OPEN SEASON 2026 OPENED LAST NIGHT WITH WORLD PREMIERE: GIL SCOTT-HERON BY BRIAN JACKSON

Last night’s opening marks the beginning of a packed eight-week program that will see Open Season bring music to Brisbane across the city’s winter months.

Now in its sixth edition, Open Season 2026 will bring together over 100 artists and special events to various venues and locations across Brisbane, from The Tivoli and The Princess Theatre to QPAC’s newly opened Glasshouse Theatre, Fish Lane, Quivr in Winn Lane and the Clarence Corner precinct in Woolloongabba.

The 2026 program again moves beyond stages and into the city’s streets, galleries and unexpected spaces, cementing Open Season’s reputation as a genuinely city-wide cultural takeover.

The two weeks ahead bring one of the most concentrated runs of exceptional live music Brisbane has seen…

Tomorrow night, Wednesday 27 May, Earl Sweatshirt & MIKE bring their landmark collaborative album POMPEII // UTILITY to The Tivoli, two of hip-hop’s most emotionally precise voices sharing a stage in Australia for the first time, while Mogwai will fill QPAC’s Glasshouse Theatre with their monumental Scottish post-rock the same night.

Thursday 28 May brings south London art-rockers Dry Cleaning to The Princess Theatre, touring their acclaimed new album Secret Love, produced by Cate Le Bon and hailed by Uncut as the work of “the most important British guitar band of their generation.”

The weekend delivers legendary art-pop duo Sparks to the Glasshouse Theatre on Saturday 30 May, with Matt Berninger of The National performing solo at The Princess Theatre on Sunday 31 May.

The following week is no less impressive. Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon (with Hana Stretton) plays The Princess Theatre on Tuesday 2 June, before Thursday 4 June delivers a stacked night of two shows: Alison Wonderland on her Ghost World Tour at The Tivoli – one of the most recognised figures in electronic music, with over a billion streams and a historic Coachella headline slot, returning to Brisbane club rooms – and North Carolina five-piece Wednesday at The Princess Theatre, whose songs sit somewhere between Dinosaur Jr’s scuzz and the lonesome highways of country.

The fortnight closes with acclaimed poet and musician Kae Tempest at The Princess Theatre on Sunday 7 June.

First staged in 2020, Open Season began as a single-venue, four-week series before growing into one of Australia’s most ambitious annual winter programs. Now in its sixth year, it spans eight weeks, activates more than ten venues across Brisbane and brings together local, national and international artists across a genuinely cross-genre program that encompasses punk, indie, electronic, jazz, hip-hop, psych, spoken word and beyond.

Among the highlights to come later in the season: the legendary Eddy Current Suppression Ring return for a rare live appearance; Hiatus Kaiyote bring their jazz-soul-funk to The Tivoli; and the keystone Against The Grain Festival, celebrating 10 years of Brisbane promoters GRAIN, transforms The Princess Theatre and the Clarence Corner precinct with more than 30 artists including Stereolab, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and Hatchie.

Tickets are available at openseason.live