THE WOMBATS @ HORDERN

Set to light up stages at headline shows in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, whilst also making an appearance at SummerSalt Festival in regional areas. The beloved band will arrive to our shores ready to play a stack of new tracks from their hotly anticipated sixth studio album, Oh! The Ocean, set for release on 14 February 2025.

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’ latest 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.

The Wombats return with their most sophisticated and sonically adventurous album yet. Oh! The Ocean grooves with social anxiety, internal strife and the tribulations of LA life, where Murph lives. Once again they provide escapism from the mundane with songwriting that has profound meaning to audiences in turbulent times, packaged in the band’s deceptively cuddly and playful façade.

Oh! The Ocean marks a new era for the band, moving away from previous synthetic sounds to embrace a warmer-blooded approach. Taking 50 new songs into a studio in Echo Park, LA, in July 2024 for six weeks of sessions with new producer John Congleton (St Vincent, Wallows, Death Cab for Cutie), The Wombats shunned the AI studio techniques that have become prevalent in modern-day recording, in order to make a far more natural and human album.

Alongside familiar sounds they explore new genres from glistening tech rock to sci-fi pop, futuristic fuzz rock to bluesy rock’n’roll, with touches of disco and hip-hop-inflections.

TICKETS

To buy tickets and more info: www.thehordern.com.au

For more fun – check out other stuff coming to the EQ: www.entertainmentquarter.com.au/whats-on