Nothing But Thieves Announce Stray Dogs and 2027 World Tour

Nothing But Thieves have put a name and a date on their next era. The Southend five-piece will release their fifth album, Stray Dogs, on September 25 via RCA Records/Sony Music, and they have mapped a 2027 headline run across Europe, the UK, Ireland, the United States, and Canada in support of it.

The announcement lands a week after the band returned with "Evolution," their first new music since 2023's Dead Club City. NME reports that the new album was written over a dedicated five-month stretch rather than pieced together on the road, and that the band recorded at Angelic Studios in Oxfordshire, the same room where they made their 2015 self-titled debut. For a group that spent the last album cycle building an entire fictional city around arena-ready dystopia, that matters: Stray Dogs is being framed as a reset toward the chemistry that made the band combustible in the first place.

The band's own explanation for "Evolution" points in that direction. "It's a song that's not too concerned about finality. I think imperfection and authenticity is becoming ever more valuable and it's definitely something we're drawn to," they said in a statement quoted by Rock Sound and Hot Press. They added, "We've spent some time trying to work out what's real and tangible about who we are and how we use our time. The people we travel the world with, the human moments on stage, the connection we make with those who come to our shows. That's real. It's a bit of a love letter to the people in our world in that way."

Nothing But Thieves can sometimes read as too polished on paper, but their best songs work because the vocals push against the gloss until something human cracks through. "Evolution" leans into that tension. It is a big, climbing guitar single with festival-field proportions, but the hook is less victory lap than group exhale, a band trying to make scale feel communal instead of corporate. That is a useful lane for them in 2026, especially after Dead Club City gave them their first No. 1 album while also nudging their sound toward a heavier concept-album sheen.

Stray Dogs will be the band's fifth studio album, following Nothing But Thieves, Broken Machine, Moral Panic, and Dead Club City (excluding the Moral Panic II expansion). Hot Press notes that Dead Club City became their first No. 1 album in 2023 and their fourth Top 10 record. The official store listings for Stray Dogs are already live, with vinyl and other physical editions marked for September 25, including a 12-page booklet on the standard black vinyl edition and an alternate-cover marbled vinyl variant.

The Stray Dogs tour is massive

The 2027 tour starts January 12 in Paris and runs through April 21 in Toronto. NME calls it the band's biggest headline tour to date, and the routing backs that up: The O2 in London, Co-Op Live in Manchester, 3Arena in Dublin, Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, Brooklyn Paramount in New York, and The Salt Shed in Chicago are all on the list. Ticketmaster's North American listing confirms several U.S. dates and presales beginning June 2 or June 4 depending on the market, while Hot Press lists Dublin tickets on sale Friday, June 5 at 10 a.m. local time.

It is also a pretty clean statement of where Nothing But Thieves sit now. They are not exactly a cult rock band anymore, and they are not a legacy act coasting on a decade-old breakthrough. The venues say arena ambition; the album language says back-to-the-room recalibration. That combination can either sand a band into paste or make them sharper by forcing the songs to carry both intimacy and scale.

The most promising part of this rollout is that Nothing But Thieves seem aware of the risk. A return to Angelic Studios could have been cheap nostalgia if it were just a press-release hook. Paired with "Evolution," it reads more like a band trying to remember why the early material hit before the machinery around them got bigger. If Stray Dogs follows that thread, the title starts to feel less like branding and more like a useful image: five players circling back to pack instincts, battered a little by the last decade, still hungry enough to run.