After nearly a decade of gigs, support slots, shifting lineups and gradually building a world of their own, The Ovines are finally ready to kick the door in.
Their new single “Waiting Room” opens the next chapter with little interest in easing listeners into it. Driven by breakneck guitar riffs, frantic drums and a sharp ska-punk pulse, the track barrels forward through intricate guitar lines and anthemic choruses before abruptly stopping for something considerably more ordinary: a spoken-word interlude about making a cup of tea. Moments later, the distortion comes crashing back.
It is chaotic, funny and unmistakably British—and an appropriate introduction to the band’s forthcoming debut album, London Reign.
For The Ovines, however, the word “debut” is somewhat deceptive. Formed in 2017, the band has spent years developing its identity onstage, supporting acts including Buzzcocks, The Libertines and Green Jelly across the UK and Europe. Their 2025 EP, Two Bucks and a Bottle of Ketchup, offered an early glimpse into a world built from indie rock, post-punk, dark humor and observational storytelling.
London Reign pushes that world considerably further. Its songs turn everyday encounters, friends’ stories, modern British life and the strange characters encountered along the way into something simultaneously celebratory and disillusioned. And beneath the jokes sits a frustration familiar to countless independent bands: working relentlessly, waiting to be noticed and eventually deciding you’ve waited long enough.
“Waiting Room,” then, isn’t simply the first song from the record. It’s The Ovines announcing that they’re done standing outside the door.
“Waiting Room” introduces London Reign through this idea of being stuck somewhere between where you’ve been and where you’re trying to get to. Why did that feeling become the right doorway into your debut album?
We just wanted to kick the door in and let people know that we’ve arrived. Writing an album is every musician’s dream, so we weren’t going to waste the opportunity by putting a pony record out.
That feeling of being stuck between where you’ve been and where you’re trying to get to is something we’ve definitely experienced as a band. Small bands work so hard and get overlooked all the time, and we got sick of it. So “Waiting Room” felt like the right way to start the album. What we’re basically saying is that we’ve been waiting long enough, and now here we are.
You’ve been a band since 2017, so calling London Reign a “debut” comes after nearly a decade of actually existing, touring and evolving together. Does that history make the album feel less like an introduction and more like a document of everything it took to finally arrive here?
This isn’t the beginning of The Ovines for us; it’s just the beginning as you know it. As far as debut albums go, it’s very much an in-depth analysis of how long it’s taken us to get here.
There’s a lot of our experiences, stories and evolution as a band within this record, so although it’s our first album, it doesn’t feel like a first step to us. It feels more like a document of everything we’ve done and everything that’s brought us to this point. Now we’re just opening that world up for everyone else to hear.
“Waiting Room” moves from frantic ska-punk into anthemic rock and then suddenly stops for a spoken-word interlude about making a cup of tea. What attracts you to disrupting a song with something mundane, funny and unmistakably British rather than maintaining its momentum?
I think it’s important to keep music interesting and exciting, and we definitely like to play around with different dynamics. Keeping people entertained, but also keeping the listener on their toes and never quite knowing what’s coming next, is something we really enjoy.
There’s always a bit of chaos within our songs, but somehow it still feels like a tight unit. So taking a song somewhere completely different and a bit random feels quite natural to us.
And I think there’s something quite funny about dropping something as ordinary as making a cup of tea into the middle of all that chaos. It’s very British, but it also catches you completely off guard. That contrast is what makes it work for us.
Humor seems important to The Ovines, but your songs also contain more reflective observations about contemporary life. Do you ever use comedy as a way of getting audiences comfortable enough to hear something considerably more serious underneath it?
I think the humor we use in our songs is very reflective of us as a band. We don’t really take ourselves too seriously, and there’s definitely a bit of a bleak outlook on life, but it always somehow turns out okay.
I like being able to get a point across that other people can relate to without making it too serious or preachy. I think a bit of weird humor is a good way of doing that. You can have a laugh at something, but there’s usually something a bit more serious underneath it.
You describe London Reign as containing characters, chaos and observations of the stranger edges of modern British life. How much of your songwriting comes from autobiography, and how much comes from simply watching the people around you and inventing stories from what you see?
It’s really a mixture of my own thoughts and experiences, and stories that mates tell us that we then turn into songs. There’s a lot of that on this album.
I like taking something that’s happened, whether it’s to me or someone else, and trying to turn it into a little story with its own characters and personality. I’ve always been amazed by the way Mark Knopfler paints such a vivid picture with his words, so I try to do something similar in my own way.
It’s less about telling a story exactly as it happened and more about taking those little observations and turning them into something people can picture and relate to.
Your sound pulls together ska-punk, indie rock and post-punk rather than fitting neatly into one lineage. After years of playing together, what have you learned about the difference between wearing your influences proudly and developing something that feels unmistakably like The Ovines?
It’s definitely something we’ve always been conscious of. We’ve never really sounded like anyone else; we’ve always just been The Ovines.
I think what we do well is take inspiration from the bands we love without trying to mimic them. We tend to look a bit deeper and take inspiration from their influences as well, which gives us a much wider pool of music to draw from.
The ska element just comes quite naturally to my songwriting as well, and it’s something that’s always been there without me really forcing it. This whole record has loads of different musical influences running through it, but hopefully they all come together in a way that still sounds unmistakably like us.
You’ve supported bands including Buzzcocks and The Libertines, artists whose music became inseparable from very specific ideas of British youth and culture. What does writing about British life in 2026 require that feels different from the generations of bands that came before you?
I think a lot has changed for British bands now. There’s so much less physical media, which I think is awful. You used to not just listen to the music, but you’d go out and buy the record, idolize the artwork, queue up to buy the tickets and talk about it with your mates. There was so much surrounding the music that became part of the culture of the band.
I think those things gave people a real connection to the artists and created so much more of a talking point. That played a massive part in the culture around bands back then, and I think a lot of that has been lost now that everything is so immediate and digital.
It’s something I’d really like to bring back with The Ovines—to make the music feel like more than just something you listen to, and create that sense of a band and a culture that people can actually be part of.
Your reputation has been built heavily through live performance, while “Waiting Room” pairs that underground energy with noticeably sleeker production. Was there ever a fear that polishing the recordings too much could remove some of the chaos that makes the band exciting onstage?
Not really, because working with Jason Stafford meant we were able to capture the live sound of the band really well. All of the songs were recorded live, and we took the drums and my guitars from those live takes, so nothing was put to a grid or made overly perfect.
We then added all the other bits on top of that foundation, which means the songs still have that feeling of us actually playing together in a room. Jason then worked his magic with the production and made it sound like a proper record, without taking away the energy and imperfections that make us sound like us.
Your 2025 EP Two Bucks and a Bottle of Ketchup already established a world of dark humor, observational storytelling and restless energy. What did making London Reign allow you to articulate about yourselves that you couldn’t yet express on that EP?
Well, on the EP, Will hadn’t fully joined the band yet and was still just playing with us as a session guitarist. Having him properly in the band opened up a much wider channel of musicianship and gave us more to work with creatively.
Reg and I also moved into a little flat together in London and ended up writing a lot of this album together. So we were putting our own life experiences, stories and music tastes into the songs, and I think that naturally gave us a lot more to draw from.
A lot of the words and stories on the album came from that period of our lives, so it feels like a much more complete picture of where we were at as a band and as people.
After years on the live circuit, support tours and gradually building an audience, London Reign finally gives The Ovines a full-length statement. When people reach the end of the album, what do you hope they understand about the band—and about the version of Britain you’re documenting—that “Waiting Room” only begins to reveal?
However the listener identifies with the album is their own journey, and I don’t think we’d ever want to tell people what they should take from it.
For us, the record has given us a bit of hope that our identity and our culture still have a purpose, and that there’s still something worth holding onto. What people need to understand about us is that we just want people to listen to our music and feel as good as we do when we write and play it.
And as for the Britain we’re documenting, it’s simply our Britain. It’s the people we know, the places we go, the characters we come across, the humor, the chaos and the everyday life we experience. It’s our view of Britain, rather than trying to speak for everyone.
Ultimately, we just want people to have a good time with the record and feel something from it.
