Two-time Grammy award-nominated band The Lumineers, who were set to perform two shows in South Africa on November 30 at the Grand Arena in Cape Town and December 2 at the SunBet Arena in Pretoria, have added a second Cape Town date to their tour.
The new date is November 29 at the Grand Arena. These dates mark the bands long overdue return to South Africa and is also a celebration of their fourth studio album, “Brightside”.
The album, which was released earlier this year, includes the chart-topping first single and title track “Brightside”, as well as “A.M. RADIO”, “BIG SHOT” and “Where Are We”. Each of these singles has been paired with an official music video.
The band’s success is widely credited to their spirited live shows and this tour is expected to be no different. “Brightside”, which was produced by long-time collaborator Simone Felice and mixed and engineered by David Baron, marks the Lumineers’ first new music release in more than two years.
The album was created under the most unique circumstances band members Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites had ever experienced.
Five months into a projected two-year tour for their 2019 album, “III”, the pandemic hit and forced them off the road in March 2020.
A few months later, Fraites and Schultz took the opportunity to start working on new material together. Schultz recalled: “I was showing up at Simone and David’s studio not really knowing what we’d be doing that day, just letting things happen.
“There was no planning or choreography – we were creating in real time. And that experience seeped into the making of “Brightside”.’
In contrast to the narrative-driven “III”, the songs of “Brightside” are buoyed by an underlying optimism.
Schultz compares the making of “Brightside” to taking on a different style of cooking, where you have these skills in one area and you’re trying to apply them, but you’re also naive about how to do this other thing.
“A big part of that was just finding the spirit of each song. So this is an exciting new direction for us. I don’t think I could go back to making records the old way now, because this one was so much more fun to make, and it feels so much more alive.
“There’s a fire to this record that I don’t think we were willing to go for in the past. We were able to get out of our own way and go direct to the source.”
Tickets are available from Ticketmaster.co.za.