Nothing But Thieves are one of the handful of contemporary rock bands that successfully occupy the hallowed sweet spot of maintaining alternative credentials whilst simultaneously straddling their commercial sensibilities. It’s the through-line of crafting artful indie rock music which both bears the band’s souls and incites heartfelt sing-a-longs that continues to snowball them to greater success, and ensures they remain as equally impactful in dinky grassroots venues as it does in stadiums.
That fine balance can be traced back to Nothing But Thieves’ individual influences from the beginning and how they went about merging them moving forwards. Formed in 2012, the five-piece from Southend-on-Sea in Essex - consisting of guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown, guitarist and keyboardist Dominic Craik, bassist Philip Blake, drummer James Price, and Basildon-born vocalist/guitarist Conor Mason - realised they had a trump card in Mason’s voice.
A Jeff Buckley obsessive, Mason strived to emulate the gone-but-not-forgotten singer’s matchless range at every opportunity. Even now, it’s Buckley who fans compare Mason’s vocals to, which is no faint praise. Creating a brazen indie rock sound that echoed influences ranging from Arcade Fire to Foo Fighters to Queen to Radiohead was the key to their initial trajectory, which both swirled around Mason’s powerhouse vocal and elevated it.
It worked: after the release of their 2014 debut single ‘Wake Up Call’, Nothing But Thieves turned heads at various national radio stations as well as the likes of Arcade Fire, Muse, Biffy Clyro, and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way who all invited Nothing But Thieves to support them for a run of European shows. Well-received performances at The Great Escape, Isle Of Wight Festival and Reading Festival that same year only enhanced Nothing But Thieves’ budding reputation as an arena-ready indie rock band, before ‘Trip Switch’ from their eponymous debut album helped the Essex boys sell out their Ban All the Music tour at the tail end of 2015.
Nothing But Thieves’ follow-up album Broken Machine peaked at No.2 in the UK charts after its release in 2017, an album that spawned their biggest single ‘Amsterdam’, ‘Sorry’, and ‘Live Like Animals’ which the band say is “an anthem for the disillusioned youth” and propelled them towards a sell-out show at London’s Alexandra Palace whilst creeping nearer to the summit of festivals like TRNSMT and their perennial favourite Reading Festival.
Their commercial acclaim continued in 2020 with the release of their prescient and polished album Moral Panic and its five singles ‘Is Everybody Going Crazy?’, ‘Real Love Song’, ‘Unperson’, ‘Impossible’, and ‘Phobia', which showcased the crisp, high-end production that can also be attributed to the band’s perfectionism, particularly that of guitarist Dominic who singer Mason calls “one of those people who would just sit and work for five hours straight on an idea or a riff until he makes it good.” They revisited the same subject matter of the following year with EP Moral Panic II, having ruminated on and gestated the themes of social unrest, mental health, the human condition, and environmentalism whilst the world was shut down throughout the pandemic.
A 2021 headline show at the O2 Arena in London cemented Nothing But Thieves’ status as one of the UK’s most beloved bands, and in 2023 they released ‘Welcome to the DCC’, the lead single from their impending fourth album, Dead Club City, which they’ll bring to Reading and Leeds Festivals once again.
