The Black Queen Announces Fall 2026 Tour
The Black Queen just added a second American leg to a tour most people assumed wasn't coming back at all. The band, built around Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato and longtime touring tech Steven Ryan Alexander, hadn't played a show since 2019 before this year, and the new dates run September 9 through October 9, twenty-two stops celebrating ten years of their debut album Fever Daydream, played front to back, with songs from the follow-up Infinite Games worked in around it. Joining them on stage this time are Danny Lohner, who spent years touring with Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle, and Dillinger's own drummer Chris Pennie, neither of whom had any connection to the project's original recordings.
The band's whole existence has run counter to how music usually gets built. Puciato and Josh Eustis, the producer behind Telefon Tel Aviv, met backstage at a Dillinger show and bonded over a shared love of Massive Attack and Aphex Twin, genres that had nothing to do with either of their main bands at the time. They wrote the record living together in a stretch of downtown LA near Skid Row, and when they finally had something to release, they didn't announce it anywhere. The first single went out as 233 numbered vinyl copies, sold only through a mailing list, with zero social media promotion, the exact opposite of how a band fronted by an already-known metal vocalist was supposed to launch a synth project. It worked anyway. Fever Daydream sold out its full pressing the day it came out in January 2016, and Puciato went straight back into the studio to finish what turned out to be Dillinger Escape Plan's final album before that band ended for good.
Eustis isn't named in the press around this run, but that's not new for him specifically. He sat out touring for the Infinite Games cycle too, back in 2018, while staying on as a full member of the band, with a fill-in gear tech covering his live parts so he could focus on his own project. Nothing in what the band has said suggests this time is any different.
What's happening now reads less like a reunion tour cashing in on nostalgia and more like a band genuinely surprised by its own comeback. In their announcement, Puciato and Alexander described the project as having existed mostly "as an abstract feeling" for most of its fifteen years, only actually touring for four of them, and said flatly that they hadn't predicted how the first batch of reunion shows would feel once they were back onstage with Lohner and Pennie in the lineup. A special tenth-anniversary pressing of Fever Daydream is going out exclusively on this run.
The Black Queen, official site and tour dates
The Black Queen, Ice to Never, official video
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