Why Some Fans Don’t Want New Oasis Music

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Ask a certain kind of Oasis fan what they most want from the reunited Gallagher brothers and you will get an answer that would have sounded like heresy in 1996: please, lads, do not make another record. Keep the parkas, keep the fireworks, keep the 60,000 people bellowing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” back at Noel until his voice gives out. Just leave the studio door shut.

A Reunion Built On Nostalgia, Not New Songs

That instinct hardened into something close to consensus across the Oasis Live ’25 tour, a run of 41 dates that opened in Cardiff on July 4, 2025 and closed at the Estádio MorumBIS in São Paulo on November 23. The shows were a triumph by any measure; the tour grossed more than 405 million dollars and drew over two million people, ranking as one of the biggest concert runs of the year.

Noel, usually the most guarded man in British rock, told talkSPORT he was “completely blown away” and admitted his “legs had turned to jelly after about halfway through the second song.” He later called the run “better than the ’90s” and “ten out of ten.” None of that euphoria, though, translated into a groundswell demanding fresh material. If anything, the better the gigs got, the more nervous people became about anyone messing with the formula.

The Band’s Own Cold Water

The band itself has been the loudest voice pouring cold water on the idea. Co-manager Alec McKinlay told Music Week in May 2025 that the tour was “very much the last time around” and that there was “no plan for any new music.” Liam, who spent late 2024 winding fans up on X by claiming a new album was “already finished” and “in the bag mate,” eventually admitted he “was fucking joking.”

Then, in July 2026, he gave the definitive version of his position. When a fan begged, “oasis new album please please please im sorry but i think the new album will actually change lives,” Liam fired back: “NO I’m just not prepared for the criticism if it doesn’t sell 100 million copies in the 1st hour cure bad breath and constipation for the nation if it doesn’t turn back time for Cher and some other shit let’s just to some gigs and be happy thank you.”

The Fear Of Ruining The Legacy

Underneath the clowning is a real argument, and it is one a lot of fans have quietly made their own. The fear is legacy. Oasis is one of a handful of bands whose reputation rests almost entirely on a short, white hot burst at the start. Definitely Maybe in 1994 and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? in 1995 are the twin pillars; the latter has sold more than 22 million copies worldwide, was certified 19 times platinum in Britain for 5.7 million domestic sales, and was voted the greatest British album since 1980 at the 2010 Brit Awards.

Then came the wobble. Be Here Now, their third album, sold 663,389 copies in its first three days in 1997, including 424,000 on the opening day alone, which made it the fastest selling album in UK chart history. It moved millions more, but the critical mood curdled almost immediately, and the band never again reached those early peaks across their remaining four studio albums. That arc, two classics followed by a long, uneven descent, is precisely why fans flinch. A new album does not just risk being mediocre. It risks confirming that the decline was the real story and the reunion was a lovely exception.

A Setlist Frozen In The ’90s

The setlists made the nostalgia contract explicit. Across the whole tour Oasis played the same set of 23 songs almost every night, drawn overwhelmingly from the imperial years. In Toronto, the first North American date, six songs came from Definitely Maybe and eight from Morning Glory, with only a couple of tracks from 2000 onward and nothing at all newer than 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul.

No solo material from either brother. No surprises. The show was engineered as a monument, not a work in progress, and the crowds loved it for exactly that reason. Writing for Rolling Stone, one attendee described the concerts as “a collective exercise in nostalgia,” where “the attraction is the boys back together, and you being there.”

What The Solo Years Already Proved

There is also the awkward matter of the solo years, which function as a preview of what a Gallagher record made in the 2020s might sound like, and how the public would receive it. Both brothers have been commercially bulletproof at home. Liam has racked up multiple solo number one albums, from 2017’s As You Were through 2019’s Why Me? Why Not and the 2020 MTV Unplugged set, which shifted 21,000 copies in its first week. Noel’s High Flying Birds have been a fixture too. But number one on a quiet release week is not the same as cultural weight, and even sympathetic reviewers have noticed the ceiling.

Readers grumbled that Liam’s Unplugged only topped the chart “during a week when there wasn’t any serious competition.” Noel, meanwhile, has spent a decade making perfectly respectable, slightly muted records that reviewers tend to praise for craft while noting he “never has, and never will, reinvent the wheel.” Put those two catalogues side by side and you can see why fans worry: the raw materials of a new Oasis album already exist, scattered across a dozen solo LPs, and none of them detonated the way the old stuff did.

The Stone Roses Warning

Then there are the cautionary tales, and Oasis fans do not have to look far. The most painful comparison is the other great Manchester reunion. The Stone Roses came back in 2012 to euphoric, tearful crowds, then released two comeback singles, “All for One” and “Beautiful Thing,” in 2016. The response was brutal. On the band’s own fansite, one longtime follower wrote that “both musically and lyrically it disappoints on so many levels. A band this great should be fucking ashamed churning this turd out.”

Another fan warned it “sounds like a last minute rush job cash in, awful lyrics, just stale rock.” One writer later summed up “All for One” as “a vapid murmur over a meandering shuffle” that “sounded like the work of a band who had wilfully ignored the last 25 years of pop music.” The Roses quietly dissolved again not long after. That is the ghost hanging over any Oasis studio session: a reunion that was perfect until the moment it tried to add to the story.

Pixies And The Problem With Comebacks

The Pixies offer a gentler but no less instructive version. When they finally released Indie Cindy in 2014, their first album in 23 years, the reviews landed somewhere between polite and pained. Paste called it “so much worse than a simply bad album” because of “how much better it could have been.” The kinder verdicts, like NME’s, still circled the same problem: a band that can no longer recapture the urgency and drive of youth. Reunion records, the pattern suggests, tend to be judged not against other new music but against the untouchable early work, and that is a fight almost nobody wins.

What Fans Are Actually Saying Online

The fan reactions online in 2026 reflect all of this weariness. In the same July thread where Liam torpedoed the album idea, replies ran heavily toward skepticism. “They haven’t got a new album in them. Unfortunately,” wrote one. “Won’t change my life you dingbat,” wrote another. Even the fans who were open to it framed their hope defensively, one predicting that people would “moan it doesnt sound like definitely maybe” no matter what the band delivered. Liam agreed with that last one, adding that critics were “mad for putting the boot in but can’t if the gigs are great.” That is the whole thesis in a single tweet: the live show is unimpeachable, so why hand the doubters a target?

The Polling Nobody Wants To Do

It is worth being honest about how much of the reunion’s demand was ever about the music in the first place, as opposed to the event. A survey by The Harris Poll, its Harris QuestDIY study of 994 UK respondents launched in September 2024, found that only 22 percent described themselves as “extremely excited” for the reunion, while 38 percent said they were “not excited at all.”

The firm’s managing director Gary Topiol noted the ticket rush “was driven more by kids in their teens and twenties who never got a chance to see Oasis first time around.” A separate Ipsos poll, which interviewed 1,310 British adults aged 18 to 75 including 508 self described fans between August 27 and 28, 2024, found 83 percent of those fans excited about the reunion itself. But nobody has published a poll asking the more pointed question: do you actually want a new album? The silence is telling. The appetite is for the ritual, not the release.

Noel’s Restlessness Keeps The Door Open

Not everyone is on board with the museum piece approach, of course. Noel remains a restless, prolific writer, and he has kept the door ajar in a way that drives the leave it alone crowd slightly mad. He revealed on Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast that he wrote around 40 songs during lockdown, including what he called a heavily guitar driven stadium rock album that never came out.

In January 2026, back from his Christmas break, he told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Football Daily he was “back at work,” and by the time of the Brit Awards in February, where he won Songwriter of the Year, he was telling talkSPORT, “I’m in the studio now, but I better put something out.” Whether any of that becomes an Oasis record or another High Flying Birds project, he has pointedly refused to say. Liam, for his part, seemed to confirm the band is not finished, telling one fan they would “see me next year and the year after and so on, just not sure yet if it’ll be with oasis,” and hinting broadly at shows in 2027.

Becky Anderson
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