Catfish and the Bottlemen have teased their first new music in five years by posting a six-second snippet on their social media channels.
This first taster features Van McCann singing the lines, “Back to the graft again, just sold my voice for a long weekend”, over a chugging guitar line. The clip plays over a slow-motion black-and-white video of McCann walking down a corridor.
Check it out below:
It comes less than a week after the band appeared to be teasing a tour announcement when they posted a photograph of a sheet of paper reading “5:00pm, DOORS, 6:00pm, SHOWTIME”. At the same time, those signed up to the band’s mailing list received an email simply reading “Thursday February 22”.
The band have not played a show together since 2021, following their headline slots at Reading & Leeds and a pair of outdoor gigs at Singleton Park in Swansea and Neighbourhood Weekender in Warrington. By that time, rumours of them splitting up had already been swirling.
They have already been booked to headline Reading and Leeds this year, where they will be performing on the Friday at Leeds and the Sunday at Reading. Liam Gallagher is also headlining the festival that day, while the rest of the headline slots are taken up by Blink-182, Gerry Cinnamon, Fred Again.. and Lana Del Rey.
The live shows Catfish and the Bottlemen are set to announce will be their first since the departure of guitarist Johnny “Bondy” Bond.
In 2022, Bond confirmed he had left the band the year before, alleging that changes in the line-up and the uncertainty about the band’s future had stemmed from “behaviour constantly re-occurring that I found to be intolerable”.
“To put it simply, I feel that both the professional and personal relationships had become entirely dysfunctional,” he added in his statement.
Bondy went on to explain that he played four summer shows with the band last year as a session musician “as there was nobody else ready to do so”.
“I have had no contact or affiliation of any sort with the remaining band members since then (Neighbourhood Festival ’21),” he wrote. He added that he “assumed” the group would have informed fans about his departure as well as drummer Bob Hall’s, but that “as far as I’m aware this has not happened yet”.
Catfish and the Bottlemen’s last album was 2019’s ‘The Balance‘.
