Everything I read about The Wombats ahead of meeting the U.K. group’s frontperson and principal songwriter, Matthew “Murph” Murphy, emphasized his introversion, social anxiety, and depression. I arrived prepared to ease him into our interview, but it is Murph who makes me feel immediately comfortable at a local café and bakery in his family-friendly neighborhood in Los Angeles. This courtesy is especially appreciated considering it’s not been 24 hours since he had to put one of his dogs down.
This is the fourth area Murph has lived since moving to the city almost a decade ago. He relocated from his native Liverpool via London after meeting his wife during a spur-of-the-moment trip to Los Angeles. Now a family of four with two daughters aged 4 and 5, Murph often brings them up. His life decisions are heavily weighted in favor of his family first, and his career a close second, with the goal of not sacrificing time away from them. There are a lot of pauses when he speaks, his thoughts bubbling up slowly then morphing into different thoughts. But when it comes to his family, his statements are firm and uttered without hesitation.
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Even though he talks like Paul McCartney, his Liverpool accent softened over time and distance, Murph is an unlikely pop star. The Wombats are one of very few guitar bands from the 2000s who have persisted. They have steadily released albums, leveling up with each one. A remix of their song “Greek Tragedy” from the 2015 album Glitterbug went viral on TikTok in 2021. Their last album, Fix Yourself, Not the World (2022) topped the U.K. Albums Chart and The Wombats graduated to arenas on select tour dates. While the achievements are fulfilling, Murph admits he, “was broken by the amount of U.K. promo I had to do.” Having said that, he clarifies that, “I was immensely proud of us. I’ve always felt we were on the outside looking in. But I always believed in us.”
In a couple of days, Murph will be heading to the U.K. to promote The Wombats’ sixth album, Oh! The Ocean, which releases on Valentine’s Day. Recorded in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen), Oh! The Ocean is Murph’s first sober Wombats album—although he already experienced sober music creation with his solo project Love Fame Tragedy’s 2024 album, Life is a Killer.
“Two years and four months,” he replies instantly when asked how long he’s been sober. As for what the motivation was, Murph says, “There was a niggling feeling in the back of my head that I was going to be on my deathbed, looking back at everything with no time on the horizon, thinking, ‘Why did I spend it all hungover and struggling and feeling miserable? Why didn’t I throw myself at everything more?’”
Murph’s story is not uncommon. According to him, he was “very shy, not great in social situations.” He used alcohol and “other stuff to accentuate the alcohol,” to “flatten the distribution of emotions and make every day end the same.”
It was an ultimatum that pushed him to stop. “I guess, in my case, they would say the bottom came up to hit me,” he says. Murph struggled through the first year, but concedes that, “It keeps on getting better. Before, I was mildly annoyed by life, thought I knew everything. Now, I’m fascinated by life, and I’m convinced I know fuck all about anything.”
Murph’s sense of humor, dark as it is, threads through The Wombats’ observational lyrics. Sober, his narrative is just as sharp, although there was a time that he worried it wouldn’t be. That worry turned out to be “Utter nonsense,” he says. “The stuff I write about is a bit odd or goofy and has moments of profundity and moments that touch you. But essentially, it’s always a little bit weird. In that respect, it’s helped us stay firm and attract things to us.”
He isn’t above putting himself in detrimental situations and self-sabotaging as a source of inspiration to get a song out of it, case in point, “Pink Lemonade” from Glitterbug. “Ridiculous,” he says of his behavior. “I have to be mindful because I’ve locked myself in a room in London for two albums, chain smoking Marlboro Lights and drinking Diet Coke, going into a rabbit hole. It took me a while to get back out of it. Now I know I have to give myself at least a little bit of grace and to stop sometimes and smell the roses.”
To that end, Congleton was chosen because of his leftfield approach to production. He also mixed Murph’s Wombats bandmates Dan Haggis’ and Tord Øverland-Knudsen’s side project Sunship Balloon. Murph had 40 songs demoed to a high quality by the time The Wombats joined Congleton at his Elmwood Recording Studios in Los Angeles’ artistic enclave of Echo Park. The vision was to make the album as human as possible, what Murph calls, “an album of mistakes,” as it were. The aim was to be the polar opposite of AI-assisted music, because after hearing Ghostwritter977’s “Heart on My Sleeve” which uses Drake and The Weeknd style vocals, Murph was horrified to find it “believable” and also, “not horrendous.”
He qualifies the “mistakes” comment by saying they couldn’t fully lean into that because, “it would have sounded like a shreds video.” But what ended up on Oh! The Ocean is less the parts of the songs the band toiled over and more the peripheral sounds that resulted while they were recording.
Murph is polite but dismissive of compliments, particularly when I say there isn’t a dud anywhere in The Wombats’ catalog. And when I mention their upcoming U.K. tour is all arenas (a first for the group), he has a separation from the concept to the point where it’s almost like The Wombats’ experience is happening to someone else.
“Maybe I’m underselling myself, but I have a very distorted self-image,” he says. “I no longer aspire to have the huge Arctic Monkeys or Muse kind of success. I now aspire to be in a band like the Pixies. I also want to get to 10 albums of music and songs that I really meant and think are really good. However people respond to that is how they respond to it. Maybe I’m already at the point I want to be, but I have no idea because I’m obsessed with the minutiae.”
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