It’s well and truly winter, and that means that the first of the summer music festival announcements is just around the corner. By this time last year we’d already heard from Harvest and just shortly after from Big Day Out, the former announcing a stellar lineup including Beck, Sigur Ros, and Grizzly.

But allay your concerns lest you had been left wondering if Soundwave promoter AJ Maddah had forgotten about Harvest amongst the hustle and bustle of adding yet another festival to his calendar this Noveember with the highly anticipated Warper Tour.

The Harvest 2013 lineup will hopefully be dropping on June 27th. How do we know? Because Maddah himself told us on his favourite communication tool of choice, Twitter.

The festival this year is due to run from 10th – 17th November following a similar run to that of last year. The details of the lineup have been few and far between, but we do have one name that we can already expect to see on June 27th – Neutral Milk Hotel.

Back in May, Neutral Milk Hotel announced they would be embarking on their first official reunion tour in some 15 years, and though only a handful of American dates were confirmed for October and Asian dates in November and December, there were whispers that Australian dates could be expected from lo-fi folk pioneers very soon.

It’s been 15 long years since Neutral Milk Hotel released their last long player, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, a cult album that invented countless scores of bands, and while ringleader Jeff Magnum has partaken in solo shows over the years, the 2013 reunion tour is the first in an age that will feature the classic 90s lineup with Scott Spillane, Julian Koster, and Jeremy Barnes.

As we first speculated, the gap between November’s Taiwanese date and the December 1st date in Japan led to a Harvest-sized hole in the band’s tour plans, turns out that’s exactly what’s filling the gap, with Pitchfork revealing Neutral Milk Hotel’s expanded reunion dates – including a three-date stopover in Australia for Harvest 2013.

Given Neutral Milk Hotel is now a lock, a strong contender for another of the seven is indie Scots Franz Ferdinand, who let slip en route to the Chilean leg of Lollapalooza 2013 that they would be heading to Australia for a headline tour this November. Having recently completed a new studio album, the follow-up to 2009′s Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, they debuted new material at Lollapalooza Chile.

Based solely on the busy thumbs of AJ Maddah and his Twitter conversations, other potentials for the third Harvest outing would be reclusive Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice, who “would be great for Harvest 2013,” while a suggestion that Philly rock band Mewithoutyou  would return to our shores prompted Maddah to “invite them to Harvest right away!”

He also told a user he would consider inviting Jack White too, and goth pioneers The Cure were on his personal wishlist for Harvest, although he has since revealed he was unable to secure the Robert Smith fronted band.

Harvest 2013 Dates

Sunday 10th November – Melbourne
Saturday 16th November – Sydney
Sunday 17th November – Brisbane

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