Dead Poet Society

Two days to a name, then eight tours of Mexico

The band came together in Boston in 2013 among students at Berklee College of Music, and chose a name in a hurry — the decision was made two days after they formed, just before their first concert. Four EPs followed in short order: Haviland and Weapons in 2013, Axiom in 2015, Dempsey in 2016. None of them moved the needle at home.

What changed the trajectory was an audience somewhere else. In 2016 the Mexican music blog Pepe Problemas picked up their recordings, and the response was large enough to sustain eight separate tours of Mexico across the following two years, including support slots for Sputnik. By the end of that stretch the group had relocated to Los Angeles, where it is still based. A 2019 run opening for Badflower put them in front of American rock crowds at scale, and in 2020 they signed to Spinefarm Records.

The line-up has been stable since: Jack Underkofler on vocals, guitar and keyboards, Jack Collins on guitar, backing vocals, keyboards and drum programming, Dylan Brenner on bass since 2019, and Will Goodroad on drums.

The full-stop years

The debut album, -!-, arrived in 2021, its title generally read aloud as the exclamation album and its tracklist wrapping song names in full stops:.CoDA.,.intoodeep.,.SALT. The band's own description of the music is heavy indie rock — down-tuned guitar riffs sitting underneath choruses pitched closer to pop. AllMusic files the same records as dark alternative hard rock with progressive leanings.

American rock radio took the heavier half. ".CoDA." reached No. 19 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart in 2020, ahead of the album, and ".intoodeep." got to No. 28. Both are still played every night five years on.

Fission and a radio run

The second album, Fission, came out on 26 January 2024, a thirteen-track record the band walked through song by song in the press at the time. Underkofler framed the writing around plain disclosure rather than invention: "Talk about what you go through and articulate that correctly — there's no truer art than that." In the same week he described having had almost no plan for the band when he joined a decade earlier, and a later-acquired working theory that there is a fixed number of people on Earth who could like the music and most of them simply have not heard it yet.

The singles did the arithmetic for him. "Running in Circles" reached No. 9 on Mainstream Rock in 2023, and the version of "HURT" cut with The Warning went to No. 8 there and No. 15 on Hard Rock. "My Condition" reached No. 28 on Alternative Airplay in 2024.

Monarch, twelve tracks, Paul Meany

The third album was trailed from midsummer. "Roach" appeared around 30 June 2026 with a video Underkofler co-directed with Mindreader, and the band's note on it was four words long before the explanation: "Resent. That is what this song is about. It's about those who have wronged you, taken advantage of you, hurt you." "Sinner Systems" followed, then "Cold", which Goodroad described as being about people performing for one another and competing for a place in a social hierarchy until they lose track of what they actually wanted.

Monarch was announced on 10 August 2026 and released on 2 October through Spinefarm: twelve tracks, produced by Paul Meany, mixed by Adam Hawkins. The running order is Hollywood On Fire, Roach, Die If You Don't, Sinner Systems, Lost, Cold, Psalm 136, Dead On The Inside, Miami For The Weekend, Get Hot, The Park and The Art of Suffering.

Reviewing it for Crucial Rhythm, Samuel Stevens read the record as the band stripping back to essentials while moving into darker material, and argued the twelve tracks hold together as one line of thought about anger, grief and alienation rather than twelve separate ones. "Cold" went to No. 13 on Mainstream Rock and No. 38 on Alternative Airplay.

Where they stand in November 2026

2026 was spent almost entirely on the road before the album even landed: festival sets at Welcome to Rockville on 9 May and Louder Than Life on 18 September, a run with Chevelle, and dates with Highly Suspect. On 27 July the band announced a 25-date co-headline tour of the United States with Honey Revenge, Hunny and Broadside supporting throughout, with the artist pre-sale on 28 July using the code ROACH and general tickets from 31 July. It opened at the House of Blues in San Diego on 23 October.

Then the calendar broke. Muse announced further European arena dates for The Wow! Signal on 2 October, and confirmed Dead Poet Society as support on the 2026 UK and European leg. On 7 October the band said they had cancelled some of their own American shows to take it, running 12 November to 8 December, including two nights at Co-op Live in Manchester on 12 and 13 November. Underkofler was blunt about the arithmetic: "This opportunity is not something we can pass up and it's not something that we can reschedule or anything." The band has said it intends to return to the cities it dropped.

Their own European tour — announced on 30 June 2026 and the largest they have headlined — runs from the end of January into early March 2027, 31 shows across 18 countries. The UK and Ireland leg takes in Bristol, Newcastle, Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, the O2 Institute in Birmingham on 4 February and the Electric Ballroom in London on 6 February, before Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki.