The Wombats
Schedule
Wed, 15 Oct, 2025 at 08:00 pm
UTC-07:00Location
The Showbox | Seattle, WA
Showbox PresentsOh! The Ocean Tour
THE WOMBATS
WED, 15 OCT 2025 at 08:00PM PDT
Ages: 21 & Over
Doors Open: 07:00PM
OnSale: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 at 10:00AM PST
Announcement: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 at 09:00AM PST
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 ‘K*ll 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 to terms with his anti-social side. “I just wanted a song about the flaws of being human and being mega awkward,” he says, speaking for the reluctant party-goer in us all.
‘Blood on the Hospital Floor’, a note-to-self not to catastrophise situations (“Blood on a hospital floor, everyone's used to it,” Murph says, “they wipe it up and they crack on”), is a driving future-rock classic dappled with intergalactic noises, like cruising Saturn’s rings with the top down. ‘My Head Is Not My Friend’ builds from subtle alt-rock tones to a punchy finale as Murph soldiers through hungover regret in search of “one fucking peaceful day”. And, to glorious space pop, ‘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.
As the album expands, the band explore glistening tech rock, merge infectious, crackling guitar pop with seamy hip-hop grooves on ‘Reality Is a Wild Ride’ and, with ‘The World’s Not Out to Get Me, I Am’, even lash Muse’s futuristic fuzz rock to The Wombats’ first documented foray into bluesy rock’n’roll. All the while probing Murph’s conflicted nature in search of a salve.
“A common thread in my lyrics, and generally these days, is that my thoughts aren't really in my best interests,” Murph admits. “Ninety-five per cent of the time it's like my brain is trying to take me down and I have to just keep on top of that and remember that it's not a big deal.” ‘The World’s Not Out to Get Me…’ particularly, seems to tackle his past addiction issues. “It’s about when the escapism goes too far,” he says, “looking back at places where those processes, if gone unchecked, will leave me.”
As the songs become more lyrically playful, the sonics keep pace. ‘I Love America and She Hates Me’ is a piece of gleaming disco concerning Murph’s love/hate relationship with America, with its striving ambitions, divisive politics and lax gun laws. “I do love it, but it's such a competitive place that it feels like a battle sometimes,” he says. “I liked the idea of personifying it as someone that you're in constant conflict with. There's something in-built into the American way of being that is supportive of success and supportive of growth, which is not as prevalent in Britain. We are told to shove that shit down, don't put anything on a parade. Here it’s more supportive when you’re trying to achieve goals.”
The haunting, epic pop of ‘Swerve (101)’ touches on LA status anxiety too (“people scrambling up the totem pole,’ Murph says) interwoven with hints of obsessions reaching crisis point. And ‘Kate Moss’ – part tech noir rock-out, part dream pop twinkle – is a mini-Peyton Place, digging into the raging gossip around Murph’s LA neighbourhood. “We’ve got sorrow behind our eyes, but we look so good,” he sings, spilling the tea about model couples he knows with hidden secrets. “There's a lot going on,” he says. “OnlyFans stuff happening which I’ve been alerted to, everyone’s having a breakdown…”
For once, Murph is amongst the most well-adjusted in his universe, his evolving tactic of facing down his woes working wonders in the end. “In my journey of being in this band I’ve learned to run towards the bullets rather than run around them or do anything other than taking the issue head-on,” he says. “It's good for life in general. It’s pretty horrendous for about twenty years but then it feels amazing.” And the results, on Oh! The Ocean, are just as rewarding: a line in the sand from which The Wombats are sprinting onwards into a mature new phase. Time to see them anew.
Where is it happening?
The Showbox, 1426 1st Ave,Seattle, Washington, United States
