Northern Irish punk rock trio ASH have just announced a headline Academy, Dublin show set for Thursday, 11th December 2025 as part of their ‘Ad Astra’ tour 2025!
Ash have been together for 30 years, but it was their two years apart which ultimately inspired their brilliant new album.
Like the rest of the world, Tim Wheeler (guitar/vocals), Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray (drums) were blindsided by the pandemic. It enforced not only the first extended period of downtime the band have ever had in their incredible three-decade career, but also became the longest they’d gone without seeing each other since they met at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.
So, when they were finally reunited to rehearse for a livestream gig in the dark days of 2021, there were some understandable nerves at how it might go.
“Madly, we sounded like we’d never been away,” grins McMurray. “We sounded better than ever. It was probably one of my favourite days of being in a band – there was just such a buzz to get back in a room together.”
That buzz extended to reviewing the next steps for one of Britain’s most beloved bands. Following 2018’s highly acclaimed Islands album, the band had intended to release the follow-up quickly. And, indeed, they had most of an eclectic, part-rock/part-electronic album – some songs even predating the Islands sessions – in the can, even before the world ground to a halt.
But the catharsis of getting back together, supplemented by the joyous reaffirmation of their immense Teenage Wildlife greatest hits tour – which started pre-Covid and finally wrapped in March 2023 – amidst the chaos of a rapidly changing world prompted a rethink.
Tim Wheeler – as you’d expect from one of the greatest songwriters of his generation – had kept writing throughout Ash’s enforced lay-off. And he had turned up for the band’s re-boot camp with a rucksack stuffed full of hard-rocking anthems ready to go. And after all, heavy times call for heavier music.
“I played a shit-ton of guitar in the pandemic,” grins Wheeler, who spent one particularly bored moment in lockdown mastering every single note of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird. “There are some quite outstanding guitar solos on this record which are probably a result of that!”
The solos are, indeed, pretty awesome. But then, the self-produced Race The Night – the band’s eighth full-length studio album, no less – is outstanding in every respect. Having shut down their New York studio base as the pandemic kicked off, the band headed back to the Oh Yeah studio in Belfast with renewed focus and emerged with a record that combines the irresistible rock riffs of 2004’s blistering Meltdown album with the melodic mastery of its 2001 predecessor, Free All Angels – all wrapped up with a distinctly 2023 twist. And, with the distant rumblings of an oft-mooted rock revival on the horizon, it might just be the essential guitar-centric, anthem-packed album the world has been waiting for.
AD ASTRA TOUR 2025
Plus Special Guests
Thursday, 11th December 2025
The Academy, Dublin
MCD presale Wednesday 21st May 2025 @ 10am
Tickets on sale Friday 23rd May 2025 @ 10am