almost monday

A surf shop called UNIV

The band formed in 2015 around three teenagers from the North County stretch of San Diego, in and around Encinitas. Dawson Daugherty and Luke Fabry grew up together; Daugherty met Cole Clisby through surfing, which is less incidental than it sounds, given that Clisby is the son of the surfer Gary Clisby. They were calling themselves The Mondays until they found out the name was taken, which is how the 'almost' arrived.

Through 2016 and 2017 they built a local following playing UNIV, a former surf shop in Encinitas that doubled as a venue — they were in their second year of high school when they started doing it. The instrument roles everyone now recognises were not the original ones: Daugherty played bass until 2019, Fabry played lead guitar, Clisby played bass. The swap to Daugherty on vocals and rhythm guitar, Clisby on lead and Fabry on bass and keys happened in 2019, the same year the touring drummer Rafa Vidal joined. Two earlier drummers, Michael Leto and Daniel Griffo, had come and gone before that.

The producer Mark Needham took an interest and acted as a mentor, which led to the deal with Hollywood Records that the band is still on.

Two EPs, then a radio No. 1

'broken people', released in 2019 and later reworked with Sofi Tukker, reached No. 26 on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart and established that the band could get on American alternative radio at all. The EP 'Don't Say You're Ordinary' followed on 9 October 2020 and 'Til the End of Time' on 9 July 2021, with 'Endless Summer 2023' arriving on 11 September 2023.

The debut album, 'DIVE', came on 25 September 2024, with a deluxe edition on 21 January 2025. Its single 'can't slow down' reached No. 1 on Alternative Airplay on 1 February 2025, peaking at No. 11 on Rock & Alternative Airplay and No. 32 on Adult Pop, and ended up the third most-played song at American alternative radio across 2025. The band's own account of the record was modest about its ambitions — a snapshot of three people as individuals and as a group.

The touring that followed was heavier than the catalogue suggested it should be. The DIVE run opened in Seoul on 14 November 2024 and continued through the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and Asia. There were support slots with AJR in the summer of 2024, The Driver Era, and The Band CAMINO's NeverAlways tour across October and November 2025, plus festival bookings at Lollapalooza in Berlin and Paris, BottleRock, Outside Lands, Life Is Beautiful, Mad Cool, Pinkpop and Rock Werchter. Cumulative streams across platforms passed 1.5 billion.

The best and worst year

The second album, 'THANK GOD IT'S ALMOST MONDAY', arrived on 9 September 2026: thirteen tracks produced with Simon Oscroft, whose credits include OneRepublic and The Naked and Famous, and with Chase Lawrence of COIN. The band have described the period it was written in as the best and worst year of their lives — extraordinary personal highs set against bereavement — and have framed the record as the result of an honest life lived, with the highs and the lows both left in.

Musically it pushes at the edges of the sun-bleached alt-pop they are known for. The title track is reggae-tinged, 'superprism' is built on funk, 'no more regrets' runs on a disco pulse, and the closing 'better late than never' leans on 1980s synth-pop. Horns and electronics sit alongside Clisby's guitar more prominently than on 'DIVE'. The lyrical spine is a fictional one: Daugherty has explained that the album follows an overconfident character who keeps meeting misfortune, a device the band used deliberately to offset the more exposed songs, because they never want to take themselves too seriously. 'leaving is easy' is the clearest of the unguarded ones, an upbeat track that drops into something bleaker at the bridge as a relationship loses out to a career. 'french kids' came directly out of playing to European crowds.

Reviews were warm rather than ecstatic. New Noise Magazine scored it 3.5 out of 5; the aggregate critic score at Album of the Year settled around 70. The most consistent complaint was the middle of the record — a stretch of tracks that stay in similar keys and tempos and start to blur, so that the strong bookends do a lot of the work. 'no more regrets' peaked at No. 9 on Alternative Airplay after its release on 1 May 2026.

Standing in autumn 2026

The band go into late 2026 with the commercial position of an act in its second cycle rather than its first: a radio No. 1 already banked, a top-ten follow-up single, and festival slots that no longer need a bigger name attached. They were nominated for Best New Alternative Artist at the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards, and at the 2026 San Diego Music Awards 'lost' was up for Song of the Year and 'enjoy the ride' for Best Video. Their late-night television debut came on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Before the album landed they spent the early summer on the road in support, touring North America with Young the Giant and Cold War Kids from 24 May to 27 June 2026. An album listening party at Aviator Nation Dreamland in Malibu at the end of August drew more than 400 people and included previews of unreleased material, with the band dancing with the crowd rather than performing at it.

The headline tour behind the record opened in Hartford, Connecticut on 27 September 2026 and runs to Salt Lake City on 21 November, taking in roughly thirty cities. A Canadian leg filled early October — Montreal on the 2nd, Toronto on the 3rd, Hamilton the 4th, London, Ontario the 6th, Winnipeg the 9th, Edmonton the 11th, Calgary the 12th — before the run turns down the American west coast, with Seattle on 16 October and a home show at the Observatory North Park in San Diego on 22 October.

What the room looks like now

The current staging is deliberately plain for a band at this size: no narrative set-piece, no costume changes, the trio plus Vidal on drums and a lighting rig that works in blocks of colour. The one piece of theatre is the entrance, with the album's title track playing from tape as the band walk on, which puts the audience into the new record before a note is played live.

The playing has tightened considerably since the DIVE run. Reviewers on the current tour have described a set with no dead patches in it and a band that is straightforwardly enjoyable to watch, which is a lower-key compliment than the press release language but probably the more useful one. The small-room scale of the Canadian dates — the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, Rum Runners in London — means the crowd interaction is direct, and dance circles and crowd-surfing have been a feature rather than an exception.