The second wave of British guitar bands following Britpop’s titans, Oasis and Blur, features a much tamer lot.
Most of them share one-word band names. They also built their collective sounds on the softer side of Cool Britannia—more “Wonderwall” than “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” Britpop cooled in 1997 after The Verve’s masterpiece Urban Hymns gave it its last anthem in “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” That same year, Oasis released their third album Be Here Now, which became the avatar of the scene’s excess.
Meanwhile, Blur found global success by adopting the sound of American indie bands. Their 1997 self-titled release features “Song 2,” proving that even Blur was finished with Brit-centric rock. Outside of Britpop, Radiohead dropped OK Computer, a groundbreaking album that began the Oxford group’s reworking of the very idea of what a rock band can or should sound like.
Then came the next wave. The four bands below are quintessentially post-Britpop. They each share traces of the scene’s hallmarks. And two of them are Scottish, uniting Britain’s kingdom of the late-’90s and early aughts guitar bands.
Keane
Keane is so soft rock, their biggest hit doesn’t even have a guitar player on the track. Most people know “Somewhere Only We Know” even if they don’t know the band. It’s also a group without a knowable rock star. There’s no Liam Gallagher, Richard Ashcroft, or Chris Martin-type figure in the band. Yet “Somewhere Only We Know” is a colossal song with more than 1.6 billion streams on Spotify. In 1997, Chris Martin asked Tim Rice-Oxley to join Coldplay as a keyboardist. Rice-Oxley declined to focus on his own band. By the time Keane debuted in 2004, Coldplay had become one of the biggest rock bands in the world. You wonder how many nights Rice-Oxley lost a little sleep thinking about it. Still, Keane’s debut reached No. 1 in the UK. They followed Hopes and Fears with three more piano-forward No. 1 albums before going on hiatus. Keane returned in 2019 with Cause and Effect.
Snow Patrol
Snow Patrol put the North in Northern soul. They are a Northern Irish and Scottish rock band that finally broke through with their third album Final Straw. Their single “Run” rivals Coldplay’s “Yellow” as the greatest post-Britpop ballad. Gary Lightbody’s chorus words can turn a festival into communal catharsis in the way a Springsteen concert becomes a church. Snow Patrol, like Coldplay, found power not with the volume of a rock band, but in raw earnestness. Next Snow Patrol released Eyes Open, which featured the colossal “Chasing Cars.” If you are a songwriter and you hope to place your songs in film and television, study this song. Every piece of it.
Travis
Travis may be the most Britpop of the post-Britpop bands. Their album designs resemble the Brian Cannon and Microdot font-driven record sleeve artwork of Oasis and The Verve. Fran Healy, Dougie Payne, Andy Dunlop, and Neil Primrose also share the college-student aesthetic of Britpop bands—oversized winter coats, baggy jeans, white sneakers, and shorter scruffy haircuts. Travis broke through with their second album The Man Who. It’s a collection of stadium anthems like “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?” and “Driftwood.” They followed The Man Who with another No. 1 album, The Invisible Band. Longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich inserts filtered astral touches onto Healy’s gorgeous acoustic ballads. The electric guitars sound straight out of The Bends, and the rhythm section echoes The Beatles’ interpretation of Motown. It’s not a stretch to say Healy is his generation’s second-best songwriter behind Noel Gallagher.
Coldplay
A bunch of kids formed bands because of Oasis and Blur. However, the post-Britpop bands took the most from Noel Gallagher’s songwriting—specifically songs like “Wonderwall,” Don’t Look Back in Anger,” and “Slide Away.” Then they fused those sounds with Thom Yorke’s falsetto vocal on “Fake Plastic Trees” while the guitarists obsessed over Jonny Greenwood’s pedalboard. No post-Britpop band did this more successfully than Coldplay. “Yellow” was as ubiquitous as “Wonderwall.” “Clocks” is so good it doesn’t even need a chorus. Reliably massive, Coldplay is a U2-like institution. When Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion release a new album, they keep the music economy humming. Then the stadiums hum and cry, and alight with glowsticks while Coldplay—sometimes dressed like a British Cap’n Crunch—play hit after hit after hit after hit. Chris Martin is the Mozart of soft rock.
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