Blossoms

Songs From The Wedding Cake

Blossoms trade the stolen gorilla for the registry office, and make their warmest, longest, most grown-up record — with two songs it doesn't need.

Rating

8/10

Review

October 12, 2026

Release

October 2, 2026

Read

6 min

Blossoms' last album was named after a stolen fibreglass gorilla. Their new one is named after the building where their singer got married. It would be easy to read the distance between Gary (2024) and Songs From The Wedding Cake as a band hardening into adulthood — but the more interesting reading is that the gorilla was the joke and this is the fact. Stockport Town Hall is nicknamed "the wedding cake"; Tom Ogden was married there in 2021. The band then crashed three weddings across the north-west to promote the record, which is the funniest possible way to sell an album about a wedding cake, and also a sign that they know exactly what they have made.

A bigger room, and a different instrument

Songs From The Wedding Cake is Blossoms' sixth studio album, released on 2 October 2026 on ODD SK Recordings and Distiller. It was produced by Shawn Lee, and the origin story is the best one in their file: lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst contacted Lee online when he was 13, having fallen for his score to Rockstar's Bully (2006). The record was made at Tilehouse Studios in Denham, Buckinghamshire.

Everything about the scale is different from last time. Gary was recorded live in the room, ran 30:22, and never let a single song reach 3:40. This one runs 42:53. Nine of its ten tracks are longer than anything on Gary, and its average song is four minutes and seventeen seconds against three minutes and two. That is a band deciding the slow reveal is worth more than the sharp exit, and it is the most consequential choice on the record.

The credits — unusually revealing, and worth reading before you argue with anyone about this album — tell you what changed. No member of Blossoms is credited with a synthesiser anywhere on it. Myles Kellock's instrument here is the electric piano, on nine of the ten tracks, with glockenspiel on three and vibraphone on the closer; Ogden plays piano on "Joke About Divorce", "The Kardashians" and "The Deep End". The only synthesiser credit on the album belongs to Lee, on one track. Whatever you think Blossoms sound like, this is not a band reaching for a synth pad to get there. It is a band building from electric piano, guitar and space.

The best thing here is about a bus

The album's centre of gravity is "Additional Driver", 5:12, the longest song here that isn't the closer. It is about the 192 — the Manchester to Stockport route — and a journey home that goes wrong after the junction by the O2 Apollo, where Ogden had a small bump in his car a week before a writing session in Wales. It closes on its refrain, "Should've got the 192", which is the best line on the album and exactly the kind of detail that separates this record from its predecessor. Gary was about the internet's sense of humour. This one is about being twenty minutes from home and making it worse.

Declan McKenna was at that writing session, as he was for the week in Anglesey that preceded Gary — this is a working relationship, not a stunt. He is credited as a co-writer, and on the finished track the credits give him electric guitar, percussion and a lead vocal; he also sings background on "Meet Me in Love". That matters, because featured vocals are usually a sticker applied to a song that already existed. Here it is a genuine two-hander, and the one place on the album where two voices argue with each other rather than doubling.

"A vocal take in the hot tub later we had finished writing what would become 'Additional Driver'," Ogden told BBC News.

Handing over the microphone

The generosity is the record's most attractive quality. Rick Astley sings background on "Joke About Divorce" and appears in its video alongside Callum Scott Howells. Natalie Findlay and Jules Apollinaire co-produce and play on "Meet Me in Love" and "Guts", with Apollinaire's spoken word on the latter — Blossoms opening their writing room to outsiders. The closer takes on organ from Robin Dewhurst.

The biggest gesture is at track nine. On "Where Have You Been My Whole Life?", Inhaler's Elijah Hewson takes the lead vocal. Ogden has been the only voice this band has had for a decade; he writes the songs, he fronts the band, and he has just handed a lead vocal on his own album to somebody else, four minutes before the end. That is not how a band defends a No. 1 record. It is how a band behaves when it thinks it has something.

Where it loses its footing

Three complaints, one of them serious.

The serious one is sequencing. Blossoms have put four singles in the first five tracks — "Joke About Divorce", "Husband", "Meet Me in Love", "Additional Driver" — which means the album's most durable ideas arrive last: Hewson's ballad at nine, and the 6:39 of "The Deep End" at ten. On any record that would be a quibble. On a 43-minute one that has already spent most of its first side on the familiar, it means the album makes its best case to the fewest listeners. The warmest, strangest, least predictable half is the half you have to earn.

Second, the two celebrity titles are the two thinnest songs. "The Kardashians" reaches for shorthand and settles for a chorus; "Uma Thurman", at 2:47, is the only thing here under three minutes, and it sounds like what it is — a good title waiting for a second verse. On a record where everything else is given room to breathe, the two songs that namecheck famous people are the two that were rushed.

Third, the uniform temperature. With the electric piano on nine tracks and the tempos settled into a mid-range, there is no gear change anywhere until the closer — nothing with the clipped, played-live-in-the-room energy that made Gary's thirty minutes feel larger than they were. Blossoms have traded a strength for a better sound, and the trade is not even.

There is also the deluxe edition, which adds a full run-through of the 2016 debut recorded at Manchester's Deaf Institute in August to mark its tenth anniversary, and string-quartet versions of five of these ten songs. It is a generous package, and those reworkings are a claim about the durability of the writing that the songs still have to cash.

Verdict

The album debuted at No. 1 in the UK — their fifth chart-topping record, and per the Official Charts Company they edged past the Beatles to get it — with Scotland at No. 2 and the Irish independent chart at 16. That is a band whose audience has grown up alongside them, which is precisely what these songs assume.

Songs From The Wedding Cake is the first Blossoms album about staying put, and it is the best they have sounded doing it.

Eight of these ten songs earn their four minutes, which on an album this long is a better ratio than it sounds. The band that once wrote songs to be shouted back at them across a festival field has written 43 minutes about the bus home, a registry office and a bump in the car — and it is the most convincing thing they have done in a decade. 8.0

Hear it for yourself — the argument only holds up against the record.