At the Hollywood Bowl on October 8, 2026, near the end of the "Ask That God: Afterlife" tour, Empire of the Sun opened with Luke Steele standing on a heap of rubble while two dancers in red robes and eyeball-studded headpieces walked the stage. The dancers kept changing through the night, into mirror-ball suits and later neon wigs. Midway through, Steele picked up a red rotary phone and read out an ad for "Afterlife Insurance." He played Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" alone under one white light, and he ended "Tiger By My Side" by slamming his white electric guitar into the stage before closing with "Alive."
That scale is the whole idea, and it's been there from the start. Steele and Nick Littlemore skipped the usual pubs-and-clubs route entirely; the project's live debut was at the Parklife festival in 2009, and it has seldom played small rooms since. Onstage Steele fronts a full band, and he plays more guitar than people tend to expect. A reviewer at the Tampa stop in September 2026 showed up for the costumes and left talking about his playing and a drum solo.
The tour was built on Ask That God, their 2024 album and first since 2016's Two Vines. Work on it started in Tokyo, at a studio they found while shooting the "Way To Go" video, and part of it was written about a devoted fan who got sick and died. "Walking on a Dream" keeps pulling in new listeners on its own; eight years after release it topped the US Dance Club Songs chart off a Honda Civic ad, and later it went viral on TikTok.