While currently headlining the DORK Hype List tour, WELLY have also shared the latest single from their debut album Big In The Suburbs (pre-order here), to be released on 21 March. The single, The Roundabout Racehorse, comes with another characteristically humorous video featuring Welly in Jockey Silks accompanied by a Pantomime Horse.
Writing while in the damp, smelly basement of Welly’s university digs, The Roundabout Racehorse was born in just 15 minutes. It encapsulates the strangeness of returning home, being surrounded by people who never left and consequently not quite being able to properly escape who you are or how people perceive you.
Big In The Suburbs, 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 tableau 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 for over a year with a series of singles in the run up to the album. 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 and the kitchen sink bangers of Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect that great, grassroots British tradition of mainstream bands being beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.
FEBRUARY (DORK HYPE LIST TOUR 2025)
Thu 06 LEEDS Oporto
Fri 07 NEWCASTLE Grove
Sat 08 MANCHESTER Deaf Institute
Sun 09 GLASGOW McChuills
Wed 12 LONDON Hoxton Colours
Thu 13 SOUTHAMPTON Heartbreakers
Sat 15 NOTTINGHAM Bodega
MARCH
Fri 21 BRIGHTON Resident Records Instore
Sun 23 LONDON Rough Trade East Instore
Tickets: https://welly.os.fan/
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