Tokio Hotel's ENCORE: New Album Kicks Off a Sold-Out Arena Tour

Tokio Hotel's ENCORE is finally here. The German band's seventh studio album arrived on streaming platforms today via Believe, ending a four-year wait since 2001 and opening what the band calls a brand-new era. With twelve songs, a fresh music video, a twelve-episode companion podcast and a nearly sold-out arena tour kicking off in London later this month, the group is having one of the biggest weeks of its two-decade career.

A comeback four years in the making

The road to ENCORE has been long and very public. 2001 landed in late 2022 as a Top 10 success, and since then Bill Kaulitz, Tom Kaulitz, Georg Listing and Gustav Schäfer have spent as much time on screens as on stages, between their podcast Kaulitz Hills: Senf aus Hollywood and their Netflix series Kaulitz & Kaulitz. The singles rolled out steadily through the autumn: Memory Lane, Changes and California Nights set the tone, followed by Dye My Hair in early September and Without You as the final teaser. The full tracklist runs from Changes through Without You, Call Me By Your Name, Lovers Cove, Memory Lane, Wanderlust, Shout 2 The Universe, Homesick, Dye My Hair, Terminal 1, California Nights and Perfect Ending, which gets a brand-new video to mark release day.

Bill Kaulitz has been open about what held the band together through its strangest years. "The four of us were like in a cocoon," he said in an interview with Sleek magazine. "Going through that with your best friends and your family really brought us closer. We had moments of fear, panic, depression and exhaustion, but our bond gave us a strong foundation." That foundation is now doing commercial work: the band has sold more than ten million records worldwide and collected dozens of platinum and gold awards plus over a hundred national and international prizes, according to Sleek.

What the record actually sounds like

The album's stated theme is taking back control. The early single Dye My Hair is a driving anthem about breaking free from toxic relationships and reclaiming your own identity, as BroadwayWorld reported on release day, while Without You is the record's most vulnerable moment, written as a direct look behind the curtain after years in the spotlight. Track-by-track reviewers have found a band stretching its sound: Flyctory's review of the album calls Wanderlust quiet and intimate with a melancholy edge, and praises Terminal 1 for its short saxophone parts even while finding its chorus a little too sweet. Homesick, which the reviewer connects to rumors about the brothers' feelings for home, alternates between hushed passages and louder rock statements. The reception so far suggests a record that rewards longtime listeners more than it chases a viral moment, a fair counterpoint to the hype of release week.

The tour, the pop-up and the TV gig

The ENCORE arena tour opens October 28, 2026 at London's OVO Arena Wembley and is nearly sold out, according to BroadwayWorld. The run moves through Paris, Hamburg, Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin, Zurich, Milan, Leipzig, Vienna, Munich, Luxembourg, Düsseldorf and Madrid across November, with a Berlin album release show at the Velodrom on October 25, 2026 and a pop-up store at Prince Charles in Berlin from October 18 to October 20. A summer 2027 European tour is already announced, with dates from Rome to Warsaw and Berlin's Waldbühne, and North American shows are in the works. On December 5 the Kaulitz twins will guest-host Germany's Saturday night institution Wetten, Dass…?, which underlines how far the band's second act reaches beyond music.

Why does this land now? Tokio Hotel are in the middle of a genuine cross-generational moment. Older fans who screamed through the emo-pop years are back, and a new young audience has arrived through social media clips and the Netflix series, which the band's team says has widened its reach across generations. If you want the full story behind the songs, the twelve-episode ENCORE: Tokio Hotel podcast digs into the writing and production of every track. For more new music this week, see how Cardinal Black announced its third album for January, how U2 mapped out a 2027 world tour starting in Mexico City, and how Yuju built her new EP like a detective's case file.

Fans heading to the shows should move fast: with arenas nearly full and more dates likely once North America is confirmed, ENCORE looks set to be the band's biggest live chapter yet. Whether the wider audience hears the band behind Tokio Hotel's ENCORE as a band first and a story second, as one interviewer put it, will be the real test of this record, but for now the four friends from a small German city are playing the biggest rooms of their lives.