Welly have announced that their debut album Big In The Suburbs will be released on 21 March 2025. The record was launched alongside the latest single and title track Big In The Suburbs. In addition, they headline Dork Hype List tour, which kicks off next month, coming to Heartbreakers on February 13th.
“Big In The Suburbs is suburban surf-rock. Feeding-the-ducks-indie?” proclaims Southampton’s Welly about the single. “This is the market stall for the album, the contents page, the intro sequence, the theme song. Think the intro to ‘Thomas The Tank Engine’. We meet our motley crew in each verse – the neighbours, the foul families, the love interests, the ugly pets.
“I wrote this song in hospital after a seizure. The doctors don’t really know why. But in between tests, in the waiting room of East Sussex General A&E, this chorus floated out. Maybe some divine intervention? Maybe too much white wine? Live, Laugh, Love, Death.”
The album centres on the monochrome mundanity but also the unsung beauty of the suburbs. For his debut album – all written and self-produced by Welly himself – this rich tableau of British life is celebrated for all its triumphs and tragedies. Here are songs about wanting more than you have, about a world in flux, about doomed romance and figuring out how to be happy where everybody knows your name (and your Mum’s).
Welly has been building his creative province for over a year with a series of singles in the run up to the album. First single Shopping pays tribute to the dying UK high street and today’s grass-is-greener mentality, setting out the group’s blueprint for pop on a budget. Soak Up The Culture meanwhile sends up and adds to the canon of the lost art of the lads-on-tour anthem, with lawnmower-themed love triangle Deere John connecting a story arc with Cul-De-Sac which documents the stasis of two people at a romantic dead-end road.
With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur to the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys and the kitchen sink bangers of Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect that great, grassroots British tradition of mainstream bands being beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.
Welly’s front man, songwriter and producer was born in Southampton, showing an early fascination for other people and how they live their lives through the writings of John Betjeman and Alan Bennett. As a child Welly was obsessed by the same six songs on the iPod Shuffle his Dad clipped to his school trousers every day and that was quite enough. But when his Dad sat him down to watch the video to Common People in 2014 an obsession with music was born.
Regarding the album, Welly says: “I could say something very clever about suburban tableaus, provincial minuets, the motifs of traffic, dead end roads and big fish in small ponds, but that would be silly. This is the child’s first painting going on the fridge. I’m very proud of this. It’s fun, and music hasn’t been fun for a long time, especially British music. This is a lob in the right direction. It took 6 years to write and 6 weeks to record. The band and I did it all ourselves at my Dad’s house in Scotland. It’s DIY and not out of choice, but out of budget. Charity shop instruments, solid gold mentalities.”
Welly are rallying an energetic audience around the UK likewise in search of something different and something fun, with Big In The Suburbs creating a small-town big-dreams world of its own.
Reporting for duty as the next great British band, Welly wrapped up the Southern and Northern legs of their National Service Tour towards the end of 2024 alongside a selection of dates across the country supporting Sports Team. They have now been announced as headliners on the Dork Hype List Tour.
FEBRUARY (DORK HYPE LIST TOUR 2025)
Sat 01 BRISTOL Louisiana
Thu 06 LEEDS Oporto
Fri 07 NEWCASTLE Grove
Sat 08 MANCHESTER Deaf Institute
Sun 09 GLASGOW McChuills
Thu 13 SOUTHAMPTON Heartbreakers
Sat 15 NOTTINGHAM Bodega
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