The Wombats’s Matthew Murphy: ‘My wife hears that Kate Moss song, and is like, Can you please stop doing this?’

The Liverpool band have built on their indie past to become global touring, triumphant TikTok stars. Mark Beaumont asks about the intoxicant years, the LA fires and their new album. Here he comes now, dashing between the twinkling fairy lights, chic bars and Harry Potter stores of Liverpool’s Albert Dock towards our coffee shop date, that forgotten ex who waltzed back onto our timelines looking more and more like The One that got away. Back then, almost 20 years ago now, Matthew “Murph” Murphy was the anxiety-riddled frontman of cartoonish indie-pop trio The Wombats, bouncing around 2007 entreating us to dancefloor catharsis in “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” where “everything is going wrong but we’re so happy!” It might have felt like a delirious but brief fling for many, but in the intervening years, and over five hit albums, Murph’s band have become TikTok sensations, Gen Z heroes, a streaming phenomenon, chart-topping arena stars. Why the hell not give him a second chance?.

As he bustles into the bar, impeccably turned out in boho overcoat and rockstar shirt, the green flags stack up. Though tousled and tired from a week of intense rehearsals with his bandmates Dan Haggis (drums) and Tord Øverland Knudsen (bass), Murphy’s small talk is friendly and tea-ful. There’s a dash of nostalgia at being back in his home city, where The Wombats have convened from homes in the US, Norway and Liverpool to perfect songs from their new sixth album Oh! The Ocean for a forthcoming arena tour. He reminisces about how one emotional Valentine’s Day massacre in his youth inspired the band’s debut single and first Top 20 hit “Moving to New York”. His date declined further drinks in favour of an early night, only for Murph to later spot her in a Liverpool bar “murdered off her face”. “She was s***faced and making out with someone,” he says, baggage long since shed. “I got really jealous and wrote that song.”.

His thoughts, though, are still on his adopted hometown of LA where, until recently, he lived just a mile-and-a-half east of the Palisades fire. “There’s, like, ready… set… go,” he explains. “We were on ‘set…’, but we didn’t wait for the evacuation order. We just left because the air quality was f***ed.” Murph was lucky, but he knows three people who lost their homes. What struck him most, though, was the fact that his local charity shops were so overwhelmed with donations that they had to start turning donors away. “That’s a good metaphor for Angelenos in general. Everyone’s a bit caught up in themselves and maybe not very grounded as a community of people, but hearts of gold.”.

As we relax into our mineral waters and chicken goujons, the guard begins to come down. Gradually, we unravel Murph’s recent transformation from anxious, addiction-twisted hot mess baring his breakdowns, paranoias, romantic failures, narcotic habits and marital rows on albums such as 2022’s No 1 Fix Yourself, Not the World to the more sober and philosophical Murph we find staring out to sea contemplating existence on Oh! The Ocean. Here, amid much rich and futuristic sonic evolution with new producer John Congleton (of Death Cab for Cutie and St Vincent fame), tracks such as “The World’s Not Out to Get Me, I Am”, the happy/sad “Gut Punch” and the fatalistic “Grim Reaper” seem to look upon Murph’s personal turmoils from a better place than before, one of acceptance of life’s ups and downs.

The title was inspired by an epiphany Murph experienced on a Californian beach holiday with his wife, Akemi, and their young family last year. “I was very sleep deprived and I was looking out at the ocean, and the feeling was like, ‘What is the nature of nature?’,” he says. He realised right there that he’d been too wrapped up in himself for too long, numbed to reality by the “false energy” of touring life and his own protective, enclosing mindset. “I didn’t want to deal with the sharp edges of life,” he says. “I think of the bandwidth of life now – I’d just squashed it so that the highs weren’t too high and the lows weren’t too low… every day was pretty much the same day.”.

By then this one-time intoxicant obsessive was already solidly sober; now he feels rejuvenated too. “I’m actually enjoying life again,” he says, smiling. “I’m not clouded. I’m not trying to put something between me and life any more. I feel like I popped my head above the clouds.”. And what dark clouds they were. The band’s 2007 debut album A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation made light indie-pop work of Murph’s anxiety issues and relationship disasters; dumped on the dancefloor, lovesick at the forest rave, betrayed on Valentine’s Day. “Let’s Dance to Joy Division”, the album’s biggest hit, celebrated how misery and ecstasy could coexist in the troubled young mind, a dichotomy that has come to define the band.

As their sound gradually expanded in synth-rock and mainstream pop directions, laying the groundwork for modern alternative pop and becoming increasingly popular with each new generation of young pop fans (their 2015 album track “Greek Tragedy”, a viral TikTok smash several times over, has racked up around 300 million streams across its various versions alone), Murph’s confessions grew ever more visceral and cathartic. The 2011 ballad “Anti-D” explored his addiction to anti-depressant medication. Tracks like “This Is Not a Party” (“It’s a hurricane”) and “Out of My Head” found him indulging his hedonistic streak to self-destructive and brain-cracking degrees: by 2018’s “Turn” he was singing about “seeing a message flash and then smashing up my phone” and “screaming at the moon in black lipstick”. And the obsessions, letdowns and car arguments of “Lemon to a Knife Fight” and “If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming with You” were Kardashian-level insights into the rollercoaster of married life, episodes in a sonic Meet the Murphys that you were always amazed to find had made it to another season.