that, given enough time, could produce something extraordinary.
What changed today is the absence of code. The new message contains no numbers, no song titles and no metaphors. It is a direct statement that the five members will share Australian stages again for the first time since that Brisbane farewell.
The decision arrives 16 years after Powderfinger announced their split in April 2010. At the time they described the move as the end of what they wanted to say and do together. Years later Fanning characterised the pressure of an equal five-person creative partnership simply: “You had to do a lot of taking one for the team. And that was just one too many.”
The members never fully disappeared from each other’s orbit. In 2019 they spent time at LaCueva in the Byron Bay hinterland preparing the 20th anniversary edition of Odyssey Number Five, a process that produced the Unreleased collection of archival recordings. In May 2020 they reunited remotely for the One Night Lonely streamed performance that raised more than $500,000 for Support Act and Beyond Blue. That was a reunion of sorts, but deliberately not a return to the stage.
The language in today’s video is almost entirely about the physical business of touring: shows, audiences, and the promise of building something special for the people who have waited. It is the first official indication that the five will stand on the same stages again.
Full details, including cities, venues and ticketing, are scheduled for release on the band’s website at 6am on Monday 12 October. Until then the only confirmed facts are the ones delivered in the video: the reunion is real, the shows will cover Australia, and they will begin in September 2027.
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