Welly continue their rise with The Roundabout Racehorse, the latest single from their upcoming debut album Big in the Suburbs, out March 21st.
Premiered during their headline run on the DORK Hypelist tour, the track captures the bittersweet awkwardness of returning home, where the past lingers and small-town familiarity feels like a strange kind of time warp.
Written in the damp basement of Welly’s uni digs after a visit home, the song came together in just 15 minutes. It’s about the uncomfortable feeling of running into people from your past, some making you feel like you’ve moved forward, others making you question if you have at all. Welly explains:
“Going home is a checkpoint. You feel the same, but everyone tells you how different you are. You can get tethered to this idea of your past self—your first girlfriend, your Year 8 haircut. You want to feel like a Roman gladiator returning victorious, but instead, you wake up with a hangover and the cat’s claw marks on your jeans. What good is being ‘Big’ if you’re just ‘Big in the Suburbs’?”
The video, filmed with their long-time collaborator Harvey Payne, features Welly in jockey silks and a pantomime horse riding through their hometown, trying to recreate The Specials’ Ghost Town. Welly adds,
“We filmed it in Joe’s Honda Jazz, drove round, went to McDonald’s in full costume. It’s ridiculous. Watch it.”
Big in the Suburbs is an album about the mundane, the beautiful, and the quietly chaotic lives of suburban Britain. Self-written and produced, Welly paints a picture of a world that’s both funny and tragic, songs about wanting more, feeling stuck, and learning to live with it.
Their run of singles has already set the tone: Shopping captures the slow death of the high street, Soak Up The Culture is a piss-take on the ‘Lads-On-Tour’ anthem, and Deere John connects a lawnmower-themed love triangle to Cul-De-Sac’s tale of romantic dead ends. There’s Blur’s observational wit, Pet Shop Boys’ electronic storytelling, and the nostalgic pull of Girls Aloud’s kitchen-sink pop, all wired together with a DIY spirit.
Reflecting on the album, Welly says:
“I could say something clever about suburban tableaux, provincial minuets, and the motifs of traffic and dead-end roads, but that’d be silly. This is a child’s-first-painting going on the fridge. I’m proud of it. 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, 6 weeks to record, and we did it all ourselves at my Dad’s house in Scotland. DIY, not out of choice, but out of budget. Charity shop instruments, solid gold mentalities.”
Welly aren’t just making music, they’re building a world of their own. Big in the Suburbs drops March 21st.
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