News: Belle and Sebastian announce Australian tour celebrating If You’re Feeling Sinister

There’s a certain quiet persistence to the legacy of Belle and Sebastian, and this September it returns to Australian stages with measured purpose. The Glasgow seven-piece have announced a national tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their sophomore album If You’re Feeling Sinister, with shows scheduled for Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.

Rather than a retrospective framed by nostalgia, the tour centres on the album itself. Belle and Sebastian will perform If You’re Feeling Sinister in full, alongside selections drawn from a catalogue that has shaped the contours of indie pop for three decades. When it was released, the record stood in quiet contrast to the swagger dominating mid-90s British guitar music, favouring intimacy, melodic precision and literary lyricism over scale or attitude.

Across tracks like ‘Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying’, ‘Seeing Other People’ and ‘Judy and the Dream of Horses’, the album established frontman Stuart Murdoch as a songwriter drawn to detail and interiority. Over time, its reputation has shifted from understated favourite to recognised cornerstone of alternative pop. Critical reassessment has followed that shift, with retrospective praise from major outlets reinforcing the album’s place within the wider 90s canon.

Live, Belle and Sebastian have long balanced looseness with control, building shows that feel communal without losing focus. Their performances lean on both arrangement and atmosphere, allowing older material to sit comfortably alongside later releases. Backseat Mafia caught the band during their last Australian visit at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre.

This anniversary tour offers a chance to revisit a record that continues to resonate without requiring reinterpretation. Thirty years on, If You’re Feeling Sinister remains defined less by its moment and more by its tone: observant, melodic and deliberately restrained.