Gnarls Barkley book their first tour in 18 years, with UK dates in December

Gnarls Barkley are going back on the road for the first time in 18 years. CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse last toured in 2008, and the To Whom It Still Concerns Tour opens at The Masonic in San Francisco on 5 November.

The North American leg is short by arena standards and deliberately so. After San Francisco it takes in The Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Coca-Cola Roxy in Atlanta, The Fillmore Detroit, the Citizens House of Blues in Boston and The Fillmore Silver Spring, with one Canadian date at History in Toronto on 22 November. It closes at Irving Plaza in New York and then the House of Blues in Chicago on 28 November.

Four UK shows follow in December: Manchester Academy on the eighth, the O2 Academy in Glasgow on the ninth, Wolverhampton Civic Hall on the eleventh and the new British Airways ARC venue in London on the twelfth. These are theatres and academies rather than arenas, which is a choice about the kind of room these songs work in.

Green framed the run in terms of what the songs are about rather than what they sold. He described the tour as operating like an open book, exploring life and death and everything in between, and called the songs "the silver lining to an otherwise sad story".

The shows come behind Atlanta, which arrived in March after an 18-year recording silence and which the pair announced in February as a capstone to the Gnarls Barkley story. It follows St. Elsewhere in 2006 and The Odd Couple in 2008, and the duo have said it is their third and final album together.

The comeback single, Pictures, was the first new music in that whole stretch. Green described it as a full circle moment and said the song came from a childhood experience, which is a long way from the register of the song that made them.

That song was Crazy, which broke the duo internationally in 2006 and became the first single to reach number one in the UK on downloads alone. It held the top spot for nine consecutive weeks, a record that made the pair briefly unavoidable and then, for nearly two decades, almost entirely absent.

UK general sale opens at 10am BST on 25 September, after an artist presale on the twenty-third. North American general sale is 10am local time on 24 September, with Citi and Spotify presales earlier in the week. The run is on the tour guide, and more on the duo sits on our R&B and soul hub.