The members of the classic Blink-182 lineup are getting their kits off and hitting the road together. The trio of Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker will begin a global reunion tour in March 2023 with shows in Latin America. They’ll kick off a couple of months’ worth of North American shows in May before hitting Europe next September.

The Mark, Tom and Travis show will make its way to Australia and New Zealand in February 2024, joined by special guests Rise Against. The tour includes arena shows in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, as well as Auckland and Christchurch.

Australian support slots for large-scale national tours don't come without much consideration and one band stands above all options to prove themselves the optimal choice for Blink-182's string of Australian shows.

Slowly Slowly.

Slowly Slowly are an Australian pop punk and indie rock band from Melbourne, Victoria. The band consists of Ben Stewart (lead vocals, guitar), Patrick Murphy (drums), Albert Doan (guitar), and Alex Quayle (bass guitar). They released their debut album Chamomile in 2016. 

Slowly has quickly cemented themselves as one of Australia’s freshest bands and most exciting live acts. Slowly Slowly understand their strengths very well and play within those, and also play right on the edge and experiment. 

"Slowly Slowly are in their purest form on the epic and emotive Daisy Chain" - The AU Review - The AU Review

"Slowly Slowly frontman Ben Stewart is one of contemporary emo’s most underrated songwriters." - Kerrang

"Slowly Slowly are one of Australia’s hardest working and most resilient bands." - Music Feeds

About Slowly Slowly

It’s the dichotomy between Daisy Chain’s content and delivery that made Slowly Slowly’s fourth album even possible to release. In it, the band’s grimmest and most sorrowful lyrics to date arrive neatly wrapped in some of the most  adventurous, unhinged and unabashed tunes of their career. It’s a new sound singer-songwriter Ben Stewart says was a complete necessity for lifting the project off the ground – he simply couldn’t have handled the heaviness of these  songs otherwise. 

The resulting record is one that’s equally as profound as it can be a party starter. It melds the raw with the boisterous expertly and offers its listener moments of deep reflection and healing among other anthemic, no-holds-barred sing alongs.

Standout lyrics speak to Ben’s confrontations with himself in the mirror. “I’m stubborn at the best of times, am I gonna end up alone?” he cries during ‘Hold My Breath’ in the midst of a relationship break down, meanwhile he concedes “I’m a thousand weak layers of crazy insane” on the record’s closer ‘Papier-Mache’; a comparison he makes of himself as thin layers of paper, seemingly strong from the naked eye, but weakly holding it together to save face.  

Much like the full album, its title track carries the overarching theme of living in total acceptance of our broken and  multi-faceted selves. It encapsulates an ethos shared by the majority of Daisy Chain’s songs – that life and our growth as humans are not linear. 

Self-produced by Stewart alongside mixing duties by UK heavyweight Jonathan Gilmore (Wolf Alice, The 1975, Nothing  But Thieves, Beabadoobee), Daisy Chain carries Chamomile-days sensitive sadness and wordplay lathered in refreshing  pop sensibilities. Undoubtedly their most complex yet well-rounded piece of work to date, Slowly Slowly release Daisy Chain on November 4, 2022.