Oasis are back — and this isn’t just nostalgia, it’s a cultural reckoning

4 July 2025, 15:13

Oasis have returned, and with them comes a rush of something which feels bigger and deeper than merely their tunes and music.

Nostalgia isn’t just dominating the British summer it’s powering it completely and fuelling many of us as a result.

Tickets vanished in minutes and it’s not just middle-aged men in bucket hats reliving old glories, it’s absolutely Gen Z in Adidas, teens in Stone Island, and festival crowds who weren’t even born when Knebworth happened.

This is more than a comeback tour to me, it’s like a referendum on culture in the age of the algorithm.

Because Oasis represent a time before everything was filtered, recorded, and uploaded.

Their peak came before phones flooded the crowd and social media shaped the setlist. What they offered then and still offer now is collective feeling. Unity and a coming together, a shared emotion which is overwhelmingly hopeful. Songs built for terrace chants, stadium singing and and late-night car rides. For weddings and funerals and everything in between.

In an era of fractured attention, that unity is gold dust.

Britpop’s resurgence isn’t ironic in the slightest and not just a retro aesthetic. It’s a yearning for sincerity, for community, for a sound you don’t just listen to, but live through.

When a new parka that goes viral for resembling Lidl colours, leads to a real product drop by the supermarket chain that’s nostalgia meeting meme culture, creating commerce, story, identity. It’s newstalgia: the past reissued for the present, with just enough of a nod and a wink.

These emotional moments are economic too. From ticket sales and travel to jackets, vinyl, merchandise and content, the ripple effect touches local businesses, brands, media and more. We’ve seen it already with a visible uptick in creativity and activity, spending and optimism around culture-led events. And when culture thrives, cities follow.

Nostalgia reminds us of who we were and who we still might be. At a time when confidence in Britain feels shaky, this summer shows that belief is still there in the crowds, and in the choruses. In the thousands still willing to sing the same words, at the same time, in the same place.

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James Kirkham is a cultural strategist and founder of Iconic.

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