They Might Be Giants

×

Expand

Shervin Lainez

A close-up of They Might Be Giants.

They Might Be Giants

media release: Two very different shows. Two "Evening with” performances. Eight-piece band. Three horns. Two sets. Zero openers. Starts early. Gets loud. Renowned for their infamous live shows, They Might Be Giants has now expanded to an eight-piece band, including a three-piece horn section. Audiences can expect a spontaneous, sprawling, and utterly enthralling musical event unlike any other. Yes, TMBG is in top form and back on the road with a show that is truly ever-evolving. The first set of each night spotlights a different album, while the second set will draw from every era of their career — from the earliest days of Dial-A-Song and the platinum album Flood to their brand new 2026 releases. With all the favorites, remarkable deep cuts, and dazzling musical improvisations, each performance is a distinct celebration of the band’s singular songbook. These shows, along with the stand-alone EP, Eyeball, and all-new album The World Is to Dig, are all testament to the fact that this band will not slow down.

"[They Might Be Giants] are practitioners of the ancient art form of popcraft, constructing tight, clever confections to ensure the hooks are delivered cleanly and efficiently." ★★★★ - MOJO

“Perfect pop music can come from anywhere and can go anywhere. They Might Be Giants have demonstrated this for a quarter century…" - The New Yorker

"From their earliest days as a two-man operation built on drum machines, accordion, and a kind of conceptual mischief, John Flansburgh and John Linnell treated pop music less like a tradition to honor than a system to test. Genres weren’t lanes; they were materials." - Chronogram

“One of rock’s longest and most prodigious partnerships” - Consequence

“Catch them if you can — their live shows always deliver.” - USA Toda

On April 14, Brooklyn legends They Might Be Giants released their highly anticipated new album, The World Is to Dig, available in all formats at TMBGshop.com and on streaming services. An exclusive 180-gram vinyl color variant will be available at indie retail shops this Friday, April 17. The band’s first full-length since 2021’s Grammy-nominated BOOK, the album stands as a testament to the duo’s undying creative momentum, blending sharp songwriting and real experimentation into a refreshingly original, 18-song collection that showcases the duo’s timeless originality.

Alongside the release, They Might Be Giants have shared the album’s focus track, “Get Down.” The unstoppable dancefloor-filler finds the band pounding out huge musical hooks to a cautionary lyrical mantra: some uninvited guests have an urgent two-word message: Get down. The accompanying video is directed by graphic design superstar Paul Sahre.

They Might Be Giants have also announced new fall dates for their wildly popular THE BIGGER SHOW TOUR, bringing their multi-night live show to cities like Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Washington, DC, and more.

Every multi-night stand will be unique from the night before. The band will spotlight a different album from their catalog each night in their first set, and then play all the fan favorites along with delightful deep cuts in the second. Working with a stellar eight-piece band featuring a three-piece horn section, the shows are “An Evening with” so there is no opener. Sprawling, enthralling, unpredictable, and endlessly entertaining – THE BIGGER SHOW TOUR is an evening of dazzling arrangements, startling improvisation, and genuine positivity. It is an experience unlike any other.

They Might Be Giants treat the entire history of popular music as a trampoline rather than a rulebook. Like two pinballs pinging off of each other through musical murals stretching into a giddy ether, They Might Be Giants move by ricochet. On The World Is to Dig, the multi-Grammy-winning duo continues bouncing through the pop multiverse, digging into whatever they find with playful zeal. John Linnell and John Flansburgh continue to fire ideas off one another like particles in a perpetual motion experiment, each collision producing a new angle, a new joke, a new melodic left turn, resulting in tracks packed with esoteric references, mischievous details, and left-field detours. Untethered from trends, immune to nostalgia, and equally ready to draw from Tin Pan Alley theatrics and contemporary pop culture references, The World Is to Dig is the sound of a band very much in motion; not chasing relevance but generating it on their own terms.

That sense of motion is no accident. For Flansburgh, the freedom of They Might Be Giants has always come from refusing to plant a flag in any single approach. “There’s a tremendous advantage to being in a project that is open-ended,” he says. “We can do something that's straight-ahead punk or dig into Count Basie, and that keeps things zesty. The people with their arms folded in the back row might wonder, ‘Do these guys still have it?’ To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we ever ‘had it’ but the truth is, right now, we've got something new.”

 “I think both John and I are kind of professionally dysmorphic,” Flansburgh continues. “When I think of rock culture, I don't think of our band as having any place in it. I never think about where we land in the world.” The album’s gestation followed a similar creative pattern: each John would workshop ideas in their home studio only to bring the best ones into a fluid musical conversation, at which point they became inextricably They Might Be Giants-ified. At that point in the process, Flansburgh adds, The World Is To Dig gained some added fluidity. “This album, like our first album, was all made by the same people at the same time in the same place. It has its own musical universe,” he says. “Even as songs pull apart and get further afield, it became naturally cohesive. Our most successful records hang together in very natural ways, and this album has that continuity.” Linnell agrees, noting that the duo’s penchant for brevity aids in that strength: “Very early on, we admired bands that had short songs that said what they had to say and finished. There was this movement in the mid-20th century to write confessional poems full of very specific personal emotion, but I want to write about geostationary orbits. That would be an interesting poem for me. And speaking for Flansburgh, there's something beautifully opaque and elliptical about his recent lyrical ideas.”

“We do this for ourselves. We’re trying to make the kind of album that we would be interested in,” Linnell says. In the end, the project acts as a thesis: a duo of funny, intelligent, creative musicians still primarily guided by genuine affection for songs, ideas, and moments that move them. On The World Is to Dig, that instinct remains They Might Be Giants’ greatest constant: proof that curiosity, love, and joy are more sustaining than any trend, and that chasing those emotions naturally will always result in new discoveries.