Twenty years on from the mid-2000s indie guitar boom, the survivors of that frantic era occupy an unusual position in British pop culture. The Wombats are choosing to face the milestone directly. Frontman Matthew Murphy, drummer Dan Haggis, and bassist Tord Overland Knudsen have announced a full UK and European tour for spring 2027 to celebrate two decades since their debut record, A Guide To Love, Loss and Desperation, first introduced them.
The concerts will not follow the usual greatest-hits structure. Instead, the trio will split each night into two distinct halves. Audiences will first hear A Guide To Love, Loss and Desperation performed entirely in order, from the opening note to the finish. After that initial run-through, the band will return to the stage for a second set assembled from subsequent hit singles and long-standing fan favourites drawn from the rest of their catalogue.
The tour starts in France on April 1 at Le Trianon in Paris before heading across central Europe. Stops follow at the Palladium in Cologne on April 3, the Columbiahalle in Berlin on April 4, and Munich's Zenith on April 5. The continental leg wraps with appearances at the Gashouder in Amsterdam on April 7 and the Trix in Antwerp on April 8. Turning toward the UK, the band play Manchester's O2 Victoria Warehouse on April 10, Glasgow's O2 Academy on April 13, and London's O2 Academy Brixton on April 16, before concluding the anniversary run at the Arts Club in Liverpool on April 18.
Support across the dates features a rotating bill made up of The Snuts, Cherryholt, Abbie McCarthy, and Filip Clements. Fans looking to secure seats or floor space early will get a pre-sale opportunity on Wednesday, October 14, while the general ticket release follows on Friday, October 16 at 9am BST.
For Haggis, revisiting that 2007 debut brings back memories of an abrupt shift in the trio's everyday reality. The songs on the record represented their opening four years as a working unit, a period spent sleeping on the floors of promoters' flats and cramming gear into his grandmother's car to travel between low-capacity gigs. Almost overnight, that circuit expanded into appearances at Glastonbury and the Royal Albert Hall, alongside international trips through the United States, Japan, and Australia, where the group even crossed paths with an actual wombat. Haggis has described the anniversary shows as a ride in a sonic DeLorean, though he stressed that the retrospective does not signal an end to current creative work. The trio continue to write and record, with new music already underway alongside the rehearsals for 2027.
When A Guide To Love, Loss and Desperation landed in 2007, propelled by singles such as Kill the Director, Moving to New York, and Let’s Dance to Joy Division, it went on to shift more than 400,000 copies in the UK. Rather than fading after that initial success, the band built a remarkably steady run over the next two decades. They delivered This Modern Glitch in 2011, Glitterbug in 2015, Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life in 2018, and Fix Yourself, Not the World in 2022. Their sixth album, Oh! The Ocean, arrived in February 2025 and entered the UK Official Albums Chart at Number Four.
That longevity has produced plenty of unexpected moments along the way. Murphy recently recalled how Mick Jagger filmed himself in 2019 dancing to their track Techno Fan while recuperating from heart surgery, posting the clip online. The viral endorsement led straight to an invitation for The Wombats to open for The Rolling Stones at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Backstage at the stadium, Keith Richards ended up stroking the hair of Murphy's young daughter in a gesture that felt like a quiet rock and roll blessing. Revisiting their first album two decades later brings the band full circle back to the songs that quietly set that unlikely chain of events in motion.
