Foo Fighters opened their Take Cover Australian tour at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane on Thursday, playing 26 songs across three hours, from "All My Life" at 7:30 p.m. to "Everlong" at 10:30. It is the band's second trip to the country in ten months, and the schedule gets stranger from here: after Adelaide on November 17 they break, then return in late January for New Zealand dates and a Perth closer. Three visits to Australia in a year, all produced by Frontier Touring.

The band has made a habit of the long haul. In January they traveled 48 hours for a single show at UTAS Stadium in Launceston, Tasmania, an island roughly 1,600 miles from Antarctica. In 2022 they played one night at GMHBA Stadium in Geelong to help refuel a touring industry stalled by lockdown. Brisbane, by comparison, was familiar ground, a short walk from the XXXX brewery.

Guitarist Chris Shiflett wore an AC/DC shirt with the sleeves cut off. Before "Big Me," from the 1995 debut, Dave Grohl traced his three-decade relationship with the country and noted that the parody "Footos" video was shot there. "I'm so f, ing grateful, and lucky, that we're still here 30 years later, and coming to tour for you guys again," he told the crowd. "It would take a lot to say no to Australia."

The set's first ten songs ran as a greatest-hits block: "The Pretender," "Times Like These," "Rope," "Stacked Actors," "My Hero," "Learning to Fly." The audience skewed toward the generation that met these songs on radio, with their children beside them. That handover is visible in the "Big Me" video, where Grohl's mock-menthol ad plays as a joke a 1995 band could afford, and reads now as a document of how far the same four chords have traveled.

ROMBO has followed the band's recent turns: the Hollywood Bowl debut with Dudamel and the LA Phil, Josh Homme on Grohl's drumming, and Grohl and Pat Smear on the Pretty Reckless's "About You." A stadium tour of this size answers a different question: whether a band three decades in can still make the same 26 songs feel like an event. Brisbane suggests the appetite holds, on both sides of the barrier.

The next test is geographic. Adelaide, then a pause, then New Zealand and Perth in January, when the same set will have to carry a summer crowd that has waited through the band's absence. Grohl's line about saying no is the closest thing to a promise the tour has offered. The dates are the proof.