The Wombats

One of the UK’s most popular guitar-driven indie rock acts, The Wombats were formed in Liverpool in the early ’00s by two Scousers and a Norwegian – aka vocalist and guitarist Matthew “Murph” Murphy, percussionist Dan Haggis and bass guitarist Tord Øverland Knudsen. They met while attending the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and began releasing EPs in 2004. Something of an in joke, their name came from calling each other “wombat” whenever they made stupid mistakes. Plus in their early years, the three-piece took a giant stuffed wombat called Cherub to their gigs, calling him their fourth band member. In 2006, The Wombats signed with the London-based indie label KIDS Records and released a limited-edition vinyl consisting of Lost In The Post and Patricia The Stripper. Later that year, they issued the Japan-only album Girls, Boys And Marsupials. Many of its songs, however, appeared on their debut studio album A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation, which arrived in 2007 after The Wombats moved to 14th Floor Records. Not only did it peak at No.11 on the UK albums chart, but it also spawned four top 40 singles: Backfire At The Disco, Kill The Director, Moving To New York and Let’s Dance To Joy Division featuring the Llangattock Primary School kids choir. The band toured heavily throughout the UK and Europe in 2008 and played a number of summer festivals like Glastonbury, T In The Park and Reading & Leeds. Preceded by the popular lead singles Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves), Jump Into The Fog and Anti-D, their sophomore album The Wombats Proudly Present This Modern Glitch hit No.3 on the charts in 2011. Among the producers were Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers) and Eric Valentine (Taking Back Sunday, Good Charlotte), who helped The Wombats evolve their alternative rock and pop-punk sounds to include pulsing synth beats and infectious hooks. In 2015, Glitterbug produced by Valentine along with Mark Crew (Bastille, Rag’n’Bone Man) was unveiled and reached No.5 on the charts. The band not only hit the road on a UK headline tour but over the coming years supported The Rolling Stones, Weezer and The Pixies. Through the ’10s, Murphy had begun spending a lot of time of in Los Angeles and he ultimately moved there in 2017. The Wombats released their critically acclaimed fourth studio album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life in 2018. To support it, they played a huge gig at The SSE Arena, Wembley in early 2019. Known for being pranksters, the show saw everything from flying marsupials to circle waltzes. In 2020, Murphy launched a solo project under the moniker Love Fame Tragedy revealing his debut album Wherever I Go, I Want To Leave.

In May 2021, The Wombats released the R&B-infused single Method To The Madness. Their first new material since 2018, its demo was actually recorded at Murphy’s LA home in 2019, but due to the coronavirus pandemic the track had to be finished remotely over the following year from the band members’ respective homes. The Wombats announced their fifth studio album Fix Yourself, Not The World would come out on 7 January 2022.