Ben Folds Five Announce First US Tour in 15 Years

The original line-up of Ben Folds Five, Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee, will return to US stages in April 2027. It is the trio’s first tour together in 15 years, and the announcement leaves room for more: additional dates are promised but not yet confirmed.

Reunions tend to arrive with a short runway, a handful of weeks between the poster and the presale. This one does not. Announcing a tour roughly two years out gives the dates an unusual weight, and it changes what the news actually is. Rather than a nostalgia booking squeezed into a summer schedule, it reads as a plan.

The tour comes attached to a reissue. An expanded edition arrives via Capitol/UMe and carries a previously unreleased track, “Shelved First Attempt,” the kind of artifact that gives a reissue a reason to exist beyond a new master and a thicker booklet. The archival work and the live return are being presented together, which is a sensible pairing. It frames the tour as an extension of the catalogue rather than a pause in the members’ other work.

Folds, Sledge and Jessee have hardly been idle in the intervening years, and that is part of what makes the timing legible. A trio reuniting after a decade and a half, with a vault item in hand and dates far enough away to be properly prepared for, is making a claim about the band’s present tense, not just its past.

The April 2027 shows are US-only for now. The promise of more dates is the detail to watch.