Welly // Big In The Suburbs Debut LP // Out Now

WELLY

BIG IN THE SUBURBS DEBUT LP // OUT NOW

IT’S NOT LIKE THIS IN FRANCE // SINGLE

THE SEASIDE TOUR // MARCH & APRIL

“They’ve found drama, humour and heart in the places most overlooked and craft something distinctive” DORK MAGAZINE *****

“This is pastiche at its finest – self-aware, fun, whip-smart and witty” DIY MAGAZINE ****

“Storytelling through the lens of his life on Britain’s south coast, Welly could easily be Gen Z’s hyperactive answer to Alex Turner circa 2005” NME

WELLY is an extraordinary character with a remarkable knack for writing whip-smart, playful, funny and terrifyingly refreshing indie pop whose first collection of said songs have now been released as his debut album, Big In The Suburbs. Following on from the epic precursor singles Shopping, Soak Up The Culture, Deere John, Cul-De-Sac, Big In The Suburbs and The Roundabout Racehorse, the album lands with another burst of brilliance with focus single It’s Not Like This In France.

On It’s Not Like This In France, Welly explains:

“It could be worse, right? Neither a flag-shagger’s anthem nor a sarcastic taunt of British life, this song is, if anything, a retaliation to the one-dimensional slagging of Britain that we hear in so many dull punk songs at the moment. Yeah, things are bad, but I listen to music for a different reason.

“It’s an agnostic ‘It Could Be Worse’ singalong. It ain’t pretty, but it’s ours. It’s Not Like This In France, but it’s not like this anywhere, really. It’s not better; it’s not worse. What’s good is that it’s ours. We know the neighbour, the bloke in the corner shop, our work colleagues, our grandparents. This is what’s important. This is what the whole album is about. Look up your own street first before down your nose, or through a telescope or telephone screen.

“Written on the M6 Northbound, near Stafford. As it should have been.”

The Big In The Suburbs 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).

BIG IN THE SUBURBS | TRACK LIST

Big In The Suburbs
Home For The Weekend
Knock And Run
Deere John
Soak Up The Culture
Shopping
Cul-De-Sac
Pampas Grass
The Roundabout Racehorse
Under Milk Wood
Family Photos
Country Cousins
It’s Not Like This In France
Life Is A Motorway

Welly has been building his creative province with a series of releases 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 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.

The title track announced the album in the latter stage of 2024 and The Roundabout Racehorse bolted into 2025 as Welly ran the final furlong towards the album release. With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur to the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen-sink noughties bangers like Girls Aloud, Welly show early ambitions to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition of mainstream bands being beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.

Welly’s own suburban story has quickly become the stuff of urban myth. The group’s front man, songwriter and producer was born in Southampton, showing an early fascination for other people and how they live their lives through the writings of John Betjeman and Alan Bennett. As a child Welly was obsessed by the same six songs on the iPod Shuffle his Dad clipped to his school trousers every day and that was quite enough. But when his Dad sat him down to watch the video to Common People in 2014 an obsession with music was born. Welly’s tales of the extraordinary and the most ordinary lives began between jobs ranging from a paper round to Poundland and Peppa Pig World – and that’s just the Ps – as the band booked over a hundred DIY gigs and launched their own live album and mockumentary aka Welly’s dissertation Live In A Village Hall. Welly are rallying an energetic audience around the UK likewise in search of something different and something fun, with Big In The Suburbs creating a small-town big-dreams world of its own.

“The suburbs are a total microorganism of modern British society,” says Welly, “the purgatory of class and status, copycat compounds of 5 shops (Co-op, Coral, Age UK, another Co-op and a chippy that charges for ketchup), 2 pubs (a bad one and a really bad one) and 10,000 identical little homes. But the album isn’t as specific as this. You’ll find the songs are about things we all know well – wanting more than we’ve got, insecurity, cold feet, young drunkenness, jealousy, sickly sweet love, regret, uncertainty and just wanting to fit in. But these tableaux were born out of those odd places, thousands of which perch under major cities and above the countryside, never knowing its time but always knowing its place.”

Welly’s songwriting is journalistic, telling the world what he see out of his window, “I’m just lucky that most of the nation grew up with a similar view out of the window as I had. My songs point the finger but don’t wag it. It’s just going, ‘Look! Isn’t this funny everyone?’ over a disco-punk beat.” Big In The Suburbs magnifies the mundane with humour. “When you look at life through a microscope, as suburbanites often must, sometimes a speck of dust can be mistaken for nuclear warfare”.

Welly writes and arranges everything himself with the unwavering faith of his mystery gang of band mates: Jacob and Joe on bass and guitar, friends since school, are Welly’s most tolerant allies, keeping him in check; Matt (guitar) and Hanna (keys, Grade 1 cowbell) from the Netherlands, met Welly at university in Brighton and thus completed the gang. “The best analogy for our relationship is that of Scooby-Doo – the show is named after the main character but there’s a whole gang involved that are just as memorable”.

A Welly live show is where it comes together. “I want our gigs, my music, to be transformative like you’ve gone to see a play, a sitcom. That we’re characters who landed on this stage and you get to join us in our pop dystopia for an hour, not suffering sweaty obnoxious blokes with guitars and greasy hair constantly asking if you’re ‘having a good time?’ It’s over”.

After the band cut their teeth at ad-hoc DIY shows across the country, Welly booked their first full National Service Tour in 2024 and were invited to support Sports Team in November. Early 2025 saw them headline the DORK Hype List Tour and they recently announced a Spring run of headline shows in seaside towns for, you guessed it, The Seaside Tour.

Before Welly embarked on his journey towards pop stardom, he turned his hand to a megamix of jobs and currently works on a mobile horsebox veg stall for 10 hours a day, humping sacks of potatoes and flirting with bored housewives. But things appear to be changing for Welly and his band of brothers and sisters all doing it for the love, the laugh and the life. It’s evolving into a life where he now gets to heckle audiences all over the country, get sweaty with dance fever in dingy (and increasingly not-so dingy) venues, blasting out his idiosyncratic but relatable tales of existence, and share his pin-point commentary on normal, everyday life, all wrapped up in a duvet of familiarity and fun making you feel part of his tales and, most importantly, part of the gang. Just like all the very best pop music has the power to do.

MARCH

Fri 21 BRIGHTON Resident Records Instore

Sun 23 LONDON Rough Trade East Instore

Mon 24 GOSPORT Slice of Vinyl Instore

Tue 25 SOUTHAMPTON Vinilo Records Instore

APRIL

Tue 08 FALMOUTH Cornish Bank

Wed 09 PLYMOUTH Junction

Thu 10 WESTON SUPER MARE Loves Café

Tue 15 SWANSEA Bunkhouse

Wed 16 ISLE OF WIGHT Strings Bar and Venue

Thu 17 BOURNEMOUTH Bear Cave