The Wombats tell us about new album ‘Oh! The Ocean’: “I have the body of a 40-year-old male and the soul of a 15-year-old girl”

Check out new single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come’ along with details of a 2025 UK arena tour, as Matthew ‘Murph’ Murphy tells us about TikTok success and the band's journey so far

The Wombats have announced their new sixth album ‘Oh! The Ocean’ along with details of a March 2025 UK arena tour. Check out everything below, along with our interview with Matthew ‘Murph’ Murphy.

The announcement comes alongside a new single ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come’ – a song about Murph’s social anxiety. He described the track as being “about constantly defaulting to a Lone Wolf mindset, and what the real-life consequences of that may be”.

The new album – their first since topping the UK album chart with 2022’s ‘Fix Yourself, Not The World’ and headlining the Radio One tent at Reading & Leeds 2024 – was helmed by St Vincent and Death Cab For Cutie producer John Congleton and inspired by a revelatory experience Murph had on a beach during a family holiday this summer.

“I’d had a particularly funky morning and didn’t sleep well,” he told NME. “I took my family down to the beach around Orange County way, the kids were off playing and I was just stood there looking at the ocean. It was a very mushroomy experience.

“I saw the ocean and the waves and everything as if for the first time. It was like I was an alien, I’d come from a different planet and I was put on a beach and someone took my blindfold off and showed me the ocean. I was like, ‘What the fuck is that? How did it get there?’ It was the most awestruck I’ve ever been, really.”

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Murph also spoke to NME about the upcoming tour – which includes stops at London’s O2 and Manchester’s Co-Op Live ArenA – the near-disaster of Leeds and Sao Paolo, the intimate details of his neighbour’s OnlyFans and being chased by gangs in Rio De Janeiro.

NME: Hi Murph. What’s the secret of The Wombats’ ever-increasing success?

Murph: “I still don’t really know. I have the body of a 40-year-old male and the soul of a 15-year-old girl. Conceptually and lyrically, it’s always been a little bit odd or off-kilter. The songs are oddly specific. They’re not that pop, lyrically speaking. The ‘Greek Tragedy’ TikTok thing was just mad [a Swedish remix of the album track from 2015’s third album ‘Glitterbug’ went viral in 2020, sending the original to 140 million streams]. That feels like it’s in someone else’s hands, not ours.”

Do you feel comfortable stepping up to your first full arena tour?

“The bigger the crowd, the more comfortable I feel. The small ones freak me out, because I can see everyone’s face. I can see the boyfriend that’s been dragged along against his will. I can see the first album fans, or I can see the people who know us from TikTok and were expecting a Euro dance track. I can see all of these things, whereas when it’s a big crowd, I just see one quite happy, energetic being. If it’s Glastonbury, if it’s a big stage and there’s cameras on me, like a livestream or whatever, that’s different, that’s probably the most difficult. I don’t like that, because you’ve got the big crowd and the singular thing staring at you.”

You rammed the Radio One tent at Reading festival, but what happened when the tent was shut down in the storms that hit Leeds?

“It was a bit of a shock. I thought I was going home early because, from what we’d heard, none of the other artists on before us had been given us slot, or anyone figured it out. But they put us on the dance stage at the end and it probably worked out better than if we were in the tent to be honest. It had this crazy overhanging canopy-slash-screen that we were able to fly a load of images off.

“When we played in Sao Paolo a freak cyclone hit the stage in the middle of our third track and completely soaked us. Wrote off all the gear. Some steel split, and the stage we were on had folded down. We were on the other stage, but it was facing the main stage where The Strokes were headlining. They went on that night, but all the drapes had come off, there was no screen, they were just playing against scaffolding. It was pretty ridiculous.

“Then we got in trouble with some gang [in Rio De Janeiro] and they chased us back to the hotel. It was a wild night and I guess someone said something to the wrong person whilst intoxicated, and the next thing we knew we were in a van being chased – not chased, but two Range Rovers followed us back to the hotel. Our tour manager got me off and then had to deal with it. But apparently it was pretty freaky.”

Is the new Wombats album a continuation of the personal progression from ‘Life Is A Killer’, the second album from your side project Love Fame Tragedy from March?

“Yeah, I feel like the second Love Fame Tragedy record was really trying to deal with sobriety and finding myself in this new world where all the colours were brighter. Then this album is about how stuck in my head I always am, how I’m there but I’m actually not there, about trying to be more present in my own life. Albums four and five certainly deal with being caught up in a whirlwind that I’m now out of, and I maybe missed the whirlwind, and I’m also freaked out by the state of calm.”

Have you developed replacement vices?

“I probably drink 10 times the amount of coffee than I used to, and don’t worry about what I eat so much, but my addictive behaviours just come in repetition. I go to the same places, do the same things. When I’ve had a day that has been successful, I will try and replicate that day until it falls apart. It’s just repetition of things, of anything that makes me feel satiated.”

The title ‘Oh! The Ocean’ came from your revelation on the beach – was that a part of gaining a fresh perspective? The album feels like a new start, with producer John Congleton and a more sophisticated modern feel?

“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. ‘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.”

You’ve said you wanted the record to sound human – is AI killing music?

“I don’t know if it’s killing music. What I was interested in was that AI doesn’t really know how to make human mistakes. I don’t know how you would program that into a model like that. I was trying to embrace things that I know a computer can’t replicate.”

‘Can’t Say No’ illustrates our need to embrace wild adventure in order to escape ourselves, be it car theft, Far East voyages, cemetery parties or Satanism. How many of those have you actually done?

“Me and Tord [Knudsen, bassist] ended up at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris once. We were definitely not sober there. He would have approved.”

There are hints of discomfort with the American way of life on tracks such as ‘I Love America And America Hates Me’. Which bits of it are you particularly uncomfortable about?

“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.”

‘Kate Moss’ hints at some pretty soap opera stuff going on in your LA neighbourhood. Could you share the tea?

“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.”

Alternating between distance and creativity, The Wombats seem to have reached a constructive routine, considering there have been some rocky times in the past. Was there ever a time you thought the band might be over?

“Everything seems to be in a good place. We’ve had two or three not great moments, but we seem to put that behind us pretty easily, or we’re always focused on the next thing. We’re all actually very agreeable people, so that helps. Maybe after the third album when we parted ways with Warner, I took that pretty hard. But that was my problem because all of my self-worth was wrapped up in stuff like that. I had to then learn that that’s not the case and that took a while.

“The fourth album was crazy – I don’t think many artists leave major labels and then go on to be considerably bigger than they were at that major label, so that was nice. I always knew it was smoke and mirrors and bullshit anyway but maybe a part of my ego liked it a little bit too much, so I had to learn to live without the nonsense, which is actually way healthier.”

The Wombats  release ‘Oh! The Ocean’ on February 21, 2025. Check out the tracklist below.

‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come’
‘Can’t Say No’
‘Blood On The Hospital Floor’
‘Kate Moss’
‘Gut Punch’
‘My Head Is Not My Friend’
‘I Love America And She Hates Me’
‘The World’s Not Out To Get Me, I Am’
‘Grim Reaper’
‘Reality Is A Wild Ride’
‘Swerve (101)’
‘Lobster’

The band have also announced a full UK arena tour. Check out full dates below. Tickets will be on sale from 9am on on Friday 18 October and available here.
 
MARCH
18 – Nottingham Motorpoint Arena
19 – London The O2                                      
21 – Cardiff Utilita Arena
22 – Manchester AO Arena                                       
25 – Glasgow OVO Hydro
26 – Leeds First Direct Arena