“Songs will always win, and maybe one day you’ll catch fire and get lucky.”
There is a mixture of emotions backstage at Truck Festival as Circa Waves prepare to headline the Market Stage on Sunday.
For frontman Kieran Shudall, the anticipation is already setting in. “Trepidacious, excited, butterflies, and also marginally tired,” he admits. After more than a decade of festivals, tours and packed venues, Circa Waves have accumulated plenty of memorable moments onstage. For guitarist Joe Falconer, the best part remains the audience. “I just love the fact the crowds are always great, Truck in particular, and people’s enthusiasm seems to be endless,” he says.
“Especially on a festival like today when you’ve had three days of sun, and you expect everyone to be out of it, people still somehow pull it together. I like it when people get on their shoulders, start moshing…”
Shudall has his own particularly memorable example of festival chaos, involving the band’s drummer, Colin Jones, and an inflatable dinghy. “I liked it when Colin, our drummer, got on a dinghy and went out into the crowd, thinking the crowd would bring him back to play drums for the end of the song,” he recalls.
“And they just kept taking him further away.”
For Shudall, that unpredictable energy is exactly what makes a great festival crowd. You can usually tell almost immediately whether an audience is going to bring the atmosphere. “I think from the off, from the first song you can just see the energy and see the mosh pits begin or whatever, and you can just feel the fizziness of the room or field,” he explains.
“You can just tell straight away. It’s like an intuition.”
That connection with an audience remains particularly important to Circa Waves, even after years of performing to thousands of people. Their latest album, Death & Love, released in October 2025, was followed by the biggest tour of their career so far. “Yeah, really good,” Shudall says of the album’s reception. “We played our biggest tour we’ve ever done alongside it.”
“It’s just cool. It’s hard to tell sometimes when you’re in your little bubble. I’m up in Liverpool, and these guys are dotted around London, and then you go to Brixton Academy and see 4,000 people go mad for the songs, so it’s nice and we feel very fortunate to still be doing this, making records and playing bigger rooms.”
That relationship with their fans is something neither member takes for granted. “They give us everything,” Shudall says. “They’re the reason why we’re able to do it.” Over the years, the band have made a point of meeting fans after shows, particularly during their earlier, smaller tours. “We’ve met so many of them over the years when we’ve done smaller tours where we’ll go do merch signings after and meet them all, and they’re just such nice people. It’s the truth.”
For Falconer, those encounters demonstrate that Circa Waves have created something bigger than simply a collection of songs. “For me it’s like, the amount of people we meet afterwards and they’re like, ‘Oh, we met at one of your gigs five years ago,’” he says.
“It shows to me that there’s a good sense of community around it and people are just nice.”
When it comes to their live set, Shudall has two particular favourites. Do You Wanna Talk, which they often use as an opener, provides an immediate burst of energy, while T-Shirt Weather delivers a reaction that has become synonymous with Circa Waves. “I love Do You Wanna Talk, which we tend to open with, and I love T-Shirt Weather just for the reaction,” he says. “It’s a big moment for us every time.”
The song has become a staple of indie playlists and a defining track of the band’s career, although Shudall and Falconer admit they have a slightly unusual perspective on its enormous popularity. “We don’t really think about that,” Shudall says. “You see the numbers, but they don’t really mean anything.” Falconer agrees, explaining that the band don’t necessarily experience the song’s cultural impact in everyday life. “You’re not around people who are putting it on at a BBQ,” he jokes. “I don’t know how it was in people’s lives, because we would never put it on.”
“You see the reaction at the end of the gigs, so you know it means something, but I couldn’t honestly tell you how big it is.”
Now, as Circa Waves prepare for another major chapter, the band are set to support Two Door Cinema Club on their UK arena tour next year. For Falconer, it is an opportunity to revisit the early days of their career with a band they’ve known since the beginning. “We can’t wait,” he says. “We’ve known those guys since the very beginning of our career, and yeah, those venues are gonna be pretty wild.”
The tour will also see Circa Waves perform at London’s O2 Arena and Glasgow’s OVO Hydro for the first time. “We’ll be playing the O2 Arena for the first time, which should be fun; never done that before, same with the Hydro in Glasgow,” Falconer adds. “They’re so lovely as well, and their show is incredible.”
Despite the size of those upcoming venues, Circa Waves remain passionate about the importance of grassroots music spaces, something they believe is essential for developing the next generation of artists. “It’s massively important,” Falconer says.
“It’s easy for people to forget that the only reason we got good at playing gigs is because we went out in that first couple of years and we toured non-stop for two years in some tiny venues, 50–200 cap.”
“Bands need these venues to get good; otherwise you won’t have the foundation to build a solid career. It’s important people have access to those spaces, and it’s a shame so many have closed down.”
The band still make a conscious effort to return to smaller venues whenever possible. “We try and do small tours now and then to just go back to those venues because it’s nice to be in those spaces and highlight that those venues exist to those who may not know they exist.”
It is a philosophy that also feeds into the advice Shudall has for artists attempting to break through today. “The same advice goes for everyone,” he says. “If you write songs every day, you’re gonna get better at it. If you play gigs as much as possible, you’re gonna get really good at them.”
With social media now playing such a significant role in the music industry, Shudall believes artists can sometimes lose sight of what matters most. “There’s so much focus on social media now, and I see so many people talking about how ‘this is how you get a song out there’, and it’s just like, write as many songs as you can.”
“Songs will always win, and maybe one day you’ll catch fire and get lucky. You’ve got to try.”
As for Circa Waves themselves, their ambitions remain firmly rooted in the music rather than simply chasing increasingly large venues. “I always like the songs to dictate where we go next,” Shudall says when asked where he’d like to headline in the future.
“But I feel like we’ve always loved playing the O2 Academy Brixton, so if we can get back there, I’d love that. Even bigger than that, even better.”
“Making great music is all that I really think about.”
With Death & Love continuing to take the band into bigger rooms, an arena tour alongside Two Door Cinema Club on the horizon and their commitment to the grassroots venues that shaped them still firmly intact, Circa Waves are showing that their next chapter isn’t about forgetting where they came from. It is about writing the songs, playing the gigs and seeing just how far they can take them.
