Oasis always knew it deserved to be huge, and back home in Britain, it was from the start. It’s a rock ’n’ roll institution there, with the inconsolably volatile, eternally bickering brothers at the heart of the band, Liam and Noel Gallagher, aging (if not quite mellowing) into sage but profane pop culture elders. In America, however, Oasis never really broke big. Until now.
If you told me a couple of years ago that in 2025, a reunited Oasis was going to sell out stadium shows in the United States, I would assume you were one of my former (male) Gen X co-workers from Spin magazine going through a midlife crisis.
Not that I wouldn’t be rooting for it. I love Oasis. As a ’90s kid obsessed with the aggressive oddness of Tori Amos and Björk, and the moody insularity of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain, the natural swagger of Liam and Noel Gallagher always felt thrilling and oddly subversive.
It was possible to say you wanted to be bigger than the Beatles, and then literally try to do that?
It was possible to announce that you wanted to be the biggest rock star in the world, as Liam did, and then actually become one of the biggest rock stars in the world?
It was possible to declare your desires and then unabashedly, publicly, willfully pursue them?
Last summer, when the band announced a global tour, 15 years after its acrimonious breakup, all five stadium gigs in the United States sold out within hours. That’s roughly half a million tickets purchased to see a band who never had a No. 1 single or No. 1 album in America and who, at its lowest point in the early 2000s, was often struggling to fill 2,000- to 3,000-seat theaters here. “Wonderwall,” which peaked at No. 8 on the U.S. charts in 1996, was its only U.S. Top 10 hit.
What happened? How is Oasis filling two nights at venues last sold out by Beyoncé? What does this band have that America suddenly needs?
For Gen Xers from both sides of the pond, the appeal of this moment is obvious — it’s a chance to get drunk with your old friends and sing along to bangers from your youth. What’s weird, though, is how many young people want to get drunk and sing along to bangers from our youth, too.
Most critics think that Oasis made two truly great albums: “Definitely Maybe” and its follow-up, 1995’s “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” Gen Z, unspoiled by decades of exposure to critiques of Oasis’ five other releases, has embraced a number of the band’s lesser-known tracks. Spotify saw a significant rise in Oasis’ streaming numbers the first weekend of the band’s reunion tour, and the service reported that half of the 16.6 million new Oasis listeners are members of Gen Z.
I always loved Oasis for its unapologetic megalomania and the band’s genuine unfilteredness, confidence and willingness to provoke purely for laughs (“Pitchfork” has called them insult “artisans”), which definitely fits this cultural era for young people. Gen Z kids have grown up in a world where everyone everywhere is afraid of saying or posting or retweeting the wrong thing all the time. The enemies of rock ’n’ roll are self-consciousness and self-seriousness, and although the guys from Oasis take themselves and their band seriously — sometimes painfully so — they also get that this is supposed to be fun.
A recent piece in The New York Times by Chris DeVille argued that the brothers were made for our current social media era of smack talking. They delight in throwing shade at each other (if fans “want to hear old Oasis songs, they’re being played by a fat man in an anorak somewhere,” Noel said of his brother a few years ago). Their brash loutishness, which seemed out of step with the indie culture of the 1990s, helped keep them relevant. It also, via social media, endeared them to people born after the band’s peak and reminded the rest of us that a certain scabrous quality is one of the things we loved about rock stars in the first place.
Oasis announced the U.S. tour with a statement that read in part: “America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.” Rock stars aren’t supposed to be thirsty. They aren’t supposed to care. But Oasis really, really cares. It’s why it picks fights with nearly every band that has ever presented as competition — rivals must be dealt with not only because they challenge the ego, but also because they are a direct threat to the thing Oasis most desires: your attention.
The Gallagher brothers have always been sardonic, but they have never been ironic. Underneath the bucket hats, they are as romantic about rock ’n’ roll as it’s possible to be. There is no era as defined by the pose of the disaffected rock star as the ’90s, the ultimate age of irony. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the defining song of the decade, is a literal satire of the rock ’n’ roll anthem. The opening track on Oasis’ first album is called “Rock ‘N’ Roll Star.” It’s an earnestly aspirational tribute to the glory of the rock ’n’ roll life and a mission statement the band has been allegiant to for over 30 years, even when the fans, at least in America, didn’t buy in.
I remember seeing Oasis in the wild, at a hotel pool in Los Angeles, just before the Grammys back in the mid-2000s. It was late morning when I noticed a collection of dudes in hotel bathrobes swagger out to the patio and order trays of drinks. Soon, a boombox appeared, and Oasis’ music began to fill the air. They became increasingly loud, behaving like a parody of prototypical Oasis fans at a fancy pool in paradise: day drinking on a weekday and traumatizing the posh clientele
It took me a moment but I soon realized, these are not fans; this is actually Oasis. The giveaway was Liam leisurely walking in slow circles around an obstacle course of patio furniture, chest out, nodding along to the music, arms pinned behind his back, kicking first one leg and then the other out in front of him like a U.F.C. fighter celebrating a victory. This was all for an audience of maybe a dozen people, most of whom were associated with his band. And this was all before rampant use of cellphone cams and social media. If you didn’t happen to be at a cabana at that particular pool on that particular day, this decadent, idiotic rock star behavior went unnoticed.
It was hilarious back then but feels poignant now. A more innocent, obnoxious, fun time, when the world didn’t feel so trapped in fear, and lines like “Maybe I just wanna fly/Wanna live, I don’t wanna die/Maybe I just wanna breathe” and “Someday you will find me/Caught beneath the landslide/In a champagne supernova in the sky” captured that hedonistic optimism we seem to have lost, now found again.
Lizzy Goodman is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine whose writing on music, culture, and fashion has also appeared in “New York,” “Rolling Stone,” and “Elle.” She is the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of rock ’n’ roll in New York City from 2001-2011.
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