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.
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“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.
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