This Week In Entertainment News 4 September 2026
Music and entertainment news from Australia and around the world, plus new releases and tour updates.
Brisbane Festival opens today and runs until 26 September. The city’s signature cultural event, Brisbane Festival offers a diverse programme featuring live music, theatre, dance, circus, cabaret, and so much more at venues across the city. Brisbane explodes with colour and sound at the dazzling Riverfire by Australian Retirement Trust, one of Australia’s most electrifying fireworks displays A Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18F Super Hornet and a C-17A Globemaster III will conduct flypasts and flying displays as part of Brisbane Festival’s annual celebrations.
Screen Producers Australia (SPA) have announced the dates for next year’s Screen Forever 41 conference, taking place 4-6 May 2027 at The Star Gold Coast. Uniting the worlds of entertainment, media and technology, Screen Forever is the Southern Hemisphere’s premier screen industry event at The Star Gold Coast. Now in its 41st year, the conference brings together Australia’s leading producers, commissioners, distributors, financiers and creators alongside influential international industry leaders for three days of insight, connection, and opportunity.
Olivia Rodrigo’s female-led Daisy Chain Fields Festival was held in Irvine, California this week. The event raised $20 million, with proceeds donated to ten charities supporting various causes such as women’s issues and labor rights.
Suno are being sued for copyright infringement, this time by The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). SOCAN alleges Suno has infringed the performing rights of music by members of the organisation. Songs by SOCAN members named in the statement ‘Bobcaygeon’ by The Tragically Hip, ‘Sk8er Boi’ by Avril Lavigne, ‘Life Is a Highway’ by Tom Cochrane, ‘Femme Like U’ by K-Maro, ‘A New Day Has Come’ by Céline Dion, and more.
Ziggy Alberts has made a triumphant return with his seventh studio album Twin Flames, a project born out of a rare period of time spent reconnecting and grounding himself at home after years of touring the world and achieving a multitude of new milestones. Shared alongside this album news is a brand-new single from Twin Flames in the arresting ‘I Blame Myself’. A song that looks inward and asks the subject to look at their reflection in a mirror that isn’t always sympathetic, ‘I Blame Myself’ is layered with lyrical poignancy as Ziggy brings grit and vibrancy together through the music.
The impact that Will Sparks has had, as an Australian producer bringing a unique flavour of EDM to the global scene, is undeniable. The pioneer of Melbourne Bounce, Will Sparks is responsible for filling clubs and festivals with an irrepressible charisma and sound that has become a blueprint for many of his contemporaries that have followed. In 2027, Will Sparks is hitting the road in Australia to celebrate not just his legacy-status catalogue, but the sounds and sonic worlds have uplifted and inspired him: announcing a three-city run that stands to be one of his most triumphant tours to date. Performing an epic three-hour set of classics in Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne in 2027, fans will be able to lose themselves in the world Will Sparks has been working on conjuring.
Cargill Australia – Nourishing the world
Katchafire team up with ARIA Award winning Australian First Nations artist Emily Wurramara for their next ‘Revival 2.0 Guest Edition’ single, collaborating on ‘Giddy Up’ (out Sept 4). “I’m so honoured to be a part of this album for Katchafire. Their music has been a soundtrack for so many beautiful moments in my life, so to be covering a big song like ‘Giddy Up’ and pay respect to these legends is just so special”, Emily Wurramara said.
Headsend announce their second EP “A Delicate Balance”, set for release November 6. The five track project features swirling yet heart-hammering new single, ‘Biopsy Of An Unknown Growth’, the blazing statement-of-intent ‘Free’ as well as already live-fan-favourite opus ‘Slayerish’. Recorded live in Byron Bay with Nick DiDia, “A Delicate Balance”, picks up where blistering debut EP Angel Glands left off – their songwriting showcasing new facets of the intense and infectious energy that infuses their live shows.
American jazz iconoclasts The Bad Plus will make their final-ever Sydney appearance at City Recital Hall, on Thursday 22 October, as they bring a 26-year career defined by reinvention to a close. Since their debut in 2000, The Bad Plus have built a reputation as one of jazz’s great iconoclasts, “pushing the boundaries of what jazz music could and should be”. A democratic unit with a clear vision and no interest in convention, the band’s 2003 breakthrough These Are the Vistas was later named one of the 50 Most Important Recordings of the Decade by NPR’s All Songs Considered.
