The Pineapple Thief

Yeovil, 1999

Bruce Soord started The Pineapple Thief in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1999, as a place to put songs he was writing on his own. Cyclops Records carried the early albums until 2007, and the move to Kscope in 2008 put the band on a roster built around post-progressive British rock. Someone Here Is Missing, released in 2010, came wrapped in sleeve artwork by Storm Thorgerson.

Across the following years the catalogue grew to sixteen studio albums and six EPs, with Soord as the constant and the only original member. Speaking in October 2026 he described the band's history as containing "so many periods, so many epochs" that the earlier records feel like the work of different groups, and admitted he could not quite believe he was still talking about it "26, 27 years since I started".

The Harrison reset

The decisive change came in 2016, when Gavin Harrison — the drummer from Porcupine Tree and King Crimson — played on Your Wilderness and then stayed. Soord points to that arrival as the moment the band's prospects changed. The line-up settled around Soord on vocals, guitars and keyboards, Jon Sykes on bass, Steve Kitch on keyboards and Harrison on drums.

Dissolution followed in 2018 and Versions of the Truth in 2020. Give It Back, in 2022, went back through older material and rebuilt it around Harrison's playing. It Leads to This arrived in February 2024 and reached number one on the UK Rock chart and number two on the UK Independent Albums chart, the band's strongest showing to that point.

The live side of the catalogue is unusually well documented for a band of this size: Where We Stood in 2017, Hold Our Fire in 2019 and Nothing But the Truth in 2021, all drawn from headline shows. In December 2025 came Retracing Our Steps, an eight-disc anthology covering the 2007 to 2014 material.

Leaving Kscope

On 14 April 2026 InsideOut Music announced it had signed the band, ending a relationship with Kscope that had run since 2008. Soord called the deal "a definitive milestone" and said the band were "energized by this new partnership", while being careful about the old one: "We've been with K Scope since we started, and they were fantastic to us." Thomas Waber, who runs InsideOut, said it "feels like the right time to be working together".

Tickets for a North American headline run went on sale on 17 April 2026, three days after the signing was made public — a sign of how closely the label move and the touring plan were tied together.

Far and Wide, and the two-guitar rule

The album was announced on 7 August 2026 alongside New World Order, with a video by George Laycock of Black Tide Productions; God Knows followed as the third single. Far and Wide came out on 9 October 2026 on InsideOut, nine tracks long, with cover art taken from an abstract sculpture by Michael Schoenholtz.

The governing idea was a restriction. Soord decided the studio should not do anything the stage could not reproduce: "Let's just do what we do live," as he put it, "so we don't have to have any trickery in order to perform it live." In practice that meant no more than two guitar parts at any one time — "why have we got four or five guitars?" — and vocal harmonies limited to what five people can sing in a room. Harrison was arranging with the same picture in mind, hearing sections and thinking about how they would land in front of an audience.

Two of the songs come out of bereavement: Hold the Ashes was written after the death of Soord's father, and Still Living turns on mortality. God Knows moves from tribal drums and heavy riffing into solo piano; No Exceptions closes the record with its longest and most drawn-out guitar crescendo. The release ran to a limited 2CD and Blu-ray artbook with the bonus track Daylight, a disc of instrumentals and Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD 5.1 mixes, plus a digipak CD and gatefold vinyl in several colours.

Reception was strong without being unanimous. The Prog Report, reviewing on 5 October, called it the band's most accomplished work and singled out the 10/8 groove of New World Order and Scattering Like Flies as a masterclass from Harrison. MetalTalk called it "magnificent" and "a complete statement spread across nine tracks". The Progressive Subway, on 26 October, went the other way and found it boring. The album entered the Official Albums Chart on 18 October 2026 at number 28, reaching 15 on the physical and sales charts and 13 on the Homegrown chart.

Where things stand

The 2026 live year was built around festivals and one-off headline shows rather than a tour: Zorlu Center PSM in Istanbul on 25 June, Mount Edgcumbe Country Park in Cornwall on 27 June, Ilosaari in Joensuu on 3 July, CoolHead Brew in Helsinki the following night, Rootsfestivalen in Brønnøysund on 16 July and the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester on 2 August. The band played an in-store at hmv's Oxford Street shop in London on 14 October, five days after release.

The touring proper starts on 17 November 2026 at the Howard Theatre in Washington DC and runs through nineteen North American shows to the Hollywood Theatre in Vancouver on 13 December, taking in the Gramercy Theatre in New York on 20 November, the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 25 November, House of Blues Chicago on 27 November and The Bellwether in Los Angeles on 8 December.

The UK and European leg was announced in September 2026, with an artist presale on 9 September and general sale on 11 September. It opens at The Garage in Glasgow on 4 March 2027, then the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on 5 March, the O2 Academy in Sheffield on 6 March and The 1865 in Southampton on 7 March, before a long mainland run through France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and the Nordics. The band's line on it was blunt about priorities: "Playing live is at the very heart of what we do, and when we were writing and recording Far and Wide, we constantly had the stage and the energy of the audience in mind."

On stage

Live, the four-piece becomes five, with Beren Matthews added on guitar so the recorded arrangements hold up without backing tracks. On the 2024 headline tour the sets ran to around eighteen songs with a two-song encore — Alone at Sea and The Final Thing On My Mind at Terminal West in Atlanta on 14 November 2024, where Randy McStine opened solo with a large pedalboard. Festival slots in 2026 compressed that to ten songs in roughly an hour, opening with The Frost, In Exile and Demons and ending on Give It Back and Alone at Sea; Hold the Ashes was already in the set by late June, months before the album carrying it appeared.

Presentation is lit rather than screened: spotlights pick out individual players as pieces such as Build A World tighten towards their crescendos, and Soord fronts the band without much in the way of showmanship, working through singing that reviewers have described as calm, nuanced and confessional. Harrison takes most of the critical attention — one reviewer judged him "worth the price of admission by himself" — and the same review noted there "wasn't a song that called for a bathroom break".