You might have heard, but Britpop’s greatest group returned this year in a blaze of summer-dominating, triumphal glory. Plus, easily missed, Oasis got back together, too.
Odd as it is to say now, Live ’25 wasn’t a nailed-on success. Questions swirled: Would the irascible brothers keep their egos and fratricidal instincts in check? Could they swerve notoriety for playing so slowly that the life drains out of even the most committed loyalist? Any chance the setlist might show proof of their existence past 2002? (Yes, yes, no.) Demand for the tour was insane, some 14 million trying for the UK dates alone, a nearly 600 percent leap on 1996’s immortalised pair of Knebworth shows.
Once the ticker tape from the opener in Cardiff confirmed that they were not just in decent form, but had actually exceeded all expectations, a funny kind of tremor swept Anglophiles the world over, like the aftershock of a bliss nuke. With tabloids and legacy music media fixated on tracking the brothers’ every move, even a brief pat on the back sent people doollally. Out went strappy tops and cigs, in came bucket hats and more cigs, as Planet Gallagher blotted out the sun. And lo, just in case you thought they hadn’t raked in enough cash already, here arrives the 30th anniversary edition of (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory, a reissue of a reissue of a reissue. You may not like it, but this is what Peak Oasis looks like.
As the world’s most ardent proponents of Lennonism, the only comparison Liam and Noel will brook these days is against their idols. So let’s begin there. Socially, in 2025, Oasis are bigger than the Beatles. Chalk it up to heavy competition in the ’60s, or a total collapse of aesthetic progression since the ’90s, but you can only tackle the void in front of you, and Oasis did so with brutal efficiency. If you cup your ear today to the ballad of the pub man, you won’t find gents in collarless grey suits harmonizing “Day Tripper” at closing time. What you will find, however, is middle-aged men greying around the temples and young lovers with live forever inked in cursive on their calves, arm in arm, belting one of modern rock’n’roll’s universal standards: “Champagne Supernova,” “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” or, plausibly, all of the above.
There’s no great surprise why the closing run of Oasis’ stadium slam-dunk was reserved for What’s the Story?’s very own Big Three, nor why more tracks from the group’s second LP found their way into the set than any other. The tunes are biblical, with mile-wide choruses, doubled strings, and triple-tracked Les Pauls rousing enough to win hearts and minds at scale. Their best song may lie elsewhere—not that, or that; yes, that—but it did establish the group as too big to fail, despite multiple attempts to stress test that assumption over the subsequent 14 years.
By now, the case against Oasis is well established: stagnancy, imitation, the death of cultural advancement. And yeah, I mean, sure. But it’s a doctrinaire perspective that presumes that the millions who fell hard for What’s the Story? were somehow on a journey to the far edge of microtonality, rather than eager to receive a lodestar to guide their life and listening habits. Similarly, the argument that the Gallaghers only appeal to nativist boozehounds is clearly bollocks, even after a summer of rightward lurches and mortifying displays of cheap nationalism. The crowd at Wembley this August was transcultural, all walks spilling over in ecstasy. I’ve witnessed a comparable stadium atmosphere just once, in 2021, when a late penalty sent England’s men’s team to their first final since 1966. (Gallaghers reunited? England fairly good at football again? Geezer prayers have truly been answered.)
Overall, you’ll find What’s the Story? at 30 just as you left it. Even when memorable, it’s liable to remind you of something else, although by now, many have come to prefer the taste of third-stage Baudrillardian simulacra over the original. “Some Might Say,” a right ol’ dashboard-smacker, is so in thrall to the nicotine-stained ceilings of ’70s pub rock that it apes not one but two of Ronnie Wood’s bands. The Ringo-coded choogle of “She’s Electric” still really does go there with a “cousin/dozen/one in the oven” rhyme scheme. “Cast No Shadow”’s paean to a rudderless Richard Ashcroft remains touching, yet so narrow was the group’s compositional lexicon, the opening bars manage to ape the very, very popular single you heard a mere five tracks earlier. “Wonderwall”... is “Wonderwall.” Anything more would just be padding word count.
In spite of familiarity, probing this thing can throw up some interesting questions. On a steamroller captained by the primo frontman of the post-Nirvana era, how to square the fact that the album’s most exhilarating measure is a drum fill? Or that “Morning Glory,” a blatant Side 1, Track 1, is tucked away deep in the record’s back half? They lead off instead with a plodder, then follow it up with an outright clunker. “Roll With It,” the worst showing here with the exception of the swamp songs, was nevertheless the slab of meat’n’potatoes chosen to go out into battle against a set of rivals Noel detested so vehemently, he wished reprehensible things on them. Certainly a choice! The brothers got trounced, kept it moving, and won the war anyway.
Even by their standards as masters of the swindle, this anniversary set ranks as howlingly low-effort. Given Oasis’ 1995 was one of the more extensively documented years any band could hope for, you’d have assumed at least a full vault show, but no. The remasters are identical to versions available elsewhere, with just five “Unplugged” versions of the boys’ biggest tunes bundled in: aka Liam’s original enunciation, facial muscles working overtime, undergirded by Noel’s High Flying-style overdub. Pick of the curious litter is “Morning Glory (Unplugged),” whose menacing air-raid riff and scooped lows have been substituted for piano trills and a smattering of bongos. The track takes on a swimmy, almost camp quality; keyhole to some alternate reality where the boys never made it out of Burnage, but kept plugging away in village halls nonetheless. Noel’s band could never touch the track live, seeing how it was a stone-cold Liam Banger on the wrong side of the barbed wire, so this version offers an honest look at what he’s hoped to do with it ever since the estrangement. I find it rather sweet.
The neat version of Oasis history ends with the band splitting up after 1996’s iconic Knebworth shows, a fantasy nodded to in the excellent 2016 documentary Supersonic. Naturally, they were too coked out their gourd to think of that at the time, so onwards they forged. Despite Be Here Now immediately snapping the Definitely Maybe-What’s the Story?-The Masterplan hot streak, Oasis entered the new millennium 3 for 4, with the active possibility that they might yet reclaim the magic. By the end of the 2000s, lobbing plums and trying to biff each other over the head with guitars like a wayward Tom & Jerry scene, the dream had burned down.
Pin it on passive consumption habits, or the way streaming’s economies of scale benefit those with pre-existing cultural capital, but along the way, Oasis also became even more popular internationally than in their first phase. You can’t move on a certain plane of TikTok for 1994 fancams, or daughters gifting dads reunion tickets. From 2019 to 2024 alone, the band logged 10 billion streams worldwide. Blur, the Verve and Pulp could only muster 7.2 billion, combined. Only four songs from the ’90s rank in Spotify’s all-time top 100, and wouldn’t you just know it, there’s “Wonderwall” filling in a Dua Lipa/Benson Boone sandwich.
The decision not to call it quits at the top of Olympus ultimately played in their favor. A two-and-done lifespan would have airlocked the mythology: still substantially influential, but, with apologies to the city of Manchester, more Stone Roses than Rolling Stones. Instead, this downhill trudge past cooling international interest and dwindling sales at home—2008’s Dig Out Your Soul managed just one-tenth of What’s the Story’s 18x platinum flourish in the UK—did one key thing that helped lay the groundwork for 2025’s remontada. It forced the brothers to eat shit.
The post-split years proved a constant attack on the central tenets of Oasis’ musical belief system. Noel, thin-skinned patrician of Real Rock, watched its stock crumble while a new bête noire, the 1975’s Matty Healy, rose to the top of the tree. Healy, whose sax-fond softboism was the diametric opposite of Noel’s dour glower, relished his status as chief tormenter by repeatedly baiting the bull. Meanwhile, Liam’s Beady Eye was a laughingstock, forcing Mr. Maracas to shimmy up the greasy pole from the bottom again, as legions of imitators—your Courteeners, Blossoms, and Bottlemen—lapped them on the festival circuit. Arctic Monkeys, the only British group to come close to rivaling Oasis for impact in the decades hence, would even append their own lighters-up ballads with a little splash of “Anger,” a sop to its chordal cousin and a wink to the fact they were only keeping the throne warm until the pair stopped marding.
All this must have driven them to distraction, but you gotta say, they really did have it coming. Liam, the man with a fork in a world of soup, seemed more motivated in the 2000s to spark up new feuds than attend to his evidently shot voice. By the band’s dissolution, the lowlight reel of dickswinging and territorial megalomania ran long, thoroughly harshing out the media and fellow artists. Poor old Robbie Williams, whose addled Glastonbury weekend with Liam became the stuff of moodboard infamy, was on the receiving end of some particularly nasty venom that iced the bonhomie. There was never any reason for why the pair so frequently replaced mordant wit with spite, but you don’t exactly need a degree to unpack it. “What can I say?” elder bro reasoned in Supersonic. “I’m a bit of a cunt.”
That much we knew when What’s the Story? last came up for re-evaluation in 2014. The saga seemed to have reached its logical conclusion. Noel’s parables of upward mobility had come true; Liam’s clarion call of rolled notes and smashed pints had been answered with gusto. The great political force of late-’90s England was the Mondeo Man—lower-middle class, on the up, a small-c conservative in taste and outlook—who swung overwhelmingly for Blair’s Labour and, as the cornerstone of Oasis’ fanbase, made the Gallagher-assisted mirage of Cool Britannia fleetingly real. But this lot were always due to age out sooner or later, and it was tricky to foresee who would become the custodians of Brand Oasis.
In the 2010s, the rise of a dominant social force in the Oasis-mad heartlands of the North, Midlands, and Essex supplied the answer in the Deano. Son of first-wave Oasis fans in flesh and in spirit, he’sthe exact kind of cliché character who comes to mind when you think of Bri’ish blokes living for Gallagherian levels of coke on Friday, sinking shots to “Mr. Brightside,” then FIFA and Nando’s all weekend to take the edge off. The uncomplicated, universalist rockers on What’s the Story? are the only 20th-century heritage hits that cut through to a new generation reared on Calvin Harris. It’s their unswerving devotion that reignited the flame, the very same sunburnt shoulders who rode out the dynamic pricing and will fill overflowing fields from here until 2027.
And listening back to What’s the Story?, you can spot glimmers of the 21st century coming into view. The album renders portraits of a 2D land where men are sympathetic arseholes and women their doting rocks; an emotionally stunted generation who duck therapy to appear on high-performance podcasts and Love Island instead; a country that stopped asking more of itself.
That Oasis, in their actions if not necessarily their songs, gave cover to this mentality is a fair charge. The belief that any mess could be mopped up with enough cutting banter flows downhill from Liam’s incongruent approach to life: charm and hate in perfect balance, proclaiming peace and love mere seconds before getting your front teeth knocked out in a bar brawl. Short wonder that a generation of copycats was captivated by their hero’s ability to strut through the day absent of consequence, their ambition simply to get noticed, and perhaps mugged off, by him on X. Only one dream lay out of reach—that the saviors would return.
Once the cultural reversal knocked them off their perch, a funny thing happened: The brothers started to show a little brio. From the backfoot, they returned to their most convincing form, with a chip on their shoulders and a point to prove. (Not uncoincidentally, this is why they never made a front-to-back good record again after 1995.) The road forked in 2017, following a terrorist attack that ripped through Manchester Arena, killing 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert. As a stunned city willed itself to its feet, impromptu renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” began to ring out. Liam, who showed up for the benefit concert while Noel did not, swiftly capitalized on rising goodwill. By now totally unable to escape his songbook’s shadow, he leaned in, kickstarting a successful solo run fueled by the same self-determination that made for such an explosive emergence at 21. The message was loud and clear: Oasis had spent enough time in the shadows.
From there, the chers frères’ rehabilitation began to feel like a fait accompli. Liam and Noel spent years chasing each other’s tails in the public domain, a footrace of festival headline slots and press-hogging tit-for-tat: You play gigs honoring essential workers, I’ll take it for Teenage Cancer Trust; you entertain a rabble of kids for Vice, I’ll liquefy my innards on Hot Ones, etc. They remained hellbent on doing everything except breaking the dang bread. Even after Liam’s supreme rattle, returning to headline Knebworth solo in 2022, and repeated attempts to goad Noel back into action, no detente lay in sight. Until, that is, they were each offered a hundred million reasons to see the situation differently.
