The Art of Longevity The Art of Longevity Season 3, Episode 6: The Wombats
The Wombats have defied all UK press scepticism (and cynicism) to become one of the country’s biggest indie pop bands. Big streaming audiences, huge social media followings and a multi-generational fanbase now pretty much guarantee the Wombats will hit no. 1 on the album charts, as new album ‘Fix Yourself Not the World’ has proved. They also secure headline festival slots and sell out shows and tours, not just at home but even in the USA.
Having come to know and admire the band’s songcraft on their previous record Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life In 2018, I’m fascinated by The Wombats’ story. How did the band defy the critics and cultural trends (indie has hardly been in cultural favour for the past 20 years) to become every young bands dream: independent, popular, commercially successful and on a seemingly unstoppable creative roll?
The answer is multi-faceted of course. The band is a close knit, collaborative unit of multi-instrumentalists, all trained in music and sound production at Liverpool’s LIPA. They have ridden a wave of ‘pop as the new indie’, adjusting their sound to be something way beyond their early post-punk/grunge guitars of the early 2000s. At the core of their success are those songs - catchy, bouncy, poppy earworms - some of which have topped 100 million streams.
When I was reading through the reviews for The Wombats’ latest album Fix Yourself, Not the World, it was The Guardian’s Alexi Petridis who put it best:
“Scroll down the Wombats’ Spotify page and you come to the section headed “Fans also like”. It features a selection of their mid-00s contemporaries, fellow strivers in the league of what was cruelly dubbed “landfill indie”: the Pigeon Detectives, the Kooks, the Enemy, Scouting for Girls”.
In my conversation with Dan Haggis of The Wombats for The Art of Longevity, I didn’t want to be the one to bring up the phrase landfill indie but I didn’t have to...
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