Noisia Are Back: Trio Reunite and Announce First Show Since 2022

Noisia are back. Seven years to the day after the Dutch drum & bass trio announced their split, Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen and Thijs de Vlieger have confirmed they are making music and heading back onstage.

There is no comeback album, five-year plan or promise about where this goes. Instead, Noisia have ideas and unfinished tracks they want to test where their music hits hardest: in front of a crowd. Their first show since closing their farewell tour at Lowlands in 2022 lands at Amsterdam’s Melkweg on December 4. Further dates are planned, with presale opening September 23 and general sale September 25.

Secure tickets here.

The members are not shelving solo work. Roos will continue with Sleepnet and ring noord, his audiovisual duo with Former, whose punishing Lownoise EP on Vision Recordings and electrifying Everything is still to come EP on Anetha's Mama Told Ya landed earlier this year. Van Sonderen continued with the razor-sharp electronic duo Zonderling and continues to run Vision Recordings alongside his bandmates. De Vlieger, meanwhile, has used his Thys moniker to chase stranger strains of club music through solo records and collaborations. Most recently, he joined Samurai Breaks for Freak Frontier II, a four-track EP inspired by the mythology of a supposedly lost early-’90s video game. Those projects will continue alongside Noisia.

Then there is Vlucht. Released last week with no explanation – a deadpan documentary follows Noisia and their manager Walter into an obsession with birdwatching. After days of fans searching for clues, the answer has landed: birdwatching was the bait. Noisia have reunited.

Noisia shared the news in a personal statement, reflecting on why they stepped away and what ultimately brought them back together. 

Read their full statement below:

Hello person,

Exactly seven years ago, we decided to disband. Back then, we tried everything we could to get us out of the deadlock we were in. We had to admit the answer wasn’t in more trying, in more force. It was in letting go. We needed a full stop.

When we ended Noisia, we had no intention of returning to it. We went our separate ways, followed our individual interests, and started solo projects and new collaborations.

But we stayed in the same building, with our three studios in a shared space. We still had Vision. And we still hung out as friends. While becoming submerged in our own worlds, we would catch glimpses of each other navigating new terrain. Taking risks, growing.

—

We’d sometimes find ourselves missing the feelings we’d get when sharing the Noisia music, and missing our lives around it. But talking about Noisia would often lead straight back to thoughts about those struggles and pressures from the past.

But then, more recently, we noticed those thoughts didn’t follow anymore. Memories of joy, beauty, and mutual respect started to outweigh the shadows of the past. Mentioning Noisia had lost its heaviness.

We’d get a little giddy in conversations about the things we could maybe do. We took up bouldering together. We got closer. And slowly, plans began to hatch.

We started making music together again. That in turn made us crave the excitement of the stage, and the feeling of sharing our music with crowds…

—

We’ve grown a lot individually. We intuitively feel that our own endeavours can now co-exist with our Noisia project. Combining our forces again feels incredibly exciting now.

We want to experiment and play with our back catalogue and the material we’ve recently been making. Then, we want to test new music at shows, bring our experiences from those shows into our production decisions, test it again, starting a positive feedback loop that way. So we’ll take our time before we release anything.

This new process will start at one of our most familiar and beloved venues: Melkweg Amsterdam, on December 4th. That’s the first step, with more to come. We hope to see you all there!

Love, Martijn, Nik and Thijs