PRE-ORDER BIG IN THE SUBURBS LP: Pre-order HERE
BIG IN THE SUBURBS VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAi2Rws6f0M
WELLY have announced Big In The Suburbs, the debut album, due for release on 21 March 2025. The record launches alongside the new single and title track Big In The Suburbs and yet another inspired video featuring Welly as a suitably disinterested talent show judge. He whiles away the hours watching a swathe of wannabees do their mediocre thing. What better introduction to, by indie rights, should be deemed the debut album of 2025.
“Big In The Suburbs is suburban surf-rock (feeding-the-ducks-indie?) 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&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 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 all year with a series of singles in the run up to Big In The Suburbs. 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 to the kitchen sink bangers of Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect that great, grassroots British tradition with the mainstream bands once beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.
Welly’s own suburban 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 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.
Welly’s tales of the extraordinary and the most ordinary lives began between jobs ranging from a paper round to Poundland and Peppa Pig World – that’s just the Ps – as the band booked over a hundred DIY gigs and even launched their own 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 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.”
BIG IN THE SUBURBS | TRACK LIST
- Big In The Suburbs
- Home For The Weekend
- Knock And Run
- Deere John
- Soak Up The Culture
- Shopping
- Cul-De-Sac
- Pampas Grass
- The Roundabout Racehorse
- Under Milk Wood
- Family Photos
- Country Cousins
- It’s Not Like This In France
- Life Is A Motorway
Reporting for duty as the next great British band, Welly recently wrapped up the 14-date Southern leg of The National Service Tour with the Northern leg kicking off soon with a last hurrah headline show at London Moth Club following on 4 December. Welly and the gang are currently out on the road with Sports Team for a selection of dates across the country and have just been announced as headliners on the Dork Hype List Tour in 2025. Great times are coming.
NOVEMBER
Thu 14 MANCHESTER Club Academy (with Sports Team)
Fri 15 BIRMINGHAM Castle & Falcon (with Sports Team)
Sat 16 LIVERPOOL Arts Club (with Sports Team)
Tue 19 GLASGOW SWG3 (with Sports Team)
Wed 20 LIVERPOOL Arts Club Loft
Thu 21 STOCKPORT Bask
Fri 22 PRESTON The Ferret
Sat 23 MIDDLESBROUGH Play Brew Tap Room
Tue 26 ST ANDREWS Club 601
Wed 27 KILMARNOCK Bakers Nite Club
Thu 28 CARLISLE Brickyard
Fri 29 SHREWSBURY Albert’s Shed
Sat 30 HUDDERSFIELD Parish Dive Bar
DECEMBER
Wed 04 LONDON Moth Club
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
