Kasabian

There was a moment in the mid-2000s when Kasabian felt like an inevitability. The Leicester rock band arrived fully formed, sounding like they had absorbed every lesson from Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, and Chemical Brothers and translated it into something that worked on a festival main stage at any scale. Debut single “Club Foot” hit like a freight train. The album that followed it confirmed this was not an accident.

Tom Meighan fronted the band through most of that first decade and a half. Sergio Pizzorno wrote most of the music. The partnership produced six studio albums and a run of headlining slots at Glastonbury and Reading and across Europe that put them in a category most British rock bands never reach. Then in 2020 Meighan left, following a guilty plea to assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Pizzorno stepped up as frontman. The band continued.

That transition mattered. It would have ended lesser bands. Kasabian chose to treat it as a reset. The 2022 album The Alchemist’s Euphoria was their first with Pizzorno as sole vocalist, and while the reviews were mixed, the band’s live presence was not. They still sold out arenas. The audience had made a decision of its own.

Now comes Act III, their ninth studio album, with a lead single from late 2025 called “Hippie Sunshine” and a collaborative track with Calvin Harris called “Release the Pressure” from February 2026. Both point toward a sound that is broader and more electronic than their earlier work, Pizzorno leaning into the producer side of his identity more fully than before. The shift is not a betrayal of anything. It is the logical extension of where the band has been heading for years.

The cultural moment also feels right for them. Kasabian are booked to appear on Saturday Night Live UK in April 2026, one of the early shows of the new British franchise that launched in March. The same program launched its run with Wolf Alice and Wet Leg as the opening musical guests. The company is right.

They are also headlining Finsbury Park in London in July, their biggest London show yet. For a band that spent several years under a cloud of uncertainty about whether they could survive the circumstances of their frontman change, getting here is not nothing.

Kasabian have always occupied a particular space in British rock: too direct for the critics who wanted their music more artfully obscure, too British for American crossover, but absolutely essential to anyone who has ever watched them command a field of 80,000 people at dusk. That kind of power does not come from anywhere except earned presence.

They are from Leicester. They have never forgotten it. There is something durable in that. When everything else in rock is trading on nostalgia or irony or both, Kasabian just want to make you feel it, and after two decades they still mostly do.