News: Public Image Ltd announce long-awaited return to Australia and New Zealand

Public Image Ltd are heading back to Australia and New Zealand with This Is Not… The Final PiL Tour, their first run down under in over a decade and their first New Zealand shows since 1989. If the title reads like a provocation, that’s because it is. PiL have never dealt in tidy conclusions.

Fronted by John Lydon, still operating with the same sharp-edged presence that first cut through with Sex Pistols, the band arrive off the back of sold-out runs across Europe and North America in 2026. But this isn’t a victory lap. PiL have always resisted that kind of framing, preferring instead to keep things unstable, unpredictable, alive.

The setlist is expected to stretch across their catalogue, from early disruptors like Public Image: First Issue and Metal Boxthrough to later material that continues to bend form rather than settle into it. Formed in 1978, PiL rewired post-punk by pulling in dub, electronics and avant-garde textures, stripping away rock’s familiar shapes and rebuilding them into something colder, heavier and harder to pin down.

The current lineup, with Lydon joined by Bruce Smith, Lu Edmonds and Scott Firth, has settled into a unit that trades precision for pressure. The grooves hit low and repetitive, the kind that don’t just sit in the background but press forward, while Lydon’s vocal delivery remains confrontational, somewhere between spoken word and rupture.

More than four decades in, PiL still operate like a band that doesn’t trust comfort. That ethos, “this is not a rehearsal,” isn’t branding, it’s method. These shows aren’t about revisiting the past so much as testing how much of it still holds weight in the present. Judging by their recent runs, the answer is plenty.