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The Wombats
Staring out to sea, Matthew “Murph” Murphy seemed to see himself for the first time. He’d found himself down on the beach after “a fucking terrible morning” on holiday with his family earlier this summer, truly taking in the enormity of his surroundings: nature’s unceasing ebb and flow, its timelessness and tranquility.
He had, right there, what he now calls a “mushroom-esque spiritual experience”. “It was a moment of complete awe, but also a shock,” he recalls. “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.” He found himself asking difficult questions. “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 that follows – Oh! The Ocean, The Wombats’ sixth, and their most sonically adventurous and superbly melodic yet – sets about trying to answer them. Its sophisticated, ahead-of-the-curve grooves (the richness of Death Cab for Cutie combined with the adventuring mindset of St Vincent and Tame Impala) still tremble with the sort of confessional emotional honesty that has made the Liverpool band’s music as cathartic and relatable to their growing young fanbase as it is catchy and playful. From behind the band’s deceptively cuddly façade, Murph has sung openly about his anxiety, depression, marital issues and addictions (he’s now “sober as hell”); here, he lays bare his social discomfort, internal strife, compulsive behaviours and the dilemmas and tribulations of life in his adopted Los Angeles. But, like this year’s second album from Murph’s side-project Love Fame Tragedy, Life Is a Killer, there’s also a sense of progress towards confronting, accepting and coping with his issues.
Success, after all, can play havoc with the troubled mind. Since they emerged as leading lights of the late-‘00s indie rock scene with 2007 debut A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation and its hit singles ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’, ‘Moving to New York’ and ‘Kill the Director’, 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. 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.
“I don't think I understand that, but the tent was flowing out,” Murph says. “There hasn't been a concerted efforts to move sonically with the times, we just hope for the best songs and play around with them in the studio until we're excited. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how it's happening. I think we have the bodies of 40-year-old men and the souls of 13-year-old girls probably. But it's great that the songs are still resonating to new audiences. It's great that our music still clearly has youthful vigour.”
Oh! The Ocean marks a new era for the band, moving on from the synthetic sounds they evolved with producer Mark Crew 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. “One of the big things for me was that it had mistakes in it,” Murph explains. “That it had the feeling of three humans in a room playing instruments, not trying to overly perfect something and just letting it be. I don’t think computers are great when it comes to art.”
To that end, Congleton had the band play every song in complete takes rather than shorter stretches, then adding sprinkles of sonic necromancy. “He's a bit of a wizard with guitar pedals and making things sound unique,” Murph says. Hence Oh! The Ocean finds Murph tackling his troubles over a smorgasbord of fresh sounds and genres. Lead single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’, for instance, delves into lush tropical pop, falsetto funk and futuristic orchestral textures as Murph details, but also comes
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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3295221-0
