Good Neighbours Announce Headline Show for Dublin
By Good Neighbours Announce A Headline Academy, Dublin Show For Tuesday 10th February 2026
Plus Special Guests
Doors 7pm | 18+
Tickets on sale Friday 12th September at 10am.
UK alternative / indie duo Good Neighbours announce a headline Academy, Dublin show for Tuesday 10th February 2026 as part of their biggest UK & Ireland tour to date.
Listen to their new single ‘People Need People’. Their debut album Blue Sky Mentality, is out September 26th via Polydor Records
Tickets from €29.00 (inc booking fee & venue facility fee)
from Ticketmaster.ie on sale Friday 12th September at 10am.
Bookings subject to 12.5% service charge per ticket (max €10.50)
Formed in late 2023, Good Neighbours, aka singers, songwriters, producers and multi-instrumentalists Oli Fox and Scott Verrill, have rapidly become the UK’s biggest new band. Released speculatively on TikTok in January 2024, their debut single Home, a big unapologetic stomper recalling the likes of 2010s indie-pop heroes MGMT and Glass Animals, and anchored by a heartfelt message about finding comfort in people you love, quickly went viral. Just as quickly it became an old-school hit, peaking in the UK at number 23, entering the top 20 in Australia (where they’ve toured extensively) and breaking into the Billboard Hot 100. It’s success – soundtracking over 250k videos on TikTok and landing 450m streams on Spotify alone – earned them a deal with Polydor in the UK and Capitol in America, while the success of followup single Keep It Up has helped solidify them as a fixture on the live circuit.
It’s been a frenetic rise. Home and Keep It Up, alongside recent singles Ripple, Starry Eyed and Suburbs, feature on the duo’s debut album, Blue Sky Mentality. Created on the road on tour buses and in hotels while traversing the planet on their own headline shows, plus supporting the likes of Mumford & Sons, Benson Boone and Foster the People, it’s full of unselfconsciously huge pop songs that take aim at the head and the heart. Thematically it focuses on community, friendship, coming of age and togetherness, channeling emotional lyrics through the prism of escapism and positivity. “If you listen to our music, or come to a show, and you feel better after than you did before then we’ve done our job,” explains Fox, encompassing the duo’s modus operandi.
Ripple, for example, was inspired by a close friend of Fox’s who lost his father. Shutting down instead of opening up, Fox tried to encourage his friend to talk about how he was feeling. The process later inspired a song that encases these raw emotions in shimmering, DayGlo music accented by a raw, off-the-cuff spirit. Speaking about the album title, Fox explains that the band’s mates, a lot of whom are men, would often struggle to talk about their mental health. “The reason why we end up putting our songs in big optimistic productions is so that when you are at one of our shows if I’m on stage talking about grief, or talking about like losing someone, and I’m singing it at the top of my lungs to this bright beautiful sound it opens that conversation naturally,” he says.
In many ways, the formation of Good Neighbours was in itself a way of healing the duo’s own mental health struggles. Both Fox and Verrill had started in the music industry as solo artists before pivoting to songwriting for others after those endeavours didn’t work out. As the London music scene became more creatively insular, and the music being created more lower case, the pair decided to mess with the well-worn formula. “The first thing we did was a song called I Like that led us into the sort of soundscape of Good Neighbours, which was big and brash basically,” says Fox.
Another early song was the stomping Keep It Up, which marries big echo-laden beats with Fox’s impassioned, high register vocal as he exorcises some demons. “I was so angry when we did that song,” Fox says. “I’d just been fired from my fourth part-time job. We had these really happy piano chords and I just started screaming as high as I could down the mic with these lyrics just being like, ‘fuck everyone, fuck this, I’m so annoyed’.” Paired with a lighter, airy chorus it helped solidify a sound that while recalling the likes of Passion Pit and Foster the People, carried a very British melancholic sensibility.
With a handful of songs sitting on a private Soundcloud link, the pair – now called Good Neighbours due to the fact their studios were next door to each other – decided to email them to a few labels. Within a few days everyone had replied. Their songs had clearly struck a chord. “They were the antithesis of what was going on in the UK,” says Fox. “I think the labels were almost like, oh, thank God someone’s actually sending a Hail Mary.”
Having secured a manager the pair decided to hold off signing and continued to write new material, including the life-changing Home, a song that alchemises grief into hope. “It had just been a bit of a weird year in 2023 for me,” Fox explains, “just like losing people and stuff. I’d not seen anyone for a while and I was coming back from Essex into London from a funeral. I was angry at the world and I saw my partner at the time and we just hugged each other and my whole body completely relaxed. I was like ‘oh that’s quite a nice sentiment there’. Even though I had been home, I hadn’t felt at home. It made me think maybe home can just be that person sometimes. The song became a nice homage to all of the things that aren’t necessarily the four walls around you.”
Recorded at the end of 2023, the pair started teasing Home on TikTok in January 2024. To their genuine surprise the song started to take on a life of its own and as it went viral globally, labels started knocking again. The pair eventually signed with Polydor and Capitol. “We were really lucky that we knew this project inside out,” says Fox. “It had a footprint in our minds of what it would look like, where it would go, and what the songs would be.”
They also knew how strong the bond was that they’d already fostered with their rapidly growing fanbase. For a number of them, Home was their anthem, a beacon of light in dark times. “The fan interaction that stuck with me was in Detroit and this lady that had lost her child,” Fox remembers. “She was at a show with her husband who was this big tough guy and we were like oh he’s not going to come over. She was talking about how Home meant so much to them, and that it reminded them of their kid. And then the husband came over and he was just super emotional about it as well. I thought, ‘Oh, we have actually done something here’.”
Verrill adds: “We did a gig in Coventry and this 60-year-old bloke came up and gave us a spiel about how it helped him through a really tough time. It was amazing to hear that.”
Home was followed by Good Neighbours’ self-titled EP in October 2024, before further acclaim arrived with a 2025 Brit award nomination for Rising Star and a place on the BBC Sound of 2025 longlist. As their profile rose so did the workload, hence making Blue Sky Mentality mainly on the road. “We did a lot of it on the bus in America,” Fox says. “Only one song was done in a proper studio. We never sat down and planned what was going to be on it.” While it wasn’t always ideal, it means the album has a scrappiness that the pair love. “It’s so mismatched and in the nicest way it’s very DIY,” Verrill adds. “You can hear that none of it’s done on a proper microphone. And we’ve not overthought anything on it. It is big, but it’s not clean. Which is really fun.”
While the album was mainly created by Fox and Verrill, they opened up the process slightly to include songwriting assistance from Justin Tranter (Imagine Dragons, Chappell Roan) on the whistle-heavy future single Walk Walk Walk, Joe Janiak (Lewis Capaldi, The Vaccines) and Pablo Bowman (JADE, Jonas Brothers), while mixing was done by Dan Grech-Marguerat (The Killers, Lana Del Rey). The result is a fifteen-track journey that takes big topics like mental health, lost hope (as on the excellent Kids Can’t Sleep) and the importance of love in dark times and smuggles them, Trojan Horse-style, into powerfully cathartic songs that enable and encourage emotional release.
The album’s sense of escapism, and the need for communication, is anchored by Blue Sky Mentality’s artwork. A regular reference point on the duo’s initial moodboard was anthropological British photographer Martin Parr, whose intimate and uplifting portraits of everyday people seemed to suit the album’s mood. Once these were handed over to creative director Joe Mortimer the theme morphed into the Blue Sky Café, a place one could visit to find relief. Shot at Max’s Café in Kennington, south London, it features Fox and Verrill sat at a table surrounded by the usual café paraphernalia plus a fantastical blue sky backdrop. “So it had the Martin Parr thing, and then it also gave us so much freedom character-wise,” says Fox. “Also we didn’t want to be the sole focus of the artwork. So you have the young version of me and Scott, us now, and the old version in the same artwork, which is really cool.”
The brightly lit art, all reds, blues and yellows, perfectly reflects the music. Even when they venture into straight ballad territory as on the banjo-assisted Starry Eyed and the gorgeous, hope-driven Wonderful Life, the songs always blossom into a sunburst. The latter holds a special place for the band: “That song was written when we just started to feel like people in London were taking notice of Good Neighbours,” Fox explains. “But we hadn’t had the hit yet. So it was a little bit of a blue horizon, like feeling quite good about ourselves for once. It’s about how you were rolling with the punches and now you’re starting to see that things are maybe turning your way.”
On the tropical pop of People Need People, meanwhile, community and friendship is celebrated. “We’ve got our studio that we used to write out of and it ended up being somewhere our mates would come through all the time,” Fox says. “That song’s kind of a homage to that – when someone didn’t have money in the bank you’d buy them a beer. It’s about how we’ve always been surrounded by really great people.”
With more live shows planned throughout 2025 and into 2026, and huge festivals like Glastonbury and Reading and Leeds already under their belts, Good Neighbours aren’t resting on their laurels. After years of hard work, and setbacks galore this is finally Oli Fox and Scott Verrill’s time to shine. It’s that connection with their audience, one they kickstarted themselves back at the start of 2024, that they hold closest. “They’re trusting us so dearly that they can talk about anything with us, which is almost like a super power. It does really feel like that’s what we’re bringing to the music scene. It’s an honest conversation.” So what are their hopes for the future? “Loads of money,” they joke, almost in unison. “No, we honestly just want to play bigger venues now,” smiles Fox.