WELLY
THE ROUNDABOUT RACEHORSE SINGLE // OUT NOW
BIG IN THE SUBURBS LP // 21 MARCH 2025
“Meet one of the UK’s wittiest new songwriters … a Where’s Wally of suburban England” NME
“One of the most exciting new acts in ages … equal parts nostalgia and social commentary” DORK
“It’s a whole lot of fun whilst meticulous musicality lies beneath the maverick mentality” WONDERLAND
“Satirical, sometimes scathing Southampton newcomers” STEVE LAMACQ | BBC 6 MUSIC
“A bubbly dose of acerbic pop that leaves a real impact” CLASH
“Truly unique, combining art-pop and electro-chaos” DIY
PRE-ORDER BIG IN THE SUBURBS LP: Pre-order HERE
While currently headlining the DORK Hype List tour, WELLY have also shared the latest single from their debut album Big In The Suburbs, 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.
Welly explains: “The Roundabout Racehorse is about going back home and bumping into characters from your past that make you feel either good about yourself or, conversely, that you’ve done nothing in life. Going home is a checkpoint – YOU feel the same, but everyone comments on how different you are from last time they saw you. You can get tethered to this idea of your past self, unable to escape that first girlfriend or that terrible haircut from Year 8. You wish you could feel like a Roman gladiator making his ‘Nostos’ but, in fact, you end up coming home with a hangover and the cat’s claw marks on your jeans. You can be cocky, yeah – but to what end? The fattest fish in the smallest pond? What good is being Big, if you’re Big in the Suburbs?”
Speaking about the video, he says: “We worked with our school friend and tolerant confidant Harvey Payne, as we have for all our videos, filming Joe’s Honda Jazz around our hometown, trying to rip off The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ video. Give it a watch. We go into McDonald’s in Jockey Silks and a Pantomime Horse costume.”
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.
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 even launched their own 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.
Regarding the album, Welly says: “I could say something very clever about suburban tableaus, provincial minuets, the motifs of traffic, dead end roads and big fish in small ponds, but that would be silly. This is the child’s first painting going on the fridge. I’m very proud of this. It’s fun, and music hasn’t been fun for a long time, especially British music. This is a lob in the right direction. It took 6 years to write and 6 weeks to record. The band and I did it all ourselves at my Dad’s house in Scotland. It’s DIY and not out of choice, but out of budget. Charity shop instruments, solid gold mentalities.”
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
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
Ticket: https://welly.os.fan/
WEBSITE: https://worldwidewelly.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/p/Welly-100080595133396/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/worldwidewelly/?hl=en-gb
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/WorldWideWelly