U2 will take The Greatest Show On Earth across the U.K. and Europe in 2027, a stadium run announced Thursday that opens April 26 at Stockholm's Strawberry Arena and closes with two nights at Milan's Stadio San Siro on July 5 and 6. Wolf Alice support throughout. Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Berlin and London fill the months between; the London dates are June 18 and 19 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Spanish shows and a further North American leg are promised soon.
The billing reads Carnaval De Luz Presents: The Greatest Show On Earth, tying the tour to an album that has already been set in motion. In a statement, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen called the title a throwdown and a dare "to try and have the best night of anybody's life," adding: "A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of colour, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums, and tunes you can hold onto." The Edge, separately, said the tour will wrap in Ireland in 2028: "There's nowhere else we'd want to be for that party."
The scale is familiar and the timing is not incidental. The band marked fifty years together last month with a lunchtime set at Mount Temple Comprehensive, the Dublin school its members attended, then played Grafton Street. Before the stadiums open, U2 goes small: a BBC Music gig on November 3 at an unannounced central London venue for a select group of fans, with tracks from the coming record getting their first airing. Presale for the European dates opens November 2 at 10 a.m. local time for U2.com subscribers, with a Visa cardholder presale on November 4.
Wolf Alice are the telling choice of opener. A band built on dynamics that swell and retreat, they will meet rooms designed for the opposite, and the pairing puts a younger British guitar group in front of the largest audiences of its career. It also echoes the thread running through U2's recent collaborations, where the band keeps placing itself beside artists from another generation.
The tour follows the Sphere residency in Las Vegas, forty dates across six months that rebuilt Achtung Baby inside a screen. Stadiums ask for something else: no walls to project on, only distance and weather and the oldest test in the job, which is whether a song carries to the back row. The catalogue has answered that before. "With Or Without You," the 1987 single that held the top of the Hot 100 for three weeks, is the obvious case, a song whose studio version is mostly restraint and whose live version is mostly the crowd. The official video shows how little the band needed to make it land.
The Latin American leg, with Beck, sold out its first dates and begins February 23 in Mexico City. Europe follows in spring. For now the itinerary holds one promise worth keeping an eye on: Ireland, 2028, the last night of the run.
