On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
Listen
Top tracks on Spotify · SoundCloud
The profile · researched 20 September 2026
Neck Deep went home to Wrexham to make the record that saved them — and are now closing festivals with it
A Welsh pop-punk band who started with a demo posted online in April 2012, Neck Deep spent 2026 headlining 2000trees and preparing to open arenas across Europe for Simple Plan, ten years on from the album that made them.
A demo posted in April 2012
Neck Deep began as something closer to a hobby than a band. On 19 April 2012, vocalist Ben Barlow and guitarist Lloyd Roberts put a song called 'What Did You Expect?' online from Wrexham, in north Wales, a town with no pop-punk infrastructure to speak of. The name came from a lyric in the Crucial Dudes song 'Boom, Roasted'. Within months the project had hardened into a working group, with the Rain in July EP arriving in September 2012 and A History of Bad Decisions following in February 2013.
Hopeless Records signed them, and the debut album Wishful Thinking landed on 14 January 2014 — fast, cheap-sounding in the way the genre tends to reward, and openly indebted to Blink-182 and New Found Glory. It did enough to win them the Kerrang! Award for Best British Newcomer that year. What it did not do was settle the question of whether a band from Wrexham could hold a career.
Barlow has returned to that point repeatedly on stage since. Closing a sold-out Manchester Academy show on the band's tenth-anniversary run, he told the room: "We shouldn't have made it, being where we're from," before telling the crowd to be proud of where they come from.
The album that fixed them in place
Life's Not Out to Get You, released on 14 August 2015, is the record everything else is measured against. It reached the UK top ten, has since been certified Silver in the UK, and produced 'Can't Kick Up The Roots' and 'December', both of which remain fixtures of the live set eleven years later. It is also the record around which the band's line-up broke and reformed: Roberts left shortly after its release following allegations of sexual misconduct, which he was later cleared of, and Sam Bowden took over on guitar.
The Peace and the Panic followed on 18 August 2017 and pushed them further than any British band in the genre had managed at that point, debuting at No. 4 on the US Billboard 200. Bassist Fil Thorpe-Evans left in 2018 to concentrate on production; Ben's brother Seb Barlow, who had been handling recording duties behind the scenes, took the bass job officially in 2020. In 2019 they supported Blink-182 on tour.
All Distortions Are Intentional arrived on 24 July 2020 into an empty touring calendar, and the churn continued: founding drummer Dani Washington departed in 2022, with Matt Powles stepping in. By the time the band came to make a fifth album they had a line-up of Ben Barlow, Bowden, Matt West, Seb Barlow and Powles, and a decade of accumulated expectation about what a Neck Deep record ought to sound like.
Abandoning Los Angeles
The self-titled fifth album exists because the sessions for it collapsed. The band went to Los Angeles to record in the usual way, with outside producers, and walked away after a month. Ben Barlow described the moment of decision plainly: the five of them "sat in a booth at a coffee shop, all just like, 'What the fuck are we going to do here?'" They flew home and made the record in their own studio in Wrexham instead, with Seb Barlow producing and engineering — his first time in that chair for the band since the 2014 debut. Drums were tracked at Treehouse Studio in England and Sam Guaiana mixed in Los Angeles.
Calling it Neck Deep was, by Barlow's account, the obvious consequence of having made it themselves. Ten tracks, a little over thirty minutes, deliberately pacey, with what he called a lingering aggression underneath. "We're not fucking trying to be anything we're not," he said on the eve of its release, adding that the band still had "a lot left in the tank".
Released on 19 January 2024, it reached No. 11 on the UK albums chart, No. 2 on the UK independent chart, No. 3 on the UK rock and metal chart, No. 4 in Scotland and No. 22 in Australia. Reviews split: Kerrang! and New Noise Magazine both gave it four out of five, while Sputnikmusic gave it two and a half. The singles — 'Heartbreak of the Century' from February 2023, then 'Take Me with You', 'It Won't Be Like This Forever' and 'We Need More Bricks' across the second half of that year — did the heavier lifting on streaming.
2025 and 2026: the anniversary, then the festival
The band spent 2025 extending the self-titled album rather than replacing it. A new single, 'You Should See Me Now', arrived on 21 May 2025. Six days later, on 27 May, they announced a UK run performing Life's Not Out to Get You in full for its tenth anniversary: Leeds Academy on 14 December, Glasgow Barrowlands on the 16th, Manchester Academy on the 17th, Birmingham O2 Institute on the 18th and O2 Academy Brixton on the 19th, with Boston Manor supporting. Tickets went on sale on 30 May.
On 12 September 2025 Hopeless issued Neck Deep (The Dumbfuck Edition), a deluxe version of the self-titled record with four extra tracks — two of them live recordings from Barcelona — new artwork, and the first vinyl pressings of 'STFU' and 'You Should See Me Now'. On 3 December 2025 Simple Plan announced their Bigger Than You Think! UK and European tour, running 2–31 October 2026, with Neck Deep opening the non-UK dates.
The year's largest moment came on Saturday 11 July 2026, when they closed 2000trees in Gloucestershire — ten years after their previous appearance at the festival, and finally on its main stage alone. The night before, Ben Barlow had joined Funeral for a Friend to sing 'Juneau' with Lucas Woodland. Reviewers described a field of thousands and a set built almost entirely from material the crowd already knew. The band then played North Jakarta on 8 August 2026, and as of late September 2026 their calendar is dominated by the October European run: Frankfurt on the 6th, Düsseldorf the 8th, Amsterdam the 9th, Hamburg the 10th, Copenhagen the 12th, Berlin the 16th, Warsaw the 17th, Prague the 18th, Budapest the 21st, Munich the 23rd and Barcelona on the 26th.
Two different shows, depending on the night
Neck Deep currently run two distinct formats, and which one a ticket buys depends on the billing. The anniversary shows were structured in halves: Life's Not Out to Get You played straight through, front to back, followed by a second stretch of material from across the catalogue — 'Motion Sickness', 'Gold Steps', 'In Bloom' — with a painted backdrop of the album's artwork filling the stage and pyrotechnics firing on the bigger choruses. At Manchester, Barlow tested the room with deep cuts before conceding: "We got some real ones in the room."
The headline festival set is a different animal: no theme, no playthrough, just the singles. At 2000trees they opened with 'Can't Kick Up The Roots' and worked through 'She's A God', 'We Need More Bricks', 'Where Do We Go When We Go', 'Dumbstruck Dumbfuck', 'Lowlife', 'A Part Of Me' and 'December', with the rarely aired 'Crushing Grief' thrown to long-term fans and 'In Bloom' closing the weekend. Barlow's stage patter ran from a joke about the main stage screen looking football-ready to a straight-faced speech about the band's political streak, and he spent part of the set with two pints, one for drinking and one for throwing.
The October dates are a third mode again — a support slot in front of Simple Plan's audience in halls of two to ten thousand, where the set will necessarily be short and hits-only. What reviewers agreed on through 2026 is that none of this reads as a nostalgia exercise: the 2015 album has held up, and the band are still adding to the pile rather than sorting through it.
The show, now
A Neck Deep show in 2026 comes in two shapes. The headline version is a career-spanning run of singles with no interval and no concept: at their 2000trees headline on 11 July 2026 they opened with 'Can't Kick Up The Roots' and moved through 'She's A God', 'We Need More Bricks', 'Where Do We Go When We Go', 'Dumbstruck Dumbfuck', 'Lowlife', 'A Part Of Me' and 'December', dropped the rarely played 'Crushing Grief' for long-term fans, and closed the festival with 'In Bloom'. Ben Barlow works the crowd hard between songs — a gag about the main stage screen being football-ready, a two-pint routine with one for throwing, then a serious few minutes about the band's political streak. The tenth-anniversary shows that ran through December 2025, with Boston Manor supporting, were structured differently: Life's Not Out to Get You played in full against a painted backdrop of its own artwork, pyrotechnics on the choruses, then a second half of 'Motion Sickness', 'Gold Steps' and 'In Bloom'. Reviewers of the sold-out Manchester Academy date reported a room that sang every word and a band treating the record as something still alive rather than a museum piece. From 6 to 26 October 2026 the format changes again: an opening slot on Simple Plan's Bigger Than You Think! European dates, from Frankfurt to Barcelona, with Charlotte Sands also on the bill — a shorter, singles-only set in front of somebody else's audience.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · mancunion.com · outofrage.net · readdork.com · moshville.co.uk · distortedsoundmag.com · newnoisemagazine.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
S. Bollmann · Attribution
