The Wombats are coming to First Avenue’s main room on September 26th.
Even after eighteen intense years of bouncing, bellowing, and soul-baring your way to the top, some successes strike when you’re not looking. While The Wombats were hard at work remotely constructing their fifth album Fix Yourself, Not The World from LA, London and Oslo, a new generation of TikTokers were sending the band viral by making over 600,000 videos — some viewed over 100 million times — around the opening lines of the Oliver Nelson remix of their 2015 Glitterbug album track ‘Greek Tragedy’: “We’re smashing mics in karaoke bars, you’re running late with half your make-up on.”
“I think one influencer made a video of her dancing, singing the opening, and then it took off and every man and his dog were doing it,” says singer Matthew ‘Murph’ Murphy of a viral breakout that has seen the remix streamed 30 million times, the original track 120 million (sending it gold in the US) and add 2.4 million to their monthly Spotify listeners since January 2021. “Someone sent me Charlie Puth singing it like whilst having some granola. I guess people were searching ‘what is this song?’ It turned out that remix was on some Hed Kandi compilation [Dusk ‘Til Disco, 2015] and that was the only outlet for it. It’s cool that random celebrities are singing the opening lines to something I wrote a long time ago, it’s great that it’s doing well but it’s just completely random.”
The success of the ‘Greek Tragedy’ remix is further illustration, if any were needed, of The Wombats’ ability to remain relevant to new generations of fans through the timeless power of their songwriting alone. Formed at the Liverpool Institute Of Performing Arts in 2003, they were the three-headed guitar pop sensation — Murph, bassist Tord Øverland Knudsen and drummer Dan Haggis — that erupted out of Merseyside with Top Twenty hits like ‘Let’s Dance To Joy Division’ and ‘Moving To New York’ during the late-’00s indie rock explosion, stamped their mark on the era with 2007’s fervidly melodic debut album A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation, and then transcended it. By 2011’s This Modern Glitch (a UK Number 3 hit) and 2015’s Glitterbug (Number 5) they’d easily hurdled the shift to streaming and become a playlist phenomenon thanks to tracks such as ‘Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves),’ ‘Techno Fan,’ ‘1996,’ ‘Emoticons’ and their online secret weapon ‘Greek Tragedy.’
Red Rum Club will be starting out the night!
You won’t want to miss it so get your tickets here
