Hannah Everingham 'Big Surprise' Album Release Tour Announced

Better get the balloons out and / or bake a cake — Hannah Everingham is hosting Big Surprise parties all across Aotearoa New Zealand this spring, quite literally, as that's the title of the Ōtautahi songwriter's just-announced upcoming new album. We've been treated to a couple of preview tunes from album number three already, with May's free-spirited and playful 'Judi Dench', plus Everingham's propulsive yet yearning latest single 'Want You'.

Recorded live with bandmates Thomas Isbister on drums and Michael Kime on bass, "in full takes in the former home of renowned New Zealand children’s writer Margaret Mahy in О̄hinetahi Governor’s Bay, New Zealand, and at Josh Logan’s home studio in Lyttelton", Big Surprise will be out digitally on 7th August (physically the following week). Inventively drawing "on languages of pop-rock and sci-fi, psychedelic folk and post-punk", preorders for the limited vinyl LP / compact disc editions are available now. Grace your eyes and eyes with the lead singles below, and catch Everingham in a variety of onstage configurations at the following dates...

"BIG SURPRISE is accepting change, accepting transformation, accepting courage, accepting love, whatever that does, nothing is too deep, nothing is lost - what could be wrong when you are always in time with the universe, leaving the place you never were, returning to somewhere new and looking at the stars AGAIN! Land like an old friend, dark sky like tomorrow has already arrived. I came home singing and I bought myself a new perfume."

Hannah Everingham - Big Surprise Tour 2026

Saturday 29th August - Pearl Diver, Dunedin (solo)
Saturday 5th September - Loons, Lyttelton (full band)
Sunday 6th September - Whammy, Auckland (duo)
Thursday 10th September - Meow, Wellington (duo)*

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR
*Wellington tickets via hannaheveringham.com

Press release:

BIG SURPRISE!!!!! ARE YOU COMING TO THE SHOW????

Hannah Everingham tours New Zealand in celebration of her new album Big Surprise, out August 7th 2026. Featuring the songs ‘Judi Dench’ & ‘Want You’ - Big Surprise, Hannah Everingham’s third album, holds a magic in its name. How could a surprise be big or small? Seemingly defining and defying its own contradictions, here is an artist who sings of crabs, earthquakes, shopping in New York, Judi Dench and a lover who gifts flowers by lifting them, roots and all, from the earth.

Garnering attention since the release of her debut album Between Bodies in 2022, Hannah Everingham has been described as an artist beamed out of a timeless sonic realm - a seasoned navigator between shadow and jubilation. She has performed across New Zealand, in Australia & New York. This tour includes her first NZ shows since the release of her acclaimed 2024 album Siempre Tiene Flores, and will be a celebration of her new album across the country with a full band show in Lyttelton and duo shows in Te Ika-a-Māui.

Big Surprise, recorded in full takes between the former home of New Zealand children’s writer Margaret Mahy in Governor’s Bay & in Lyttelton captures a similar playfulness - an enchantment for children and adults alike, a leaning towards the supernatural mystery. Love as, and is, the real force that leaps outside the body, just as this music pours out of the record. Hopefulness in the island of the music, the lightness of living within a deep blue darkness. This is, like an island, a world approaching its own boundary. The big surprise is life itself, the road that unwinds only as you move. Yet these shifting melodies over thick rhythm give Big Surprise a fluidity, much like seaweed that binds itself to the volcanic peninsula from where the album was made. Both bound and freely floating, both made of the bright sky and the blue sea, it is true, just as Everingham sings, that -

in the morning
I will wake up
free