- 2025-02-25
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MUSIC
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The Wombats Releases New Album “Oh! The Ocean”
British alt-pop band The Wombats, consisting of Matthew Murphy (vocals/guitar), Tord Øverland Knudsen (bass), and Dan Haggis (drums), released their sixth studio album “Oh! The Ocean” on February 14, 2025.
This marks their first album in three years since the 2022 album “Fix Yourself, Not the World”.
The album title is inspired by a revelatory trip to the beach the band frontman Matthew Murphy took on a family holiday.
Matthew Murphy said of the album title, “I've been to many beaches and seas and coasts over the years but for some reason it felt like the first time I had ever seen it and was truly present. There was this revelation that I had been living a life caught up in my own head, or in some kind of racing helmet or with blinkers on. It was really a potent experience. I felt like I saw everything new for the first time, and was aware that I had been so selfish to not take in how crazy the world and life is. I'd been caught up in my own BS for way too long. The album offers up some internal questions like: why are my head and body disconnected all the time? Why am I incapable at times of seeing any form of beauty in the world or in others? Why do I expect the world to conform to my will? Why do I never stop and smell the flowers?”- The band recorded the album with producer John Congleton at Echo Park in Los Angeles for six week.
Matthew Murphy told NME about working of John Congleton, “It was really refreshing to work with John, although I felt bad because I'd done the last the last three Wombats albums and my two LFT ones with Mark [Crew]. Where the decision came from to work with someone else was just more that it felt riskier to do the same thing again. It just wasn't an option. It felt like we knew what we were going to get with Mark. We know what the end result is going to be. We just didn't feel like we could do that four times in a row. For me, six times in a row.”
He continued, “'Kate Moss' came out very, very different to how the demo sounds, which is great, and I drove [John] a bit crazy with 'Can't Say No', because it just wasn't sounding fun enough. I was trying to inject it with life and energy. I was trying to say, 'Imagine you're watching Pulp play 'Common People' at Glastonbury, that's the fun that we want'. He got out this one machine, I can't remember what it was called, and I just went to town on that with him, and it gave the track a lot of lift.” -
The Wombats explained about some tracks for the album.
“Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want To Come”
“This song is about pranging out in social situations. This one is kind of a bit of a special one that came out of nowhere. I remember having that kind of lyric and trying to fit it into several things. And it didn't really find a home, and then suddenly it did. I like a lengthy title.”
“Can't Say No”
“The song is about making decisions that in no way benefit my future self, and in fact cause my future self a lot of problems. I never truly learnt to live 'in' the moment, I was only ever living 'for' the moment and as if that moment was going to be my last.
It's kind of probably my favorite song on the record, and it's kind of, I think I love it so much as it's like juvenile, but wise and kind of sad and fun and kind of sounds like it was made on the moon.
I think, I mean, this song was supposed to be on our fourth album, and then it didn't quite work, and had an old chorus, and then randomly changed the chorus, like two months, really, before we started recording that, and then I fell back in love with it. The verses are seven years old and the chorus is brand new. It always kept kind of coming back and tapping me on the shoulder. There was just something always wrong with the chorus in my head, and then I spent some time on it, and something kind of magical happened. And it's suddenly my favorite one that song, probably.
Definitely struggled with people pleasing. I think the three of us maybe to some degree, are a little bit like that. But I mean, the lyrics of this song is just about being a bit of a muppet, really, and trying to use anything at my disposal to escape my reality, which I've stopped doing now, and that's what the song's about.”
“Blood on the Hospital Floor”
“The idea behind 'Blood On The Hospital Floor' is that things that seem difficult in life can often have a simple solution. Things are not always as bad as they may first seem. The analogy is to mopping up blood on the hospital floor - cleaning up the mess and moving on.”
“Kate Moss” via NME
“There are a lot of relationships teetering on the edge. One of our friends is going through a divorce and she started an OnlyFans which did pretty well. After her second child she had quite an excess of milk, so her OnlyFans was called, like, Lactating Mommy or something. It's just about how everyone seems to be having a breakdown. But it doesn't seem to be strictly located to that area in Los Angeles, it seems that everyone is going it through at the moment. We're all just reckoning with the fact that most people in LA came from somewhere else and probably did something creative and had a really great twenties and thirties, and then they've settled down and then real life has suddenly slapped them around the face. Some people can't do it.”
“My Head Is Not My Friend”
“'My Head Is Not My Friend' is a song about the idea that maybe I don't actually have my best interests at heart. It's a song about hungover regret and perhaps not having my best interests at heart throughout that time.”
“I Love America And She Hates Me” via NME
“That's a love song to how divided and dark America is as a place and as an idea – how ridiculous the place is. The whole song leads up to the 'I'll love America 'till I'm shot in the back of the head' kind of thing. The gun thing is definitely a concern. I'm never gonna get used to that being brought up in the UK - constitutionally in America, even though a lot of people are fighting against it, that's a part of being free. The British mind can't fully comprehend it, or at least my generation.” - source : Apple Music
