UK band, Welly their new album Big In The Suburbs, will drop on March 21, 2025. The news is paired with the band’s release of the title-track. Welly proclaims.“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 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 and 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; a collection of picture-perfect, alt-pop vignettes, in which regular lives are often quietly on the brink of going berserk. For his debut album – all written and self-produced by Welly himself – this rich tableaux of British life is celebrated for all its tragedies and triumphs. Here are songs about wanting more than you have, a world in flux, 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 all year with a series of singles in the run-up to Big In The Suburbs. First single ‘Shopping’, for instance, 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 both sends up and adds to the canon of the lost, the Lads-On-Tour Anthem, with lawnmower-themed love-triangle ‘Deere John’ connecting a story arc with ‘Cul-De-Sac’ (and the stasis of two people at a romantic dead-end road). With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur or the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen-sink noughties bangers like Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition with the mainstream bands once beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.

Welly’s own suburban origin-story has quickly become the stuff of urban myth. The group’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 or Alan Bennett. As a kid 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. Welly’s tales of extraordinary, most ordinary life began between jobs ranging from the paper round, Poundland or Peppa Pig World – that’s just the P’s – as the band booked over a hundred gigs DIY and even launched their own live album and mockumentary (aka Welly’s dissertation, Live In A Village Hall). 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.

Regarding the record, Welly mentions, “I could say something very clever about suburban tableuxs, provincial minuets, the motifs of traffic, dead end roads, big fish in small ponds, but that would be silly. This is the-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
Big In The Suburbs
Tracklisting:

1. Big In The Suburbs
2. Home For The Weekend
3. Knock And Run
4. Deere John
5. Soak Up The Culture
6. Shopping
7. Cul-De-Sac
8. Pampas Grass
9. The Roundabout Racehorse
10. Under Milk Wood
11. Family Photos
12. Country Cousins
13. It’s Not Like This In France
14. Life Is A Motorway

2024-2025 Welly Tour Dates

Sports Team dates:

14.11.24 || Manchester || Club Academy
15.11.24 || Birmingham || The Castle & Falcon
16.11.24 || Liverpool || Arts Club
19.11.24 || Glasgow || SWG3

Headline Dates:

20.11.24 || Liverpool || Arts Club (Loft)
21.11.24 || Stockport || Bask
22.11.24 || Preston || The Ferret
23.11.24 || Middlesbrough || Play Brew Tap Room
26.11.24 || St Andrews || Club 601
27.11.24 || Kilmarnock || Bakers Nite Club
28.11.24 || Carlisle || The Brickyard
29.11.24 || Shrewsbury || Albert Shed
30.11.24 || Huddersfield || Parish Dive Bar
04.12.24 || London || Moth Club

Dork Hype List Tour 2025:

01.02.25 || Bristol || Louisiana
06.02.25 || Leeds || Oporto
07.02.25 || Newcastle || Grove
08.02.25 || Manchester || The Deaf Institute
09.02.25 || Glasgow || McChullis
13.02.25 || Southampton || Heartbreakers
15.02.25 || Nottingham || Bodega

Order Tickets for Welly HERE