U2 Announce First Dates for 2027 'Greatest Show On Earth' World Tour, With Beck Supporting

U2 are going back to stadiums. The Irish band announced the first dates of their 2027 world tour on Thursday, October 15 — a run billed as Carnaval De Luz Presents: The Greatest Show On Earth — and the opening leg is deliberately concentrated: six shows, three cities, all in Latin America. According to Live Nation's announcement, carried by Premier Guitar and reported independently by Consequence and JamBase, the tour opens at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City on February 23 and 26, 2027, moves to Estádio MorumBIS in São Paulo on March 10 and 12, and closes the announced leg at Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires on March 23 and 25. Beck will support all six shows, and the announcement stresses that these are the only Latin American cities the tour will visit in 2027.

These are U2's first stadium concerts since The Joshua Tree Tour ended in Mumbai on December 15, 2019, according to JamBase — a gap of more than seven years by the time the first show arrives. In between, the band did not disappear: they played 40 concerts at Sphere in Las Vegas across 2023 and 2024, a residency built around Achtung Baby that became one of the most talked-about live productions of the decade. But a residency in one room in Nevada is a different proposition from hauling a stadium production across continents, and this announcement is the moment U2 become a touring band again in the full, old sense of the phrase.

The dates, and who is missing

The six confirmed dates are February 23 and 26 in Mexico City, March 10 and 12 in São Paulo, and March 23 and 25 in Buenos Aires. Consequence reported one notable absence: Chile. Citing reporting by the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, Consequence said negotiations to bring the tour to Santiago had been under way since 2025 but did not produce a show, and that the band had played Chile on all four of its previous Latin American touring visits, beginning with the PopMart Tour in 1998. Whether a Santiago date could still be added is not addressed in the announcement; what is confirmed, per Live Nation, is that additional 2027 dates for Europe and North America will be announced in the coming weeks, and that plans for an Irish homecoming are in the works.

Larry Mullen Jr. is back

For longtime fans, the most consequential line in the announcement may be the lineup itself: Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. Consequence reported that the tour marks Mullen's return to the drums after he was forced to miss the Sphere residency because of health problems; he underwent surgery connected to a congenital fusion in a facet joint in his neck, as he discussed in a recent Rolling Stone cover story reported by Consequence last month. Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg played the Sphere shows in his place. Mullen is not a replaceable part in this band's story — he is its founder in the most literal sense, the teenager who pinned a musicians-wanted note to the noticeboard at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin in September 1976. U2 marked the 50th anniversary of that moment on September 25 with surprise performances at the school and on Grafton Street in Dublin, according to JamBase. A 2027 stadium tour with the original quartet intact is, among other things, a 50th-anniversary lap.

A new album underneath it all

The tour is built around new music, not only nostalgia. Carnaval De Luz, U2's 16th studio album and their first collection of new material since Songs of Experience in 2017, arrives November 13 via Interscope, according to the announcements reported by Consequence, Stereogum and others. The 12-track record was produced by Jacknife Lee, and its closing track, 'Torn,' features the late Dolly Parton. The announcement day brought the album's third single, the title-giving 'The Greatest Show On Earth,' co-written with Brian Eno, following earlier singles 'Street of Dreams' and 'Silencio' — the latter a short, sharp homage to early surf-punk whose video was filmed in Mexico City, a neat piece of symmetry for a tour that opens in the same city. The new single arrives with a video directed by longtime collaborator Anton Corbijn, shot in the Californian desert.

Beck, and the ticket calendar

Beck is a strong piece of casting for this leg: an artist with his own multi-decade catalogue who can hold a stadium crowd rather than merely warm it up, and whose shape-shifting career rhymes with U2's own experimental streak. Fans planning to go should work to the following calendar. The U2.com subscriber presale begins Monday, October 19, at 10 a.m. local venue time — first for the Feedback Group, with the Hype Group, which includes new subscribers, following on Tuesday, October 20, according to the presale details reported by Just Jared; both subscriber windows close Wednesday, October 21. General sales then begin Thursday, October 22, at 10 a.m. local time for São Paulo and Buenos Aires, and Friday, October 23, for Mexico City, which also has a separate Ticketmaster artist presale on October 22 with registration closing Sunday, October 18. Consequence's summary of the on-sale put general availability from October 22 via Ticketmaster; the city-by-city split above is the more detailed version, and buyers should confirm their city's exact window at the official ticket links before the morning arrives.

In their joint statement, the four band members framed the tour's name as a challenge they are setting themselves — a dare to deliver the best night of their audience's lives, mixing showmanship with colour and volume. That is a high bar to announce in advance, which is presumably the point. U2 have spent five decades making the stadium show into their signature art form, from Zoo TV's media overload to the 360° Tour's claw. What the Greatest Show On Earth production actually looks like will not be visible until February in Mexico City. What is visible now is the shape of the return: a new album in November, a founding drummer back in his seat, six enormous Latin American nights to open, and the rest of the world — Europe, North America and Ireland included — waiting on announcements in the coming weeks. We are tracking the album season, including John Legend's Pharrell-produced Muse, in our news section.