Empire of the Sun Add 31 Shows After a 220,000-Ticket Tour

Two hundred and twenty thousand people bought a ticket to the last one. That is the figure sitting underneath the Ask That God: Afterlife tour, and it is the reason a band that took eight years between albums is now spending a second consecutive year on the road behind the same record.

The 2025 Ask That God run sold out completely across 22 countries, with 110,000 tickets sold in the United States and 40,000 in Mexico. Empire of the Sun are not extending that cycle on optimism. They are extending it on a measured result, and the follow-up is built to close the chapter rather than repeat it.

Thirty-One Headline Shows and a Festival Prologue

The Afterlife run is 31 headline dates, opening in August and ending on 9 October at PH Live at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, according to uDiscover Music. Around those headline shows sit three festival appearances: Osheaga in Montreal, Up In The Sky in Aspen, and Outside Lands in San Francisco.

The route takes in Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Northwell at Jones Beach Theater, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and stops in Holmdel, Philadelphia, Miami, Houston, Toronto, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin and Phoenix. Consequence counted 34 dates in total once the festival slots are included, running from the start of August through to early October.

Tickets moved through a conventional two-stage sale: an artist presale on 17 March at 10am local time, with registration closing two days earlier, and general on-sale on 20 March.

The Album That Ended an Eight-Year Silence

Ask That God arrived in 2024 as the duo’s first new album in eight years. For a project built on Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore’s particular combination of processed vocals, wide synth pads and heavily costumed stagecraft, that gap was long enough that the return had to do two jobs at once: satisfy an audience that had grown up on Walking on a Dream, and give the live show new material to build around.

A digital deluxe edition followed in 2025 with two additional tracks, Dark Secrets and Somebody’s Son, the latter featuring Lindsey Buckingham. That is an unusual pairing on paper, a Fleetwood Mac guitarist on a synth-pop record, and it points at something the duo have always done quietly: they treat guitar as another texture in the stack rather than as the instrument the arrangement is organised around.

That approach has a long lineage in electronic pop, where the decision about which machine carries the pulse shapes everything above it. Our piece on the 808 sound and where it went after 1983 traces one version of the same argument.

What Steele Says the Run Is About

Steele’s framing of the tour is deliberately open-ended. “It feels like a very pivotal time,” he said. “We have a new song to sing, we have to step into a new doorway — a new chapter. The world is changing.”

He described Afterlife as “a tour of unknowns and possibilities — new visions, new plateaus, fragile breakthroughs”, and closed with “Let’s break barriers together.”

Read plainly, that is a band signalling that the show has been reworked rather than reprised. The Ask That God visual world was one of the more committed productions on the 2025 circuit, and the word Afterlife suggests a continuation of that universe rather than a fresh start. For an act whose identity is as much about costume, headdress and colour as it is about the records, the staging is not decoration around the songs, it is the reason a large share of that 220,000 turned up.

Polo & Pan Make It an Electronic Double Bill

Polo & Pan and Midnight Generation open all headline dates, and the first of those choices does real work. The French duo trade in a warmer, more melodic strain of dance music than the headliners, built on filtered loops and a lighter touch, which sets up a contrast rather than a warm-up.

Booking a support act with its own established audience is a practical decision as much as a curatorial one. On a 31-date run across amphitheatres and stadiums, a bill that reads as two electronic acts rather than one plus an opener widens the pool of people willing to buy early, which is what makes venues of this size work.

Why a Closing Chapter Still Matters

There is a particular problem for electronic acts built around spectacle. The production that makes the show worth seeing is expensive to build and expensive to move, and it only pays for itself across enough dates. A single tour cycle often cannot amortise it, which is why elaborate stagings either get scaled down for the second leg or the act simply stops touring the record.

Running a second full year behind one album is the alternative, and the 2025 numbers made the case. A completely sold-out run across 22 countries is not merely a good tour, it is evidence that demand had not been satisfied by the first pass. The Afterlife shows are the response to that, and the Las Vegas finish gives the cycle a defined end point rather than letting it taper.

For listeners, the practical read is straightforward. This is the last scheduled run behind Ask That God, the staging has been rebuilt rather than recycled, and the venues are large enough that the visual side will be doing most of the heavy lifting. For anyone who has only heard the duo through a pair of headphones, the show is where the arrangement choices become obvious, because the parts get separated across a stage and a lighting rig rather than compressed into a stereo field.

Reading the Route

The venue list is worth reading closely, because it describes the size of audience the duo can now assume rather than hope for. Forest Hills Stadium in Queens holds a capacity in the low tens of thousands and is an open-air tennis stadium, which means a stage built for sightlines from three sides. Northwell at Jones Beach Theater is a waterfront amphitheatre. The Hollywood Bowl is a natural amphitheatre with a shell that shapes the sound before any rig gets involved.

These are not interchangeable rooms, and for an act whose show depends on lighting and costume they present genuinely different problems. An amphitheatre with a long summer dusk cannot deliver the same visual contrast as an indoor venue until late in the set, which is why acts of this kind tend to structure the running order around the light rather than around the tempo.

The finish is the exception. PH Live at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas is an indoor theatre, so the last night of the cycle is the one date where the production has complete control of the darkness. Ending there rather than at the largest venue on the run is a choice that favours the look of the show over the headcount, which is consistent with how the project has been presented since the beginning.

The geographic spread is conventional in the best sense: Toronto and Boston in the north-east, Philadelphia and Holmdel in the mid-Atlantic, Atlanta and Miami in the south-east, Houston, Dallas and Austin across Texas, then Phoenix and Los Angeles in the west. It is a route designed to keep travel costs sane while putting the production within driving distance of most of the continent’s major markets.

What the Cycle Says About the Duo’s Position

Eight years between albums would end most careers operating at this scale. That it did not says something about how the duo’s catalogue has continued to circulate: their older material kept finding new listeners through playlists and sync placements during the silence, so the 2024 return was not a reintroduction to an audience that had moved on.

The result is a band able to book amphitheatres on the strength of a record released two years ago, with a support bill of its own standing, and a schedule that runs a full quarter of the year. That is a stronger commercial position than most acts manage on a first-year cycle, let alone a second.

Whether Afterlife genuinely closes the chapter or simply pauses it is the open question. Steele’s language points at movement rather than conclusion, and “a new doorway” is not the phrasing of a band planning another eight years of quiet.