THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Welly is reporting for duty as the next great British artist — armred with his debut album 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 this album — all written and self-produced by Welly himself — this rich tableaux of British life is celebrated for all its tragedies and triumphs. Here are songs about wanting more than you have, a world in flux, 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 all year with a series of singles in the run-up to Big In The Suburbs. First single Shopping, for instance, pays tribute to the dying U.K. 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 both sends up and adds to the canon of the lost, the lads-on-tour anthem, with lawnmower-themed love-triangle Deere John connecting a story arc with Cul-De-Sac (and the stasis of two people at a romantic dead-end road). With inspiration ranging from the parochial storytelling of Blur or the intellectual electronica of Pet Shop Boys to kitchen-sink noughties bangers like Girls Aloud, Welly shows early ambitions to reconnect the great, grassroots British tradition with the mainstream bands once beamed straight into your claustrophobic living room.”
