Temples

Two men, a bedroom and a YouTube upload

Temples began in the summer of 2012 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, as a duo: James Bagshaw on vocals and guitar and Thomas Walmsley on bass. The first song they put on YouTube did the work that normally takes two years of van touring — labels came looking, and so did a pair of unusually loud endorsements. Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr both called them the best band in Britain at a point when the group had almost no radio play to its name. Adam Smith joined on keyboards and rhythm guitar; a drummer completed the live unit.

The debut single 'Shelter Song' set the terms — reverb stacked on the vocal, fuzz on the guitars, a debt to the Beatles' 1966-67 period and to the Zombies worn openly rather than hidden. By the time Sun Structures arrived on Heavenly Recordings in February 2014, Temples had already supported Kasabian and the Vaccines around the UK and European festival circuit. The album reached No. 7 in the UK. That same year the band played The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which is a strange altitude for a group whose record sounded like it had been made in a terraced house, because it largely had been.

Three albums spent widening the frame

What followed was a slow, deliberate campaign against being typecast. Volcano, in 2017, reached UK No. 23 and traded some of the debut's analogue haze for cleaner synth lines. Hot Motion, in 2019, charted at No. 51 and leaned harder and heavier. Behind the scenes the line-up changed: drummer Samuel Toms left in 2018 — he later said he had been asked to leave and did not want to go into why — and went on to the solo project Secret Fix. Rens Ottink took the stool and has been there since.

Exotico, released in April 2023, was the outlier. It was built as a concept record around a mythical island, ran to sixteen tracks, and was produced by Sean Ono Lennon, whom the band had met at Desert Daze. It divided reviewers — some heard the band finally reaching full scale, others heard a record that would have been stronger at twelve songs. It also turned out to be the last Temples album made with an outside producer.

Across those years the band also moved through labels — Heavenly, then Fat Possum, then ATO — before signing to V2 Records for the current cycle.

Bliss: the Ibiza record made by a guitar band

V2 announced the signing alongside the single 'Jet Stream Heart', which Bagshaw described as "Kylie Minogue meets Daft Punk meets Temples". Bliss, their fifth album, came out on 26 June 2026: ten tracks, produced entirely by the band themselves, with no outside hand on the desk. The reference points they named were not psych records at all — Faithless, Underworld, Massive Attack, Portishead, with Prodigy, Air, Röyksopp, Moby and Orbital in the wider mix. None of them lived through late-'90s rave culture as adults; what they went after was the residue of it, which they call "melancholic euphoria".

The method was to interrogate every instrument through a dance-music lens rather than a band one, then feed the results back through samplers to chop and reassemble their own playing. Degraded keyboard samples were used to make new parts sound like old tape. Smith framed the album as being "about permission: to let go, to move, and to become something unexpected", and elsewhere described its stillness as something closer to being stuck while the world moves. The lyrics track disconnection, frustration, surrender and renewal; 'Vendetta' came out of a falling-out between friends.

Bagshaw has been blunt about why the 12-string guitar that defined Sun Structures is largely absent. "People want another 12-string song… I can't work like that," he said, comparing it to a chef being asked to make only their signature dish for ever. His claim for the record is that it is "our most forward-thinking" one and that "no one can pigeon-hole us" — while insisting it is still audibly a band playing, not a laptop project.

Standing now: a record that split the room

The reception has been genuinely divided rather than politely mixed. Far Out's Reuben Cross reviewed Bliss on 26 June 2026 and gave it 1.5 out of 5, calling it "a pitifully uninspired pastiche" and objecting to the digitised guitar treatments, the straight 4/4 drum programming and the synth lines, while singling out 'Megalith' as the one track that works. Other outlets ran the opposite line, hearing the strongest and most ambitious set the band has assembled. Commercially it held: Bliss debuted at No. 10 on the UK Record Store Chart and picked up Spotify and Apple Music playlisting.

The band's answer to the argument has been to tour it relentlessly. The campaign opened with a festival slot at Latitude in Suffolk on 25 July 2026, then moved to North America from September — Denver's Bluebird Theater on 15 September, the Casbah in San Diego on 20 September, two nights at The Chapel in San Francisco on 22 and 23 September, Mississippi Studios in Portland on 25 September, The Pearl in Vancouver on 27 September. Mainland Europe follows through October: La Laiterie in Strasbourg on 11 October, L'Autre Canal in Nancy on 13 October, La Cartonnerie in Reims on 14 October, L'Aéronef in Lille on 15 October, Le Trianon in Paris on 17 October, with Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid and Barcelona in the same run. The French dates carry Metro Verlaine as support.

The UK leg lands in November and is small by design for a band who once charted at No. 7: Strange Brew in Bristol on 9 November, Scala in London on 12 November with Oslo Twins opening, The White Hotel in Manchester on 13 November, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow on 14 November. Face-value tickets start around £22. The itinerary then returns to North America and closes at Warsaw in Brooklyn on 2 December. In total the band has roughly 47 remaining shows across 13 countries on the books.

What the show actually is

The current set is not a Bliss playthrough with a greatest-hits appendix bolted on. At The Chapel on 23 September the band played sixteen songs, opening with 'Revelations' and running 'Certainty', 'Cicada', 'Megalith', 'Glimmer', 'Keep in the Dark', 'Colours to Life', 'Blue Flame', 'Hot Motion', 'Gamma Rays', 'Vendetta' and 'Paraphernalia' before finishing with 'Jet Stream Heart', 'Shelter Song', 'The Golden Throne' and 'Mesmerise'. Six of the sixteen came from Bliss and five from Sun Structures, with single tracks pulled from Volcano, Hot Motion and Exotico — a near-even split between the newest and the oldest material, and the twelve-year-old songs placed at the end rather than used as bait early on.

Bagshaw has said the live arrangements have been rebuilt rather than reproduced, and that on some songs he now performs without a guitar at all — a direct consequence of writing parts that began life inside a sampler. Ottink's drumming on the record draws on electronic production in the Aphex Twin and Daft Punk lineage, which is the hinge the live show turns on: the same four players, but with the rhythm section doing the job a drum machine would do on a dance record. Earlier Temples tours have used live painting projected behind the band, synced to the music, through whole sets.

The venues are the clearest signal of where they sit. Scala, The White Hotel, King Tut's and The Chapel are 300-to-1,100-capacity rooms, which means the Bliss set is being tested at close quarters in front of a crowd the band describes as having stayed open-minded across five records — rather than from a festival stage where a sudden turn towards Ibiza would be easier to get away with.