The Wombats

Since they emerged as leading lights of the late-‘00s indie rock scene with 2007 debut A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation, frontman Murph, bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen and drummer Dan Haggis have maintained an incredible upward momentum. 2011’s electro-flecked second album This Modern Glitch made them Top Ten regulars; 2015’s third Glitterbug saw them embraced by the TikTok generation, with ‘Greek Tragedy’ a viral hit several times over. By 2018’s Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life they’d stepped up to arenas and 2022’s Fix Yourself, Not the World consolidated their unstoppable rise with the band’s first #1 album, seeing them reach over 2.5 billion streams. Headline shows at Crystal Palace and The O2 followed amid the band’s biggest touring cycle so far, taking in arenas across the globe and culminating at Reading 2024, where the band headlined a rammed Radio One tent overspilling with crowds of 18-24-year-olds that remain their core audience twenty years into their career.

The Wombats’ forthcoming album Oh! The Ocean trembles with the confessional emotional honesty that makes the Liverpool band’s music as cathartic and relatable as it is catchy and playful, to their continuously growing young fanbase. The latest single taken from the record, ‘Can’t Say No’ examines the human need to throw ourselves into wild, often self-destructive experiences in order to distract ourselves from our inner anguish. “We’d rather run away than feel at all”, Murph sings of in-song escapades, including car theft, vandalism, far eastern voyages and demon worship.

Oh! The Ocean is the band’s most sonically adventurous albums yet and is the result of the three-piece taking 50 new songs to Echo Park, LA, in July 2024 for six weeks of sessions with new producer John Congleton (St Vincent, Wallows, Death Cab for Cutie). The title is inspired by a revelatory trip to the beach Murph took on a family holiday. With Murph now feeling the benefits of his fresh perspective, Oh! The Ocean represents a line in the sand from which The Wombats are sprinting onwards into a mature new phase.

In celebration, the trio will be setting out on their biggest UK tour a month after the album release, colouring arenas in Nottingham, London, Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds before bringing their electrifying performance down under. 

Warming up the crowds in Brisbane and throughout the SummerSalt Series is Del Water Gap, while Bea and her Business and Ra Ra Viper will join the UK band for each stop on the tour. Don’t miss The Wombats’ new era when they hit a city near you this spring. Tickets to the tour will go on sale from 12pm local time Monday 17 February. Fans can sign up to presale access now via secretsounds.com.