Due for release on Friday 6th February 2026, the record will be their fifth full-length studio album, and arrives on the heels of last year’s acclaimed Top 30 effort ‘Light A Bigger Fire’. The release will be supported by an extensive 24-date UK and European tour, including a return to the iconic Paradiso in Amsterdam along with other familiar territories. The tour will culminate at Manchester’s Albert Hall, a show which will be a homecoming and the band’s biggest ever headline show.
Prior to the album tour dates, IST IST will be rounding off 2025, the year which marks their first decade as a band, previewing tracks from ‘DAGGER’ at four UK shows in Leeds, Glasgow, London and Newcastle.
With a swelling fanbase across Europe and some of their biggest UK shows to date on the horizon, the anthemic quality of ‘DAGGER’ feels destined to cut through even the most capacious of spaces.
Wasting no time to sit on their laurels, IST IST launched into laying down the bones of what would become their upcoming fifth album:
“We started working on the album as soon as we got back from the European tour in late 2024. The momentum you carry from a tour into the studio is powerful and you’re still in that live headspace, so the music you write in those moments tends to be more visceral. You go with the flow a little bit more rather than it being methodical. What you end up with is a collection of songs already primed for the stage.”
Alive with ambitions for the band’s next evolutionary stage, IST IST approached esteemed producer Joe Cross (Hurts, Courteeners, Slow Readers Club), tasking him with creating a conduit with which to conduct their big ideas. Rekindling the chemistry that had spawned their previous work together, pretty soon, something special began to materialise from the partnership again. Bass player Andy Keating adds:
“We wanted to make some braver and more brash choices during the recording process. We wanted to make this record for ourselves first and foremost. There was no agenda beyond capturing the post-tour energy and playing the sort of things we wanted to listen to. The result of that is our most direct album since our debut ‘Architecture’.
Lead single and album opener “I Am The Fear” is demonstrative of this brave new world; an electrifying juggernaut piled high with oscillating synth strokes, meteoric basslines, and stacked guitar tones. Whilst the intrinsic, shadowy essence of IST IST’s trademark sound remains firmly in place, a panoply of new influences and inspiration ripples across these 10 tracks with a striking sense of redefinition.
From the lightning bolt pop immediacy of “Warning Signs”, to the skyscraping synth reachings of “The Echo”; the loping rock swagger of “Burning”, to the scintillating sci-fi soundtrack-primed “Encouragement”, and the spacious ambience of “Song For Someone”, ‘DAGGER ’glitters from the darkness with luminescent melodies and incisive hooks.
Whilst ‘DAGGER’ charts another seismic step forward for the band in terms of confidence, control, and execution, fans will be reassured to hear that it has come at no sacrifice to their modus operandi. Completely self-funded and due to be released completely independently via their own Kind Violence Records imprint, five albums in, ‘DAGGER ’symbolises the driven DIY ethic that has been programmed into IST IST’s DNA since day dot.
