Father of Peace

Two friends and a word they made up

Father of Peace started in Tel Aviv in 2023 as a duo: Avshalom Ariel on guitar and vocals, Tom Bollig on drums and vocals, best friends since childhood. Ariel came to it with a producer's background rather than a band one, having worked on Toy, the Netta Barzilai song that won the Eurovision Song Contest for Israel in 2018.

Rather than take a genre label from anyone else, the pair coined one: suncore. Their own press describes it as a sound that burns with live intensity and conjures a deep mystery, at once ancient and immediate, raw, explosive and melodic, built to be experienced as much as heard. It is promotional language, but it points at something real in the writing — short songs that behave as though they have much more room than they do, with tempo and register shifting inside three minutes.

The Year of Madness, and the clip that travelled

The debut single, Escapism., arrived in May 2024 and was a cover of RAYE's song rather than an original. The debut album, The Year of Madness, followed in September 2024 on Selah Studios: eight tracks — Business State of Mind, Advice, Escapism., The Land of Foreign Suns, The Year of Madness, I'm a Unicorn, Enemy and Trapeze — arranged by Nir Horowitz and mixed by Gal Oved.

What moved it beyond a local release was Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit drawing attention to The Land of Foreign Suns, and a run of short-form video that gave the band an audience well outside Israel before they had toured widely.

The French rock magazine W-Fenec reviewed the album in March 2025, calling it eight incisive tracks and singling out Ariel's movement between spoken word, rap-singing and wordless vocalise, which the writer compared to Serj Tankian. The reference points offered were System of a Down, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Vampire Weekend, with Trapeze picked out for an airiness closer to Beatles-era McCartney. The verdict was one of the rock revelations of 2024. The band's own materials add The Mars Volta, and jazz and metal, to the list of things feeding in.

From duo to trio

April Mandil had played bass and sung since the band formed in 2023. She left in October 2025 to work on solo projects, and May Alpert joined in November 2025 on bass and vocals, turning the duo into a trio.

The summer of 2025 had already brought two singles, Heaven and No Complaints, alongside a deliberate change of look: artwork and video drawing on tarot imagery and medieval woodcuts, which is still the visual language around the current record.

The first thing written with Alpert in the room was Bluish, released at the end of January 2026, which pushes the bass forward and gives her a vocal line of her own. Persian followed as the next single, harder-edged and closer to the alternative end of what the band does.

Two records in one sleeve

The Year of Madness & The Mystery Century came out on 25 September 2026 through Trade Secret Records. It runs to sixteen tracks across two discs and forty-five minutes, which puts the average song well under three minutes.

The structure is the point: rather than replace the 2024 debut, the release binds it to the new material under a single title, so the eight songs that built the audience sit alongside the second batch written as a three-piece. It also explains the name the band has been touring under all year, which was announced before the record it is promoting existed in shops.

Where they are now

The Year of Madness & The Mystery Century Tour has been the band's first genuinely global run. After three sold-out shows in the United States, they played a club leg in July 2026 — Beat Kitchen in Chicago on 8 July, Mercury Lounge in New York on 11 July — before heading to Japan and Australia in August.

The Japanese dates were Summer Sonic: Makuhari Messe in Chiba on 15 August and Banpaku Kinen Kouen in Suita on 16 August, followed by Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on 18 August and the Prince Bandroom in Melbourne on 19 August.

The autumn leg is fifteen shows across Europe and Britain, promoted by Live Nation. Confirmed German-speaking dates are Szene in Vienna on 1 October, Heimathafen in Berlin on 4 October, Gruenspan in Hamburg on 14 October and Artheater in Cologne on 15 October, with a presale that opened on 24 June 2026 and general sale the following day.

The London show is at Islington Assembly Hall on Thursday 22 October 2026, presented by AEG, doors at 7pm, 16 and over, at £28.97 including booking fee and the venue levy. The venue is currently running a waiting list rather than selling tickets, which is the clearest single indicator of where demand sits for a band on its first proper British visit.

The set as it stands

Only a handful of setlists from this tour have been logged publicly, and they are consistent enough to read as a fixed show rather than a nightly rebuild. Chicago on 8 July and New York on 11 July shared the same opening twelve songs in the same order.

The shape is front-loaded with new material — the unreleased Of Course opens, then No Complaints, then Persian, which had its live debut in Chicago — before the debut album takes over in the middle third. Bluish and Heaven also made their live debuts on that July leg, which means a large part of what audiences in Europe will hear had been played fewer than ten times anywhere before the tour reached them.

Two covers are fixtures rather than novelties: RAYE's Escapism., which is the band's own debut single, and King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man, which sits late in the set and is the clearest signal of the progressive side of the writing. The Land of Foreign Suns is given an extended outro, and Trapeze has been played from within the crowd rather than the stage.