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The profile · researched 10 October 2026
Airbag's long way round: from Oslo bedroom EPs to three English dates and a first live album
Airbag are a Norwegian progressive rock band who spent twenty years building an audience by free download, line-up attrition and word of mouth. With their first official live album out since November 2025 and new material appearing in sets, they play three English shows in October 2026.
Five schoolfriends and a Pink Floyd ticket
Airbag began in Oslo in 2004, formed by five classmates who had seen Pink Floyd on the Division Bell tour as teenagers. That is not an incidental detail — the guitar tone, the long instrumental builds and the preference for space over density all trace back to it, and reviewers have been making the comparison ever since without the band showing much interest in shaking it off.
The group's first audience came from giving the music away. Three EPs released between 2004 and 2007, circulated by free download and MySpace, accumulated close to 250,000 downloads, which was enough to get Karisma Records to sign them in August 2008. The debut album, Identity, followed in 2009 and was largely a reworking of that EP material rather than a clean break from it.
Drummer Henrik Bergan Fossum joined for the second record, All Rights Removed, in 2011 — the album that gave them the seventeen-minute Homesick, still the piece they tend to end concerts with fifteen years later.
Becoming a trio
The 2013 album The Greatest Show on Earth is the one most often treated as the turning point, where the band stopped sounding like admirers of a style and started writing inside it. Prog magazine's assessment — that this was the moment Airbag became something more particular — has been quoted back at them regularly since.
Then the band halved. Two founding members left after Disconnected in 2016, leaving vocalist and keyboard player Asle Tostrup, guitarist Bjørn Riis and Fossum to work out what Airbag was without them. Rather than recruit, they kept it a trio and leaned into electronics and arrangement, a direction that continued on A Day at the Beach in 2020, which drew on 1980s synth records and film scoring more than on 1970s rock.
A Day in the Studio / Unplugged in Oslo followed in 2021, a live-in-the-room hybrid release made in the period when touring was not an option. Riis, meanwhile, has kept up a parallel solo catalogue of seven albums, most recently Fimbulvinter in April 2025, built around the Norse winter that precedes Ragnarok.
The Century of the Self
The sixth studio album, The Century of the Self, arrived on Karisma in June 2024: five tracks, roughly forty-seven minutes, with the fourteen-minute-plus Tear It Down at the end and the ten-minute Dysphoria at the start. Between them sit Tyrants and Kings, Awakening and Erase, written across a stretch from May 2022 to January 2024.
Lyrically it turned outward — censorship, demagoguery, the machinery of persuasion — while keeping the band's domestic register, songs that work as songs before they work as arguments. Writing for The Prog Report, Steve Joyce singled out Riis's bass playing as among the best he could remember hearing and described Tostrup's delivery as emotional and haunting, recommending the record as an alternative to watching the news. Elsewhere the album was widely read as their strongest since The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a specific compliment rather than a general one: it points at cohesion over ambition.
Notably, Airbag write economically. Six studio albums in seventeen years with the same label is a slow rate for a band with this much touring behind them, and it shows in sets that can draw on every record without padding.
Dysphoria, and the record the audience asked for
On 21 November 2025, after sixteen years and six studio albums, Airbag finally put out an official live album. Dysphoria – Live in the Netherlands was recorded at Poppodium Boerderij in Zoetermeer, a venue chosen because it hosted their first show outside Norway in 2010 and because they have kept going back. Riis framed the release plainly: the fans had been asking for a live album for years, so it was for them.
The double CD and double vinyl, with a limited first pressing on white and blue marbled vinyl, runs The Century of the Self in full — Dysphoria, Tyrants and Kings, Awakening, Erase, Tear It Down — then adds Machines and Men, Redemption, Never Coming Home and Homesick. It was recorded and mixed with engineer Vegard Kleftås Sleipnes, with artwork by Tostrup, and the live line-up on it includes bassist Øystein Sootholtet and keyboard player Simen Valldal Johannessen alongside the core three.
Reviewing it for Prog on 4 January 2026, Johnny Sharp found the live versions did more than duplicate the studio ones: sharper contrasts on Tyrants and Kings and Erase, more room for Riis's guitar at the instrumental peaks, and a warmer reading from Tostrup, whose studio vocals can sound dry. The expanded introduction to Dysphoria and the closing climb through Tear It Down came out as the high points.
Where they are in October 2026
The current touring year has been billed simply as Live 2026. It opened on 8 March at Cruise to the Edge, on the pool deck of the Norwegian Pearl out of Miami — their second stint as returning guests on that festival — where they aired an unreleased song called Crazy between Tyrants and Kings and Erase. That is the first public sign of material beyond The Century of the Self; no seventh studio album has been announced.
A home festival date followed on 21 March at the Larvik guitar and bass festival at Bølgen Kulturhus, then a short European run in May: Das Rind in Rüsselsheim on the 22nd, Chez Paulette in Nancy on the 23rd and Poppodium 013 in Tilburg on the 24th.
Three English shows close out the year — Club Academy in Manchester on 22 October, the O2 Academy in Birmingham on 23 October and The Underworld in London on 24 October. These are the dates currently on sale, and they are the band's only announced UK appearances; no support act has been listed for any of the three. Beyond them, the diary holds Poland in early November, Cosmopolite in Oslo on 15 January 2027 and the Midsummer Prog Festival in Maastricht on 26 June 2027. For a band that has toured with Yes, Saga, Anathema, The Pineapple Thief and Riverside, the English venues remain small, which is part of why the shows sell.
The show, now
A current Airbag headline set runs between about eighty minutes and an hour and thirty-five, depending on the room. The Tilburg show at Poppodium 013 on 24 May 2026 started at 21:10 and finished at 22:45 — eight songs in the main set (Machines and Men, Redemption, Killer, Broken, Sounds That I Hear, Erase, Tyrants and Kings, Megalomaniac) and two in the encore (Colours, then Homesick I-III), drawing on six different albums. Festival slots are shorter and weighted towards the newest record: at Cruise to the Edge on 8 March 2026 they played six songs, opening with Dysphoria and including the unreleased Crazy, closing on Homesick III. The core trio is supplemented live by bass and keyboards — Jørgen Hagen and Anders Hovdan at The Dome in London in April 2025, Øystein Sootholtet and Simen Valldal Johannessen on the live album — and the band play in black with no theatrical staging, relying on the house lighting rig. Reviewing that London show, Marko's Gig Archive called them heirs to the Pink Floyd crown and described sparse soundscapes that break open into riffs and Gilmour-shaped solos, with the audience fixated and the applause immediate enough to pull them straight back for the encore; the same review's only real complaints were that eighty minutes was short for a catalogue this size and that the lighting and backdrop did not do the music justice. Setlist records from 2026 show the shape holding across continents: a long-form new piece early, a sweep through the back catalogue in the middle, and Homesick to finish.
Researched from airbagsound.com · karismarecords.no · karismarecords.no · roguesgalleryprog.substack.com · progreport.com · loudersound.com · markosgigarchive.blog · setlist.fm