A giant stone head sat at the back of the stage. Two red-clad figures appeared beneath stormy visuals, carrying a bonsai towards the centre. Then Luke Steele emerged in full Emperor mode. It was October 2024, Empire of the Sun were back in Melbourne, and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl had briefly stopped looking like the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. For a band that has spent the better part of two decades building its own visual universe around enormous pop songs, that setting made sense. The Bowl gives them room to be ridiculous in the best possible way: costumes, dancers, strange characters, huge screens and Steele changing shape throughout the night, all unfolding outdoors as Melbourne gets darker around the stage. A review of that 2024 show described the giant fallen-statue head, the costumed figures and Steele's red Emperor entrance before the band had even properly started playing. In February, they're doing it again. Empire of the Sun will return to the Bowl on Saturday, February 27, 2027, as part of the Ask That God: Afterlife tour. Frontier Touring is billing the six-date run as the group's largest Australian and New Zealand tour to date, beginning in Auckland before moving through Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. That return booking says something about where Empire of the Sun are now. This isn't a band coming home after disappearing for a decade. They were here two years ago. The songs have been around much longer. Yet their Australian live audience has become big enough for another run through major outdoor venues and arenas, with the production being rebuilt rather than simply dusted off. The curious part is how many different versions of Empire of the Sun will be arriving with them. From Late-2000s Australian Pop to Something Much Bigger When Empire of the Sun appeared in 2008, Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore were hardly unknown quantities. Steele had spent years fronting The Sleepy Jackson. Littlemore was part of Pnau. Empire brought those histories together but immediately looked and sounded like a separate proposition: psychedelic pop meeting electronic production, surrounded by headdresses, fantasy landscapes, futuristic outfits and videos that seemed to operate according to their own internal logic. Their debut album, Walking on a Dream, landed squarely in a period when Australian electronic and indie music was travelling particularly well. Cut Copy, The Presets and Pnau were part of the same broader conversation, while overseas acts including MGMT provided easy reference points for audiences trying to work out where this strange new project belonged. Empire of the Sun never seemed particularly interested in making the comparison easy. The visual side was there from the beginning, not added once bigger venues became available. Their imagery already suggested something far larger than the rooms a new act would usually be expected to play. Eventually, the rooms caught up. That progression is particularly obvious when you put the 2008 songs inside the 2024 Bowl production. "Walking on a Dream" began life as an immediately accessible electronic-pop single. Sixteen years later, Melbourne heard it amid a show with towering scenery, multiple costume changes and a cast of characters that would have looked excessive almost anywhere else. At the Bowl, it worked. Part of the reason is surprisingly uncomplicated. Once all the scenery is stripped away, Empire of the Sun have songs that large groups of people want to sing. Their 2024 Melbourne set opened with "Changes", from that year's Ask That God, before moving between newer material and the catalogue. When "Walking on a Dream" eventually arrived, Steele headed towards the audience and the crowd took over parts of the chorus. "Alive" closed the show. The spectacle gets people looking at the stage. The songs are what let a production on that scale breathe. One Song Has Spent Nearly 20 Years Refusing to Disappear "Walking on a Dream" is now old enough to have lived several separate lives. It was Empire of the Sun's debut single in 2008, became an Australian hit and helped establish the band internationally. Then, years after its original release cycle should have been finished, it found another route into America. A Honda Civic campaign used the track in 2016. It subsequently reached Number 65 on the US Billboard Hot 100, eight years after first appearing, while climbing to Number One on the Dance Club Songs chart. That would have been an impressive second act by itself. Then Western Australia borrowed it. In 2022, Tourism WA launched a global tourism campaign called "Walking on a Dream", built around Empire of the Sun's song and its obvious connection to Steele's home state. The track was no longer simply being rediscovered; it had become shorthand for selling an entire place. By January 2024, APRA AMCOS announced that "Walking on a Dream" had passed one billion streams across Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, earning Steele, Littlemore and co-writer Jono Sloan a Billions Award. Littlemore's description of the song at the presentation gets close to explaining why the audience at the next Bowl show won't necessarily look like the audience Empire of the Sun started with. "It's an evergreen record…it's new for every generation," he said. That isn't just a nice line to attach to a streaming milestone. A teenager going to Empire of the Sun in 2027 wasn't necessarily alive when Walking on a Dream came out. Someone in their 30s may associate the record with festivals, clubs, summer playlists and Australian radio in 2008 and 2009. Somebody else encountered the title track through an American car advertisement or a tourism campaign years later. And then there are the listeners who found the songs through TikTok. "We Are the People", another track from the debut, reached the Canadian Hot 100 in 2025 following a social-media resurgence. Seventeen years after Walking on a Dream arrived, songs from that album were still entering new charts. It makes the standard nostalgia-tour narrative a poor fit. Nostalgia is obviously in the room. Play "Walking on a Dream" or "We Are the People" to an audience that has known them for nearly two decades and memories will come attached. But you can't be nostalgic for a song you discovered six months ago. Why Come Back to the Same Melbourne Stage? The more immediate question is why Empire of the Sun would return to the Bowl so soon. Their previous Melbourne show was on October 26, 2024. The next lands on February 27, 2027. Same band. Same venue. Same album era. The important difference is that Empire of the Sun aren't presenting Afterlife as a repeat of the Ask That God show. Frontier describes the 2027 production as the final live instalment of the album's journey and a reimagining of the show that accompanied it. Steele's own description when the tour was announced was characteristically less straightforward. "Ask That God: Afterlife feels like a tour of unknowns and possibilities — new visions, new plateaus, fragile breakthroughs," he said. "I think things are going to happen on this tour that have never happened before. We can't wait to take this music and this tour to new frontiers. Let's break barriers together." For some acts, promising a redesigned production would be secondary to the songs. With Empire of the Sun, it is part of the ticket. Steele has treated clothing, artwork, film and live performance as pieces of the same project for years. The Emperor character isn't reserved for promotional photos. Those visual ideas make it onto the stage and continue changing once they get there. It also means the Bowl has qualities that an indoor arena can't quite reproduce. Empire of the Sun can start while there is still light over Kings Domain and end in darkness, with the stage carrying almost all the visual attention. The lawn means the show can be watched from well beyond the immediate crush in front of the stage. It can feel like a concert, an outdoor event and a particularly strange piece of theatre within the same couple of hours. The 2027 Melbourne ticketing reflects that range. Melbourne has front-pit general admission, reserved stalls and balcony seating, a standing terrace and general-admission lawn tickets, with the show licensed all ages. Tickets are currently on sale. You can commit to the front pit. Or you can watch the Emperor from the grass. Both seem valid. A New Chapter for Melbourne Fans That new version arrives with the band in a markedly different position from the years immediately before Ask That God. There had been an eight-year wait between 2016's Two Vines and the fourth Empire of the Sun album. Since Ask That God arrived in July 2024, Steele and Littlemore have returned to sustained touring, introduced new songs into the live set and taken the production around the world. Frontier says more than 400,000 tickets have been sold globally during the current touring cycle. The next record may not involve anything like the previous wait either. In August, Littlemore told Rolling Stone AU/NZ that Empire of the Sun were hoping to release another album "within the next year". If that timing holds, Afterlife could end up doing exactly what its name suggests: closing one version of the band's world shortly before another starts. Nearly Two Decades In, Empire of the Sun Still Look Strange Plenty has changed since 2008. The Australian indie boom Empire of the Sun arrived alongside has become a period people now write histories about. The way listeners discover music has shifted repeatedly. Festivals have disappeared and returned. TikTok can turn a song released before some of its users were born into current music again. Empire of the Sun have somehow remained recognisable through all of it. Steele still looks as though being dressed like an ordinary musician would constitute a serious failure of imagination. "Walking on a Dream" still sounds unmistakably like "Walking on a Dream". Their shows continue to operate somewhere between a pop concert, science-fiction pageant and fashion project. What has changed is the size of the audience that understands the proposition. For Melbourne, that growth brings the band back to the Bowl with a reimagined show, as part of what Frontier calls their biggest Australian and New Zealand tour. At the Bowl, the most interesting measure of that growth probably won't be the production sitting onstage. It'll be the people watching it. Some will have bought Walking on a Dream when it was new. Others will have come aboard through Ask That God. There will be parents with children who know the same songs for completely different reasons. And somewhere in the middle of all of them will be Luke Steele, dressed in something no sensible person would attempt to describe before seeing it. Two decades into Empire of the Sun, some things haven't needed fixing. Empire of the Sun Melbourne Show: Dates and Tickets When: Saturday, February 27, 2027Where: Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Kings Domain, MelbourneTickets: Lawn general admission from $129.90; front pit, reserved stalls, reserved balcony and standing terrace tickets from $169.90. Additional ticketing fees may apply, and tickets are subject to availability.Age restrictions: Licensed all ages. Book Melbourne tickets via Frontier Touring. Full Australian and New Zealand Tour Dates Friday, February 19 — Auckland, Spark Arena Sunday, February 21 — Brisbane, Riverstage Thursday, February 25 — Sydney, Afterpay Arena Saturday, February 27 — Melbourne, Sidney Myer Music Bowl Tuesday, March 2 — Adelaide, Adelaide Entertainment Centre Saturday, March 6 — Perth, RAC Arena Tickets are on sale now via Frontier Touring.