ANCIIENTS Announce UK/European Headline Tour for Fall 2026!

British Columbia progressive metal band ANCIIENTS announce their first UK and European headline tour in over a decade. Dubbed Ascent of the Fallen Ones, the run takes in fifteen dates across the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, opening 26 September in Leeuwarden and closing out 15 October in Bragança.

Anciients are a physically demanding live act. Their sets work on tension and release; long, coiling passages of layered guitar work that build until they don’t, collapsing into full-weight eruptions with little warning. Shows on their recent North American return drew attention to just how deliberate that dynamic is in practice: the quiet moments aren’t simply breathing room, they’re the setup to grandiose climaxes. Mike Hannay’s drumming is central to it, holding the architecture together through sudden metric shifts and hard, precise accents.

The tour lands in support of Beyond the Reach of the Sun, the band’s third album, released in 2024 on Season of Mist. It’s the record that ended eight years of near silence: a stretch shaped by personal crisis, lineup changes, a pandemic, and a full creative reset. The result is their most direct and dynamic work to date: ten songs that lean harder into the band’s rock instincts without letting go of the weight, capped by a JUNO Award for Metal/Hard Music Album of the Year. For European audiences, it also marks the first chance to see the current lineup live, with guitarist Brock MacInnes and bassist Rory O’Brien both having come aboard before the album was recorded.