They Might Be Giants

Lincoln, Massachusetts, by way of a student newspaper

John Flansburgh and John Linnell met as teenagers at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where both worked on the student paper, The Promethean — Flansburgh on graphic design, both of them drawing cartoons. Flansburgh has described weekends spent physically laying out pages, chopping copy with X-Acto knives and pasting it up, and has pointed out that although the school carried two town names, he and Linnell were both from Lincoln, the smaller place next door. He also reckons that almost every record in the Lincoln Public Library had been borrowed at some point by one or the other of them.

The other half of the education happened in Boston. Flansburgh got into The Rat on a fake ID as a teenager, taped shows on cassette, and watched The Cars in their early form alongside visiting New York acts such as Mink DeVille and Robert Gordon, who struck him as dirtier and skinnier than the local bands. The group itself was formed in Brooklyn in 1982, and the New York accent never entirely replaced the New England one.

An answering machine, then a platinum record

The band's first mass-distribution system was a telephone. During a hiatus in 1983 the pair began recording songs onto an answering machine and advertising the number in local newspapers; Dial-A-Song ran in that form until 1998, cycling songs and mock adverts, and was revived in 2015 on modern platforms. It remains the most accurate description of how the two work: write far more songs than any record needs, then decide what to do with them.

The self-titled debut arrived in 1986, Lincoln in 1988 and Flood in 1990, which went platinum and carried "Birdhouse in Your Soul". Apollo 18 followed in 1992, then John Henry in 1994, Factory Showroom in 1996 and Mink Car in 2001. Those seven records are the ones the current tour keeps reaching back into, and they are the reason a 2026 audience will stand up for a song about a nightlight.

Children's albums, theme tunes and a long second act

The commercial middle of the career was not where anyone expected. "Boss of Me", written as the theme to Malcolm in the Middle, won a Grammy in 2002. A run of children's records followed — No! in 2002, Here Come the ABCs in 2005, Here Come the 123s in 2008, Here Comes Science in 2009 and Why? in 2015 — and Here Come the 123s took a second Grammy in 2009. Around two decades ago the band also wrote music for Dunkin' Donuts, roughly two dozen television spots and more than a dozen radio adverts, work Flansburgh remembers fondly because the director, Tim Cawley, handed over concepts without over-specifying them.

Since 2007 the records have come out on the band's own Idlewild Recordings, which is a large part of why the release schedule looks the way it does: 24 studio albums, with 2021's BOOK the immediate predecessor to the current one, plus a long tail of compilations, live albums and EPs.

Eyeball, then The World Is to Dig

The Eyeball EP landed on 15 January 2026: four tracks, eight and a half minutes, closing with an Elegant Too remix of the title song. Linnell's explanation of the format is characteristically flat — the band writes and records too many songs for an album, so the leftovers become an EP, an appetiser before the main course.

The main course was The World Is to Dig, released digitally on 10 April 2026 and on CD, vinyl, cassette and streaming on 14 April. It runs 18 songs in 44 minutes and 28 seconds, produced by the band with Pat Dillett. The title plays on A Hole Is to Dig, the 1952 children's book; Flansburgh has been blunt that it is not meant as a profound statement. Four singles preceded it: "Wu-Tang" on 9 February, "Sleep's Older Sister" on 3 March, "Outside Brain" on 16 March and "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" on 31 March.

Reviews were warm without being uniform. AllMusic gave it four stars, arguing that the band balances sure-fire pop against out-there experiments as deliberately as it did in 1986. New Noise Magazine also gave four stars and called it fun from start to finish. Writing in Exclaim! on 14 April, David James Young found plenty of weird gems across the 18 tracks — "Wu-Tang" as piano pop about lifelong fandom rather than anything resembling the Wu — while naming "Telescope", "Slow" and "Let's Fall in Lava" as the ones he would skip; his conclusion was that at this stage the record only has to remind listeners how good the band is. The Arts Desk was cooler at three stars.

Flansburgh's framing in a Chronogram interview published on 2 April 2026 explains the posture better than the scores do. At most shows by veteran acts, he noted, nothing draws a bigger groan than the announcement of a new song, and not being in that position is the thing he values. He also described the pair as less precious than they used to be, working faster, trying things and binning them, improvising towards something they like rather than following a plan.

The Bigger Show: eight players, two sets, no opener

The tour announced alongside Eyeball on 15 January 2026 was built around a structural decision: no support act, and the band as its own opener across two sets. Flansburgh has said they keep 90 or 100 songs in rotation, which is what makes the format work — the first set spotlights a different album each night, drawn from Lincoln, Flood, Apollo 18, John Henry, Factory Showroom and Mink Car, while the second set runs across the whole catalogue, from the Dial-A-Song years to the 2026 material. On multi-night stands, the second sets differ too.

The line-up is eight strong: Flansburgh and Linnell with Dan Miller on guitar, Danny Weinkauf on bass, Marty Beller on drums, and a three-piece horn section of Stan Harrison on reeds, Mark Pender on trumpet and Dan Levine on trombone and euphonium. The tour opened at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock on 17 and 18 April 2026, both nights sold out, with "Eyeball" getting its live debut on the second. North American booking is handled by High Road Touring.

Where it stands now

The 2026 routing was heavy on repeat visits: Detroit's Majestic Theatre on 28 and 29 April, three nights at the Vic Theatre in Chicago from 1 May, Union Transfer in Philadelphia from 15 May, three nights at Brooklyn Steel from 28 May, and the House of Blues in Boston on 5 and 6 June. A second leg ran through the autumn — the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee on 24 and 25 September, the Barrymore in Madison on 26 and 27, Kansas City on 29, First Avenue in Minneapolis on 1 and 2 October and the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul on 3 and 4 — with November dates still to come in Austin on 5 and 6, Houston on 10 and 11, Dallas on 13 and 14, and the 9:30 Club in Washington on 19 and 20.

On 26 October 2026 the band extended the Bigger Show into a West Coast leg for 2027: three nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco from 5 March, the Belly Up in San Diego on 9 and 10 March, the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles on 12 and 13 March, then the Crystal Ballroom in Portland from 4 June, Treefort Music Hall in Boise on 8 June and four nights at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle from 10 June. The email-list presale opened at noon Eastern on 29 October, with general tickets going on sale on 30 October. The same rules apply: eight-piece band, no opener, a different album each night.