LANY

Nashville, 2014, and a name picked for the artwork

LANY came together in Nashville in March 2014, when Paul Klein met the drummer Jake Goss and the keyboard player Les Priest. The name reads as an acronym for Los Angeles and New York, though Klein has explained the decision in practical terms: the band wanted a four-letter word for design and aesthetic reasons as much as for geography. Early singles did the groundwork — "ILYSB" above all, then "Super Far" — and the self-titled debut album arrived in 2017, released through Polydor and Interscope.

"Malibu Nights" followed in 2018 and fixed the template the band has worked inside ever since: break-up writing delivered at a scale built for a large room, with Klein's voice sitting high and close. "mama's boy" came in 2020 and "gg bb xx" in 2021, and the collaborations stacked up alongside them — "Okay" with Julia Michaels, "Mean It" with Lauv. Across that stretch the band's touring base grew fastest outside the United States, particularly in south-east Asia, where sell-outs came earlier and more reliably than at home.

The duo years and the move off a major

Priest left on 7 April 2022 to work as a writer and producer in Nashville. Klein and Goss did not replace him. LANY has been a duo since, filled out on stage by Eric "Puff" Scarborough and Kim Vi, who have played keyboards, bass, guitar and backing vocals with the band since 2021.

The second change was commercial. "A Beautiful Blur", released in 2023, was the first LANY album on their own Sunset Garden imprint, and the band now reaches the market through Virgin Music Group distribution rather than a major label's release machinery. Everything since has come out the same way, which matters for how quickly they can move: the deluxe edition of their 2025 album landed five months after the original with no apparent label friction.

La Brea Avenue, June 2024

In June 2024 Klein was hit by a car while riding a Vespa home from the gym on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. He was knocked unconscious, has said he remembers nothing after the impact until waking on a stretcher as he was loaded into an ambulance, and was treated at Cedars-Sinai before being released a day later. Writing about it that month, he reported that his vitals were fine but that walking and moving around were still difficult.

LANY postponed shows on medical advice to speed the recovery, including the Australian and New Zealand dates. By the autumn he was back at work: the "A Beautiful Blur" world tour reached Philippine Arena in Bulacan on 12 October 2024, and by November 2024 he was out in Australia and visibly recovered, nearly five months on. The summer he lost to the crash then became the subject of the next record.

Soft, and then Soft 2

"Soft" was announced on 30 July 2025 and released on 10 October 2025 through Sunset Garden with Virgin Music Group distribution. It is a short album by design: ten tracks, thirty-four minutes. Klein and Goss produced it with Tommy King, Spike Stent mixed it and Randy Merrill mastered it, with Pino Palladino on bass and Andrew Aged on guitar among the session players — a more considered set of hands than the band had used before. "Know You Naked" went out as the lead single on 1 August 2025, "Last Forever" on 6 September. The album reached number 92 on Australia's ARIA chart.

Klein has framed the title as a decision rather than a mood: that it is easy to let the state of the world harden a person, and that the hard thing is to fight it and protect the softness and the things worth keeping. Melodic Magazine read the record as breathing new perspective and tenderness into life, the kind of clarity that only arrives after almost losing everything.

On 13 March 2026 the band added five tracks and a live video as "Soft 2", pushing the running time to just under fifty-three minutes. Among the additions were "Prettiest Thing I've Ever Seen", "I'm Doing Alright", "Finish Me" and "When Did You Stop Loving Me?" — the last of which had already been in the live set as an unreleased song, had gathered momentum on TikTok, and arrived on streaming services with an audience that already knew the words.

Thirty-eight dates, and then more

The Soft World Tour was announced on 16 October 2025: thirty-eight dates running from 23 January to 6 June 2026 across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Artist presales ran from 20 to 23 October 2025, with the general on-sale on Friday 24 October at 10am local time. The routing opened overseas in January with Dubai and Mumbai, picked up Lollapalooza dates in South America in March, then settled into a full North American leg from late March to early May.

The rooms were the biggest the band has headlined: Intuit Dome in Inglewood on 4 April, Barclays Center in Brooklyn on 11 April, the newly opened Pinnacle in Nashville on 18 April, Dickies Arena in Fort Worth on 25 April, and OVO Arena Wembley in London on 6 June. The announcement sold the production as neon-lit visuals and atmospheric lighting, intimacy at arena scale. What reviewers actually found was closer to the opposite of spectacle.

What the show does

It opens the same way most nights. Klein appears in silhouette — behind a curtain, or against a bank of red fluorescent light — the band plays the title track, and the reveal follows. Setlist.fm's aggregate for the tour, built from twenty-three logged shows out of forty-two documented, puts the average set at twenty-six songs, with "Soft" opening sixteen of them and "XXL" closing twenty-three. Twenty-one of those shows had no encore at all. The run began in Phoenix at the Arizona Financial Theatre on 26 March 2026, with KAIRO, a Nigerian-born twin duo, and the Welsh-Canadian singer ELIO opening.

The middle is where the band physically moves. At the Intuit Dome on 4 April the set ran twenty-six songs with two medleys — "Super Far" into "Mean It", and "Thru These Tears" into "I Quit Drinking" — and a stretch on a second stage for "Last Forever" and "13", during which Klein brought someone up from the floor to dance with him. Three nights earlier in Seattle the set was leaner at twenty-one songs and finished with "XXL" and "ILYSB" as a two-song encore. At the Delta Center in Salt Lake City on 28 March the B-stage section ran four songs, and the dancing partners included a couple from the crowd and Klein's fiancée.

Reviewers of the North American leg agree on what is and is not happening. Glide Magazine's account of the Phoenix opener described minimalist production with Klein as the centrepiece, lifting his hands to the light and conducting the room, and judged his connection with the crowd to be the point rather than any staging or choreography. The Utah review of the Salt Lake City show noted pastel tones, soft lighting and restrained visuals, with the pacing coming from Klein moving between the front of the stage and a keyboard. The loudest moment on much of the run was "When Did You Stop Loving Me?", sung back word for word while it was still unreleased.

Where they stand in October 2026

The tour did not end in June. Live Nation confirmed two further legs on 17 March 2026. The Australian run, the band's first there since the sold-out 2024 dates, starts at ICF Outdoors in Perth on 27 October, then John Cain Arena in Melbourne on 18 November, the TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney on 20 November and Riverstage in Brisbane on 22 November — the first chance Australian audiences get to hear the album live.

Between those two blocks sits the Philippines, still the band's strongest market: Philippine Arena in Bulacan on 8 November, SM Seaside in Cebu on 11 November and the Crocodile Park concert grounds in Davao on 14 November. It is their sixth visit, after mall shows in 2017, arena dates in 2018 and 2019, five sold-out nights in 2022 and the Philippine Arena show in October 2024. Two and a half years after losing a member and two years after Klein was carried off a Los Angeles street, LANY are the largest version of themselves they have ever been — and doing it without a major label behind the release.