The Wombats today announce the support acts for their forthcoming 2022 UK Arena Tour. The band will be joined by two of the UK’s most exciting bands in Mercury Prize shortlisted Sports Team and fellow Liverpudlians The Night Café for select dates on their 9 leg tour next spring – full tour listing below. The news follows ‘Ready For The High’, the latest offering from their forthcoming fifth studio album Fix Yourself, Not The World. A sultry buzz rock note-to-self to accept the good times now they’re here, the track will be accompanied by a video shot while the band were together in the UK earlier this month, which captures the raw live energy they recently brought to the main stages of Reading and Leeds Festival and Neighbourhood Weekender.
About the track, frontman Matthew “Murph” Murphy comments: ‘’Ready for the High’ is a 90’s inspired track that I was excited to toss a load of trumpets into. The song is about being engulfed in a bad place, but rather than accepting this as immutable, acknowledging that it is only temporary and that better times are closer than they (currently) appear.”
‘Ready For The High’ follows the single ‘If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You’, an infectious electro-pop ode to obsessive devotion, which premiered on BBC Radio 1 ‘Future Sounds’ with Yungblud and has already racked up more than 3M streams and counting on Spotify, spent a second week on the BBC Radio 1 C-List and was Greg James’ Breakfast Show’s ‘Tune Of The Week’.
Recording remotely over the past year from their respective homes, the band have been working hard to produce some of the most captivating, inventive and forward-thinking music of their career to date. With frontman Matthew “Murph” Murphy in Los Angeles, bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen in Oslo and drummer Dan Haggis in London, they discussed each day’s plan via Zoom, then recorded separately, sending individual files to producers Jacknife Lee (U2, The Killers), Gabe Simon (Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey), Paul Meaney (Twenty One Pilots, Nothing But Thieves), Mark Crew (Bastille, Rag‘n’Bone Man) and Mike Crossey (The 1975, The War on Drugs, Yungblud) to mix into the finished tracks. “It was pure madness, to be honest,” explains Murph.
The viral success of Oliver Nelson’s remix of their 2015 hit ‘Greek Tragedy’ on TikTok has enraptured a whole new generation of fans, a feat they’ve managed to continually repeat since their 2007 debut A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation. Used in over 600,000 videos (some of which have over 100 million views), the remix has rocketed to over 30 million streams, propelling the original to 120 million streams and sending it Gold in the US. It’s helped the band surpass 1.5 billion worldwide streams, also amassing an extra 2.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify since just January; further illustration, if any were needed, of The Wombats’ ability to reach new generations of fans through the timeless power of their songwriting and lyrics alone.
With their biggest ever UK headline tour set for 2022, including a landmark show at London’s The O2 and two sold-out nights at Mountford Hall Liverpool, and their fifth studio album ‘Fix Yourself, Not The World’, due for release on 7th January 2022 via AWAL, this is only the start of what’s to come as fans new and old gear up for the next exciting chapter from one of Britain’s most adored bands.
