The Wombats today announce additional dates for their UK & IE tour, taking place in December this year. This comes alongside news that special guests The Snuts will perform on all English dates, whilst Overpass will support on the entire tour. Sarah Brooki and Florentenes will also join on select dates.
Earlier this year, the band released their sixth studio album, Oh! The Ocean, via AWAL Recordings - stream here, which was celebrated with a huge UK tour, which saw them play some of the biggest headline shows of their career, including London’s O2 Arena.
The new tour dates start on 2nd December in Edinburgh, before the band perform in Aberdeen, Newcastle, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Dublin, Belfast and finish in Blackpool on 11th December. Tickets are available here.
Two years since scoring their debut UK #1 album with Fix Yourself Not The World, The Wombats are back and bigger than ever. 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. Their recent singles have received large support from fans, with ‘Sorry I’m Late, I didn’t Want To Come’ being a Radio 1 playlist track.
The three piece took 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) to create their most sonically adventurous album yet. The title is inspired by a revelatory trip to the beach Murph took on a family holiday.
Speaking on the experience, Murph says: “I’ve been to many beaches and seas and coasts over the years but for some reason it felt like the first time I had ever seen it and was truly present. There was this revelation that I had been living a life caught up in my own head, or in some kind of racing helmet or with blinkers on. It was really a potent experience. I felt like I saw everything new for the first time, and was aware that I had been so selfish to not take in how crazy the world and life is. I’d been caught up in my own BS for way too long.
The album offers up some internal questions like: why are my head and body disconnected all the time? Why am I incapable at times of seeing any form of beauty in the world or in others? Why do I expect the world to conform to my will? Why do I never stop and smell the flowers? How am I conscious? That’s why I called album 6 ‘Oh! The Ocean”
Since they emerged as leading lights of the late-‘00s indie rock scene with 2007 debut A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation, 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 Number One 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.
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.
The Wombats - NEW UK Tour Dates:
02 December – Edinburgh, Corn Exchange NEW DATE
03 December – Aberdeen, Music Hall NEW DATE
05 December - Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, Utilita Arena
06 December - Birmingham, England, bp pulse LIVE Arena
07 December - Bournemouth, England, Bournemouth International Centre
09 December - Dublin, Republic of Ireland, Olympia Theatre
10 December - Belfast, Northern Ireland, The Telegraph Building
11 December - Blackpool, England, Empress Ballroom
