“Under the Milky Way” was always built for a room you could fall into — and on Friday, July 3, The Church bring four and a half decades of shimmering, hypnotic guitar rock to a 200-seat theater in the village of Homer. This is the Singles Tour, the Australian band’s 45th-anniversary run through twenty career-defining tracks from 1980 to 2025, and the fact that one of those stops lands in a Central New York arts center instead of a shed or a casino ballroom is its own small miracle.
About The Church
Formed in Sydney in 1980, The Church spent the decade building a sound that nobody else quite had — layered, ringing guitars, a slow-burn pulse, and Steve Kilbey’s unmistakable baritone floating over the top. The 1988 album Starfish and its single “Under the Milky Way” made them international, but the catalog runs far deeper than one song. The Singles Tour leans into that history, pulling from “The Unguarded Moment,” “Reptile,” “Metropolis,” “Tantalized” and more — a guided tour through one of alternative rock’s most influential bodies of work, played by the people who wrote it.
The Venue
The Center for the Arts of Homer sits about half an hour south of Syracuse, a restored space with roughly 200 seats and the kind of acoustics that reward a band built on texture and dynamics. There are no bad seats here — every one of them puts you within shouting distance of the stage, which is exactly how music like this should be heard. Homer itself is worth arriving early for: a classic village green, a handful of good places to eat, and an easy drive through Cortland County that’s especially pretty on a July evening. For more shows in the area, browse our Central NY concert guide.
Tickets & Details
The Church play the Center for the Arts of Homer on Friday, July 3, 2026, with the show starting at 8:00 PM. With only 200 seats and a touring band of this stature, this one is not going to linger on the shelf. Get tickets here.
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A legendary band, twenty singles, 200 seats, and the night before the Fourth — start your holiday weekend with something you’ll be telling people about for years.