New Zealand rock legends Shihad say it's time to say goodbye because they can no longer put in 100 percent effort in the band like they used to.

The group, made up of frontman Jon Toogood, Karl Kippenberger, Phil Knight and Tom Larkin, formed in Wellington in 1988 as high school students with a love for American speed metal.

To mark 36 years of making memories, the band has announced Loud Forever - The Final Tour. They'll perform a circuit of summer festivals, including Rock The Bowl in Taranaki, Kickdown in Coromandel, and Homegrown in Wellington.

Additional headline shows are scheduled at the Rhythm and Alps site in Wānaka, Black Barn in Hawke's Bay, Trafalgar in Nelson, the Red Zone in Christchurch, and at Auckland's Spark Arena.

Toogood told RNZ's Afternoons that the band members have been thinking about splitting up for two years now.

"When we were young, we used to do this 100 percent of the time every year, all the time, and we just sort of got to the point where the albums were getting sort of further and further apart. We used to do an album every two years, and now it's like sort of every five [years].

"But we've all got lots of different things happening and families and lots of different things we're juggling. So we thought rather than only give it 70 percent, we'd rather go out on a bang at 100 percent."

He recalls Kippenberger's second stage show with Shihad, when they were a supporting act for AC/DC in 1991.

"When you see bands like that work for three hours, like, really hard, you go 'oh, right, we've got to work harder'. And so we were just lucky as a band to see all these amazing bands," Toogood says.

"I mean, what I love about Shihad is it's like a diary," Larkin says.

"Every album is like a snapshot in time, and each song has a particular kind of, I suppose, a window into an emotion or what was occurring at the time. And it's like a catalogue of your life."

Shihad in 2005. Photo: Supplied

The band have toured the world playing hits like 'Pacifier', 'Home Again' and 'The General Electric'. In 2010, they were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame.

Toogood, now 53, recently released his first solo album, Last of the Lonely Gods, which he wrote to make sense of a few challenging years which included the death of his mother, his brother in law, and his own health issues.

He told Music 101's Charlotte Ryan that he had lived with a mild form of tinnitus since he was 19. But a fortnight out of long Covid he was woken up from a dream to the sound of a screeching car alarm in his head. It still hasn't stopped two and a half years later.

"I was frightened of it cause it is quite alarming having that high pitch noisy ringing. It feels like a warning the whole time. So you're always on alert. I've made my peace with it. It still can be overwhelming at times," he said during an interview last month.

Tickets for The Final Tour on sale from Shihad's website.