Basement

From In This for Fun to Run for Cover

Basement came together in Ipswich in September 2009, out of the wreckage of a pop-punk band called In This for Fun. The line-up settled immediately and has never changed: brothers Andrew Fisher on vocals and James Fisher on drums, Ronan Crix on lead guitar, Alex Henery on rhythm guitar and Duncan Stewart on bass. Seventeen years later it is still those five people.

The debut EP, Songs About the Weather, arrived on 17 May 2010, and by that August the band had signed to the Massachusetts label Run for Cover Records — a transatlantic arrangement that shaped everything afterwards. I Wish I Could Stay Here followed in 2011, and Colourmeinkindness on 23 October 2012. The second album reached number 188 on the Billboard 200, which for a British band playing melodic hardcore to American basements counted as a genuine result.

Two hiatuses and a teaching certificate

In mid-November 2012, weeks after Colourmeinkindness came out, Basement announced a hiatus. The reasons were domestic rather than dramatic: Andrew Fisher had enrolled on a teacher-certification course that ran a year and a half, James Fisher was finishing a degree at Kingston University, and Henery was working in Boston as a videographer for Run for Cover. The band stopped at the exact point most groups push hardest.

They came back on 29 January 2014 via Twitter, released the Further Sky EP that July with a Suede cover attached, and put out Promise Everything on 29 January 2016. On 3 February 2017 they signed to Fueled by Ramen, the Warner-owned label, and Beside Myself followed on 12 October 2018. In the spring of 2019 they opened for Weezer and the Pixies across North America — the largest rooms they had played — and then stopped again. Henery turned to Fiddlehead, whose Between the Richness came out in 2021, and to touring work as Turnstile's videographer and photographer.

Covet, and an audience that arrived late

What restarted the band was not a decision but a song. "Covet", the second track on Colourmeinkindness, circulated widely on social media and found a listenership that had been in primary school when it was recorded. The RIAA certified it gold in November 2024 and upgraded it to platinum on 27 August 2026 — a million units by the body's reckoning, which blends sales, downloads and streams. It is the band's first platinum single in the United States, and it belongs to a record that is now fourteen years old.

The groundwork was already there. A tenth-anniversary vinyl pressing of Colourmeinkindness appeared on 21 October 2021, and the band played Outbreak Fest the following year around that anniversary, returning to the Manchester festival in 2024 after announcing it in December 2023. Somewhere in that stretch they left Fueled by Ramen and re-signed to Run for Cover, the label that had them first.

WIRED, and what John Congleton did to them

The fifth album was announced in March 2026 with two songs, the title track and "Broken by Design", and released on 8 May 2026 through Run for Cover — eight years after Beside Myself. John Congleton produced, with writing sessions at Electrical Audio in Chicago. The reference points the band cited were British and not especially hardcore: The Verve, Placebo, Primal Scream. Henery's summary was blunt: he never thought Basement could sound like this, but it is what he had always wanted them to sound like. Stewart described making the record as cathartic.

Reviews mostly agreed that the shift worked. The AU Review gave it four and a half stars, describing a band that sounds locked in and has grown without appearing calculated, and singled out the opener "Time Waster", the Brit-pop lean of "Satisfy" and the closing "Summer's End". Not everyone was convinced. The Soundboard found the production dried-out and the scope too narrow, praising "Embrace" and the acoustic "Longshot" while calling other tracks shallow. The split is instructive: the complaints are about restraint, not about the band losing its nerve.

Where they stand now

Basement spent January 2026 in Australia and New Zealand supporting Turnstile, played Rock am Ring in June and headlined Outbreak Festival at Bowlers Exhibition Centre in Manchester the same month with a seventeen-song set. Professionally shot footage of that performance went online in early September 2026, a fortnight after the platinum certification landed.

The North American leg in support of WIRED was announced on 12 May 2026, with tickets on general sale from 14 May. It opened at Brooklyn Paramount on 7 October and runs to Roadrunner in Boston on 13 November, taking in the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the 9:30 Club in Washington, Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles, the Ogden in Denver and the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto. Support rotates by date across DIIV, High Vis, Fiddlehead, Big Boy, Momma, Febuary and First Day Back — a bill assembled from the band's own orbit rather than a promoter's shortlist.

On 24 August 2026, after their Outbreak appearance in London, they announced a European and UK run for February 2027 with Fleshwater and Canadian Oi! band Béton Armé on every date. It starts at Melkweg Max in Amsterdam on 2 February and takes in Brussels, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig and Cologne before Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Norwich, the 3,000-capacity Roundhouse in London on 18 February, Manchester Academy, Belfast and the National Stadium in Dublin on 22 February. These are the biggest headline rooms the band has booked.

The show as it stands

The current set runs a little over an hour: at Roseland Theater in Portland on 28 October the band were on from 9.40pm to 10.50pm, and the Denver show on 1 November ran to a similar length. Earlier in the year they played a 45-minute sold-out show at 26 Leake Street in London on 15 May, under the brick arch beneath Waterloo, opening with "WIRED" and closing with "Promise Everything".

The structure is unsentimental about the new record. Denver opened with "Covet" and moved through "Spoiled", "Bad Apple", "Whole", "Pine", "Are You the One", "Sever" and "Aquasun" before "Promise Everything"; WIRED tracks including "Time Waster", "Deadweight" and "The Way I Feel" sit among them rather than being front-loaded as a block. Aggregated critic scores put the live band at 78 per cent across 46 reviews. The London review of the Leake Street show noted Fisher's unvarnished delivery and a crowd that surged rather than watched, and concluded that the new songs translate well enough to stay in the set.