Ash

Downpatrick, a dictionary and a number one

Ash formed in 1992 in Downpatrick, County Down, when Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray were still at school. The name came from the first word in the dictionary they liked the look of. Wheeler wrote 'Girl From Mars' in his bedroom in Northern Ireland at sixteen; three decades on he has described hearing crowds sing it back as proof the song became part of other people's lives rather than just his own.

The debut album 1977 was released on 6 May 1996 and went to number one in both the UK and Ireland, eventually certified platinum. NME later included it in its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The band arrived in the middle of Britpop and were rarely comfortable being filed under it — a movement draped in Union flags sat awkwardly with three teenagers from County Down, and they said so at the time.

The numbers behind the catalogue are unusually durable for a band that started as schoolboys: eighteen top-40 singles, two platinum albums and two gold. The three-piece line-up that made 1977 is the same three-piece playing the anniversary shows now.

What came after the debut

Charlotte Hatherley joined on guitar and vocals in 1997, widening the band to a four-piece for nearly a decade. She left in 2006 and Ash reverted to the trio format they have kept ever since. The second pillar of the catalogue arrived during her tenure: Free All Angels, released in 2001, which produced 'Shining Light' and 'Burn Baby Burn' and turned twenty-five this year. Wheeler spent part of spring 2026 talking about that record around the band's summer festival run.

The modern era has been steadier than the mid-2000s. Race the Night came out in September 2023 after a long gap, and the follow-up arrived faster than anything since the debut. Wheeler has been blunt about the pace: the turnaround between Race the Night and its successor was, in his words, the shortest gap between albums the band have had since 1977.

Ad Astra, October 2025

The ninth studio album, Ad Astra, was released on 3 October 2025 through Fierce Panda Records. Wheeler produced it himself; Claudius Mittendorfer mixed and John Webber mastered, and it runs to forty-three and a half minutes. Most of it was recorded in the summer of 2024 with final work finished in June 2025. Four singles went ahead of it: 'Jump in the Line', 'Give Me Back My World', 'Which One Do You Want?' and 'Fun People'.

Graham Coxon plays on two tracks, 'Fun People' and the title song. The two had worked together on a film project in 2014, and reconnected when Coxon mentioned going back to those recordings. Wheeler's explanation of why he wanted him was practical rather than reverent — Coxon has a very particular approach and can coax noises out of a guitar nobody else makes. The record also contains an arrangement of Richard Strauss's Zarathustra and a punk-calypso cover of 'Jump in the Line', which started as a dressing-room accident after a show when Wheeler heard the Harry Belafonte original still playing and imagined a Ramones drum beat under it.

It reached number 15 on the UK albums chart, number 4 in Scotland and number 2 on the UK independent chart, and holds a Metacritic average of 79. God Is in the TV gave it 9/10, Louder Than War four and a half stars, Clash 8/10, Kerrang! four out of five and Uncut 7/10.

The anniversary year

On 6 May 2026 — thirty years to the day since the debut came out — Ash announced a 30th anniversary edition of 1977 and played an acoustic set that evening at Belfast's Oh Yeah Centre, streamed and hosted by BBC Introducing's Taylor Johnson. The reissue comes as a double LP on green and black vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, a two-CD digisleeve with a booklet, and digitally. It adds the previously unreleased 'Bittersweet Blue', 2026 versions of 'Oh Yeah' and 'Girl From Mars' and an acoustic 2026 mix of 'Gone The Dream', with a second disc carrying a complete 2021 live run-through of the album recorded at STABAL Studios. The vinyl pairs the original record with B-sides from the era. Tickets for the accompanying tour went to presale on 12 May and general sale on 15 May.

The summer was festivals. Ash played Download in June and opened the main stage at the Isle of Wight Festival on 19 June, a bill they first played in 2002 at the first revived edition. Wheeler called the opening slot a fun one with some mystery about how it will land, and noted that the festival has got steadily bigger across their visits. McMurray's assessment of what followed was straightforward: the anniversary tour feels as big as the original 1977 tour, if not bigger.

On the road, September to December 2026

The world tour opened in Western Australia on 4 September 2026 at Perth's Rosemount Hotel, then Freo Social in Fremantle on the 5th, Adelaide's Lion Arts Factory on the 8th, The Tivoli in Brisbane on the 10th, Northcote Theatre in Melbourne on the 11th and Sydney's Metro Theatre on the 12th. New Zealand followed — The Tuning Fork in Auckland on the 14th, San Fran in Wellington on the 15th — before Japan, with UNIT and Shibuya CLUB QUATTRO in Tokyo on 17 and 18 September and Yogibo META VALLEY in Osaka on the 19th. November takes in Utrecht, Eindhoven, Cologne and Berlin. The run finishes across the UK and Ireland in December, including Southampton's O2 Guildhall on 2 December, Dublin's Olympia on the 9th, Belfast's Ulster Hall on the 10th, Manchester's Albert Hall and London's Roundhouse on the 17th.

This is the band's second distinct touring shape in a year. The Ad Astra dates in February 2026 ran through smaller rooms — The Crescent in York on the 4th, the Forum in Tunbridge Wells on the 6th, The Dome at Grand Central Hall in Liverpool on the 13th, The Welly Club in Hull on the 15th — with sets that stretched past twenty-five songs and mixed the new record heavily into the back catalogue.

Reviews of the anniversary shows have been consistent about two things: the volume three people generate after this long together, and the fact that the debut holds up as a record rather than as a souvenir. The Perth review noted the crowd spanned people who bought the album in 1996 and people born long after, and that the newer material was not treated as a bar break. Melbourne sold out both floor and balcony.