The Wombats
Chart-topping, Platinum-selling indie heroes The Wombats return with the huge announcement of their sixth studio album, Oh! The Ocean, out 21st February 2025 via AWAL. The news is accompanied by the release of the melodic single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’ and comes after the band was announced as the headliner for Rolling Sets on 7 December, their exclusive Australian headline show.
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.
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 a superbly melodic album. The title is inspired by a revelatory trip to the beach frontman Matthew “Murph” Murphy 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?”
The album’s first offering, ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’, premiered as the Hottest Record on BBC Radio 1’s New Music Show with Jack Saunders on Tuesday. It delves into lush tropical pop, falsetto funk and futuristic orchestral textures as lead singer Murph details, but also comes to terms with, his anti-social side. Murph says on the track: “‘[It] is about constantly defaulting to a ‘Lone Wolf’ mindset, and what the real life consequences of that maybe.” This relatable sentiment is reflected in the lyrics: “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come, It’s not that I hate you, I just hate everyone.”
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.