Oasis Reunion Tour: The Light(er) at the End of the Tunnel

The Oasis reunion tour wrapped in Brazil last week with 'zero' complaints. Perfect logistics, flawless sound, pristine visuals. The only grievance? Ticket prices that required lottery entries just to access the purchase queue. Which feels appropriately dystopian for 2025.

Liam asks: “Is it worth the £40,000 you paid for the ticket?” As the flares light up for ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ into the spoils of colossal closers ‘Wonderwall’ and an everlasting ‘Champagne Supernova’, the sweet escape comes to an end. Lord knows we needed a taste of that halcyon ‘90s hope and abandon in 2025....

Roll With It

The Low-Stakes Gamble That Became a Cultural Win

We're living through a bleak moment. Economic instability and geopolitical chaos form the ambient background noise. The music industry has responded by manufacturing pop stars with the emotional depth of a targeted Instagram ad. There's no major new band. All the stadium acts are legacy artists from Oasis's era or earlier, touring like it's a pension plan.

Brands engineer "memorable experiences" through acoustic pop-ups that feel hollow by design. You know the ones: athleisure companies wanting you to feel something authentic while drinking their branded kombucha.

When Oasis announced their reunion a year in advance, the collective response was: "Sure, Jan." The Gallagher brothers' feud was well-documented, playing out on Twitter with the subtlety of a car alarm. Would they make it to opening night without one of them throwing a tambourine at the other's head?

That low-stakes uncertainty made it work. People weren't invested enough to risk disappointment. It was entertainment: a yearlong reality show called "Will They Though?" When they followed through, it felt like an unexpected win in a moment when wins are about as common as affordable housing. Sometimes just not imploding counts as success.

Don't Look Back in Anger: Oasis Tour The Temporal Displacement Effect

Oasis walked back onstage after a decade of people betting they never would. And somehow the whole thing felt less like a reunion and more like someone pressed pause twenty years ago and forgot to hit play again.

The songs are ancient in internet years. Different world, different economy, different versions of ourselves. Yet when that first chord hit, the stadium didn’t know what year it belonged to. The past and present sat on top of each other like badly aligned printing. You blink and the whole place looks 2004 again.

That’s the weird magic. Beyond nostalgia, it was more like, finding your way home. Everyone there was suddenly nineteen, or thirty, or whatever age they were when Oasis was the soundtrack to optimism. Back when the future looked negotiable instead of predetermined.

And the Gallagher brothers didn’t even pretend to update anything. Same jackets. Same jokes. Same posture of heroic indifference. It "shouldn’t" have worked.. Whatever this was, it wasn’t (just) a cash-grab. Ok maybe it was a little, But it unlocked a collective memory of a world we used to dance to, it was a glitch in time.

 It was a living, breathing, rumbling thing, capturing the swell of a nation that met its cultural moment, sometimes with cheers, sometimes with fists. - New York Times

Whatever: The Softening of Fandom Culture

Something unexpected emerged in the fan response. Legacy band fandoms usually skew protective and gatekeepy: the "you're not as hardcore as I am because you don't own the Japanese import B-sides on vinyl" mentality. But the Oasis tour revealed a shift. People were being... nice?

Side note:

In the now-infamous TikTok video of Friday’s (July 4) first reunion show that has nearly 640,000 likes to date, the camera slowly pans to a young woman hitting up Shazam to identify the iconic Rolling Stones-sampling, Grammy-nominated song that is Richard Ashcroft’s calling card and one of the most beloved songs of the Britpop era. Instead of mockery, the response was welcoming. Comments encouraged her to discover the music, join the community, learn. The "I feel old" jokes were there, but secondary. It was touching. Unsettling, even.

Ashcroft wrote, “Day 2 thanks to everyone who came down and gave such beautiful support for my set. If you don’t know it Shazam it, all new fans welcome!

When circumstances are universally difficult (when everyone's drowning together), people get more generous with moments of joy. The hardening effect of constant crisis has a paradoxical softening edge: when something good happens, there's an impulse to share it rather than guard it.

Or maybe everyone's too tired to gatekeep. Either way, progress. Yay, go humans.

Oasis Live Forever (Or At Least For A Few Hours)

Oasis never disappeared. Their songs stayed in constant radio rotation for 16 years, the kind of ubiquity usually reserved for taxes and disappointment. The Gallagher brothers provided regular reminders through periodic Twitter/X feuds that read like a divorced couple fighting over who gets the good Le Creuset pot.

They were culturally present but inactive. Schrödinger's band.

The tour announcement triggered skepticism, but as months passed without public conflict, sentiment shifted. Notable because the longest the brothers had gone without fighting was approximately 11 minutes. More dates were added. They returned to countries they hadn't visited in 20 years. The energy was palpable: self-aware, slightly awkward, like running into your ex at Whole Foods but somehow it's fine.

Some Might Say

The tour's success points to a cultural hunger: the desire for genuine presence in an increasingly manufactured world. Everything feels algorithmic, optimized for engagement metrics, hollow in that specific way only late-stage capitalism achieves. Hope is in short supply and survival mode is default. We're all just rawdogging reality.

Oasis delivered something that felt real, probably because it was real. Old, unchanged, indifferent to contemporary trends. They showed up, performed, didn't implode, created spaces where people could experience belonging, even if only for a few hours.

In a landscape where authenticity is constantly commodified and sold back as a lifestyle brand, they offered something that registered as authentic precisely because it refused to adapt. Same guys, same parkas, same songs, same sibling dysfunction barely contained beneath a professional veneer.

The world is a rotting shitty bin-fire and tomorrow never knows, but tonight, you’re a rock’n’roll star. - NME

Like watching your parents stay married out of spite, except the spite creates transcendent musical experiences.

The tour worked because it provided escape from 2025's anxieties by offering access to a 2004-era emotional landscape. It's a product people hunger for but current culture struggles to manufacture: the feeling that things might actually be okay.

That's not just entertainment. That's a market gap. And the Gallagher brothers, against all odds, managed to fill it without killing each other. Well done, lads.