Feb 06 2025 11 mins
Mumford & Sons are getting ready to kick off their short run of intimate dates overseas in early March, marking the band’s first headlining shows in the U.K. and Europe since 2018, before making stops in Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, and New York.
“Surprise, surprise, our band's gonna play some shows,” frontman Marcus Mumford told KROQ’s Klein/Ally Show in Los Angeles this week. “We're very relieved, and we're gonna start small and intimate, and we're calling it 'The Tour Before The Tour,’" he says. "We're gonna play theaters all over the place. We're gonna play the Palladium in Los Angeles…. and we're gonna play the Forum in London and these little spots, which is where we kind of cut our teeth. You know, these rooms that we haven't had the opportunity to play loads, and it felt like a good way to sort of warm ourselves up and play some of these new songs in an intimate setting before bigger ones later in the year.””
Marcus tells us he’s looking forward to actually seeing faces in the crowd at these smaller shows. “The big ones, especially the outdoor big ones, can feel like a little more anonymous, especially if you're quite far away from the crowd,” he admits. ”Like Glastonbury, you're like 50 meters away from the crowd, you know? But in these places… you can smell each other,” he adds.
Tickets will be available starting Friday, February 14. Fans are advised to sign up for the band’s fan community and register for the show they wish to attend before Monday, February 10. Additionally, Mumford & Sons have partnered with PLUS1 to support War Child, donating $1 from every ticket sold to protect, educate, and stand up for the rights of children affected by war.
Last month, Mumford & Sons announced 'RUSHMERE,' their first new album in seven years, would be available on March 28.
After releasing his 2022 solo offering '(Self-Titled),' Mumford tells us he was missing the band spirit that Mumford & Sons provides “with all my heart. I was longing to get back,” he explains, “and it actually started for us two years ago, in Los Angeles. I was living here, and Ted [Dwane] and Ben [Lovett] both came out and we just started by playing some instruments together in the in the room, and then these songs started coming.”
“It was like, ‘Let's just see how it feels. This is a choice… We don't have to do this, no one's forcing us to do this. Let's do it if it feels right,’” he says, “and these songs just started pouring out of us and it's been the like most prolific two years of my life.”
Regarding his solo project, he acknowledges being surrounded by “really wonderful collaborators, people like Phoebe Bridges and Monica Martin, Daniel Ponder, Blake Mills, all these cats that I really admire that I wanted to work with and haven't been able to in the band setting ‘cause you can't work with everyone. So, I got to. enjoy leaning into some of those collaborations. I was surrounded by people, but I really missed the band and everyone wanted to come back and just see what it felt like, Ted and Ben and I just in a room together, to see what it felt like, and it felt great. Now we're sitting on all this material, and I'm not allowed to talk about it all, but there's a lot of songs. We've edited it down to like 60 or something, there's a lot of songs… well, it’s been two years in the studio.”
Words by Joe Cingrana, Interview by Klein.Ally.Show
Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images