The Pixies announced their 40th anniversary U.S. tour this week, a run of September dates that will bring them through Greenville, Louisville, Santa Fe, and a couple of festival stops before finishing in Tucson. They are also partway through a UK and European run that goes from May through July.

Forty years is a remarkable amount of time for a band that did not exist for roughly twelve of them.

The Pixies formed in Boston in 1986, spent a few years making records that almost nobody bought and almost everybody who mattered listened to obsessively, broke up in 1993 in a fax, reunited in 2004 to one of the more enthusiastic critical receptions of that decade, and have been touring and occasionally recording ever since. They released “The Night the Zombies Came” in October, their first album with new bassist Emma Richardson, who joined in 2024 after Paz Lenchantin’s departure. It is their sixth record as a reunited band and their eighth overall.

The thing worth sitting with, forty years in, is not just that they survived. It is that they survived without becoming a nostalgia act, which is genuinely difficult to do.

There is a version of the Pixies story that ends in 1993, gets excavated by rock critics in the nineties and two-thousands, and eventually gets packaged as a greatest hits tour playing “Gigantic” and “Here Comes Your Man” in theaters for fans who were not alive when those songs were recorded. Plenty of bands took that path. The Pixies took a different one.

Part of it is the songs themselves. The loud-quiet-loud formula that Frank Black and Kim Deal built their records around in the late eighties did not just influence Nirvana, though it absolutely influenced Nirvana. It influenced everything that came after it in guitar-based music. The dynamic of tension and release, the way “Gouge Away” or “Debaser” move between a hush and a scream, never got old because it was never really a production technique. It was a structural principle. You can use it in any era and it still works.

Part of it is also that the Pixies never pretended to be more mythological than they are. Black Francis, who spends most of his time as Frank Black, has always been a working songwriter rather than a symbol of himself. He has released a considerable number of solo records, toured relentlessly, and approached the Pixies’ reunion and subsequent work as a professional engagement rather than an identity. That lack of preciousness has kept the band from calcifying.

The lineup has changed. Kim Deal left again in 2013 and has not returned. Paz Lenchantin was with them for a decade and made two records. Emma Richardson, formerly of Band of Skulls, is the newest addition. The fact that each lineup change generated coverage and conversation but did not derail the band says something about how well Black in particular has managed the operation.

“The Night the Zombies Came” is not their best record. It is not trying to be. It is trying to be a decent late-period Pixies album, which is a real thing that exists and has value. It sits comfortably in the catalog without elbowing the classics out of the way, and there are moments on it that recall why the band mattered in the first place.

The question that forty-year anniversary tours always raise is: who is this for? The answer with the Pixies is more interesting than usual. It is for the people who were there in 1989. It is for the people who discovered them through Nirvana interviews in 1994. It is for the people who came to them through guitar culture ten years after that. The Pixies are one of those bands whose entry points are distributed across multiple generations, which means any given room on the anniversary tour is going to contain people who arrived at “Surfer Rosa” through completely different doors.

That cross-generational reach is not an accident. It is a consequence of the songs being genuinely good rather than merely influential. Influence fades. Good songs do not.

They will play “Caribou.” The crowd will probably lose their minds. Forty years in, the loud-quiet formula still holds.