“I’d listen to this upstairs,” Dan explains. “Then I’d go downstairs and listen to Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac! Actually, I listened to a lot of classic rock: Rolling Stones, Cream... We’re all fans of Radiohead. I also listed to harder things like Rage Against the Machine and Deftones.”

“Yeah,” Tord interjects, “I had a period of black metal!”

“I also had a Skate punk phase,” Tord continues. “No Effects, Green Day, and then I got in to the Norwegian Radiohead — Motorcycle. They’re really important for me, because I still think they were different than anything else.”

And what about my Doo Wop tag? Are these guys fans of The Platters and boybands?! Not exactly.

“We like the Beach Boys,” Dan admits.

But in fact, these guys were in several different bands when they first started. They both played some metal. Dan was in a folk trio! Let’s not forget that Joe Strummer, before the 101’ers and The Clash, was a folk singer who insisted on being called “Woody.” Dan, Tord, and Murphy, like the Platters, the early Beatles, and the Beach Boys, have a love for “woooahhs” and “oooooayyoooos.” But what sets them apart is their ability to lay those harmonies down over pop-punk rhythms, indie jangle guitars, and sporadic OMD-induced new wave synth-pop. Listen closely and you hear echoes of the last 30 years of Anglo-American (and some Norwegian) pop-rock.

Well-Wrought Words
But that’s the sound of instruments and voices. One loses an important portal of appreciation if one forgets their lyrics. These are the exclusive work of the gifted lyricist Murphy. They give The Wombats an ironic identity, a cleverness that some bands (as much as they might want it) can never attain, forcing them by default to rock out to overly earnest appeals to love, heartache, power, corruption, and lies.

My pretentious literary sensibility requires me to point out a couple of Shakespeare references in their songs. Not only are they Shakespeare references but they’re played to great humorous effect.

In “Lost in the Post,” Murphy sings of a love never meant to be, one who “wanted Mary Poppins, I took her to King Lear.” Then in “Lost in a Forest,” a song about a disappointing rave outside Leeds, Murphy asks, “Am I in a scene from Midsummer night’s dream?”