The Cribs

Wakefield, 2001

The Cribs began in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 2001 as a recording project between three brothers: twins Gary and Ryan Jarman, and their younger brother Ross on drums. They started playing live the following year and signed to Wichita Recordings in 2003, which put out the self-titled debut in 2004.

That first record traded on limitation rather than apologising for it — thin, scratchy, recorded fast — and it found an audience among people who had grown tired of the more groomed end of the guitar-band boom. The New Fellas followed in 2005 and was certified silver. It remains the album most fans reach for first, largely on the strength of "Hey Scenesters!", a song about the scene the band were nominally part of and plainly suspicious of.

The catalogue

Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever in 2007 was the commercial turn, reaching number 13 in the UK and giving them a title track that has never left the set. Ignore the Ignorant in 2009 went to number 8, their first top ten, and was made with Johnny Marr as a full member of the band; the former Smiths guitarist stayed from 2008 until 2011 and played on that album and on early 2010 sessions.

After Marr left they carried on alone and kept climbing: In the Belly of the Brazen Bull reached number 9 in 2012, For All My Sisters number 7 in 2015, and 24–7 Rock Star Shit number 8 in 2017 — four consecutive UK top ten albums, none of them made with a major-label safety net for long. Their label history reads like a map of independent music on both sides of the Atlantic: Wichita, Warner Bros., Sony, Arts & Crafts, Kill Rock Stars.

The industry noticed the durability if not always the records. They took the Q Award for Spirit of Independence in 2012 and the NME Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2013, the sort of honours usually handed to bands twice their age.

The years that nearly finished it

The run stopped after 2017. A legal dispute over ownership of their back catalogue left the band inactive for roughly eighteen months between 2018 and 2020 — not a creative block but a contractual one, the kind that quietly ends groups.

What broke the deadlock was an offer of studio time: they resumed recording at Dave Grohl's Studio 606, and the result was Night Network in 2020, released into a locked-down world with no tour attached to it. Then came a five-year silence, which Ryan Jarman has since framed as deliberate rather than troubled. "We only write when we feel like it," he told NME. "There's no point going straight into writing after touring."

Selling a Vibe

The ninth album, Selling a Vibe, arrived on 9 January 2026 through Sonic Blew and PIAS. Most of it was produced by Patrick Wimberly, formerly of Chairlift and better known for work with Caroline Polachek, Ellie Goulding and Paloma Faith — an unlikely name for a band with their history, and chosen precisely for that. "We've always had a real pop side to the band," Ryan Jarman said ahead of release. "We've often buried it out of punk rock guilt." One track, "You'll Tell Me Anything", came from an earlier set of five songs cut in Leeds with Gordon Raphael.

Three singles led the way: "Summer Seizures" in August 2025, "A Point Too Hard to Make" in October 2025 and "Never the Same" in January 2026. The writing followed a summer the brothers spent together with no recording obligation, which produced the closing track "Brothers Won't Break".

It debuted at number 5 on the UK albums chart — the highest position of their career, twenty-two years after the first record — and reached number 2 on both the Scottish and UK independent charts. Reviews were strong: a Metacritic average of 78, Album of the Week from Alexis Petridis in the Guardian, who wrote that "the melodies soar, the choruses hit, everything clicks faultlessly", and a verdict from Joe Goggins at DIY that they remain "one of the most irrepressibly vital bands in Britain". The Irish Times called it an attention-grabbing return from "first-rank indie underdogs", picking out "Dark Luck" and describing "Summer Seizures" as pristine outsider pop.

Where they are now

The UK headline tour ran from Newcastle on 18 March 2026 to Brighton on 28 March — short, deliberately small-room, and oversubscribed enough that Brighton's Concorde 2 took two sold-out nights to close it. European dates followed in April in Paris, Milan, Berlin and Hamburg, with North American shows including Santa Ana and Los Angeles.

Summer brought the outdoor run: Truck Festival in Oxfordshire in late July, and a headline show at Millennium Square in Leeds on 11 July 2026, their first time on that stage in a decade. Doors and stage times there were pulled forward by an hour so the crowd could get to the England v Norway World Cup quarter-final.

On 22 July 2026 they announced an Australian tour for October — 170 Russell in Melbourne on the 4th, the Factory Theatre in Sydney on the 5th, the Triffid in Brisbane on the 6th and the Rosemount in Perth on the 8th — their first national run there since 2018, with a Tokyo show at Duo Music Exchange on 2 October ahead of it. Those remain the next confirmed dates.

What the reviews say

The critical line on the current shows is consistent: tighter than before, and slightly less feral. Bring the Noise, reviewing Gorilla in Manchester on 17 March 2026, gave the band 8/10 and noted that the new songs sounded polished against the DIY racket the group built its name on, while the older material still did the heavy lifting — the room only properly woke up at "Hey Scenesters!". The same review acknowledged the obvious: the chaos of their twenties has thinned out, replaced by something more controlled.

Northern Exposure's Tom Jenkinson gave the Brighton finale five stars, describing security working flat out on crowd surfers and a room singing riffs back at the stage. Ryan Jarman's own aside from that night — "it's nice to know that I could have retired off that riff alone" — captures the tension the band keep working: a catalogue big enough to coast on, and a ninth album that refuses to let them.