A new country festival is coming to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in January — and its first lineup suggests LONGHAUL isn’t starting small.

Australia’s country music boom isn’t showing many signs of slowing down, and now there’s a major new festival looking to make its mark.

Announced earlier this week, LONGHAUL Festival will make its debut in January 2027, rolling through Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane with a stacked international and Australian lineup headed by Kane Brown and Kacey Musgraves.

And for a first-year festival, it’s a pretty serious opening statement.

Brown and Musgraves will both play their only Australian shows at LONGHAUL, while the international bill also brings together Charles Wesley Godwin, Margo Price, Maddox Batson, Ava Hall and James Barker Band.

There’s plenty happening locally too, with Beau Shearer, Denvah, Nathan Lamont, Taylor Moss and Tyla Rodrigues joining the inaugural lineup.

It makes LONGHAUL an interesting new addition to an Australian festival landscape that has undergone some fairly dramatic changes over the past few years.

While festivals elsewhere have been dealing with rising costs, changing audience habits and an increasingly difficult touring environment, country music has been moving in almost the opposite direction.

The genre’s Australian audience has expanded well beyond its traditional heartlands, while a new generation of artists has blurred the lines between country, Americana, rock and pop.

LONGHAUL appears designed squarely for that audience.

Rather than asking fans to make the pilgrimage to a regional festival, the event is taking a large-scale country lineup directly into Australia’s three biggest east coast markets.

The festival kicks off at Melbourne Showgrounds on Friday, January 22nd, before heading to Sydney Showground on Saturday, January 23rd and Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds on Sunday, January 24th.

There’s also an encouraging amount of depth beneath the two headliners.

Margo Price has spent the last decade becoming one of Americana’s most acclaimed and uncompromising voices, while West Virginia songwriter Charles Wesley Godwin has built a rapidly growing following through his distinctly modern take on roots and country music.

Then there’s Maddox Batson, part of a younger generation of country artists finding enormous audiences online before they’ve even had time to follow the traditional industry playbook.

Put those names alongside Brown and Musgraves and LONGHAUL starts to look less like a festival built around one corner of country music and more like an attempt to capture where the genre is heading.

That appears to be part of the plan.

TEG Live Global Head of Touring Tim McGregor said the team had been developing the festival concept for several years, describing LONGHAUL as a “flagship festival” for the newly launched LONGHAUL Touring operation.

“We have been working very hard on this festival concept for a number of years and so it is incredibly exciting to finally launch the inaugural LONGHAUL Festival with an awesome lineup of international and domestic artists,” McGregor said when the event was announced.

He also hinted that the festival is only the beginning, saying LONGHAUL Touring has “a lot more in the pipeline”.

There will inevitably be plenty of attention on how a new festival performs in the current Australian market, particularly one arriving with international headliners of this scale.

But if there was ever a genre worth making that bet on right now, country has a pretty convincing case.

And with Musgraves, Brown, Price and Godwin on the same bill — alongside some of Australia’s most promising country talent — LONGHAUL has given fans a strong reason to check out what it’s building.

The first tickets go on sale through the Afterpay presale from 12pm local time tomorrow, July 24th, with further presales beginning Monday, July 27th. General public tickets go on sale Friday, July 31st.

LONGHAUL Festival 2027

Friday, January 22nd
Melbourne Showgrounds, Melbourne

Saturday, January 23rd
Sydney Showground, Sydney

Sunday, January 24th
RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane

Lineup

Kane Brown
Kacey Musgraves
Charles Wesley Godwin
Margo Price
Maddox Batson
Ava Hall
James Barker Band
Beau Shearer
Denvah
Nathan Lamont
Taylor Moss
Tyla Rodrigues