To say 2017 was a huge year for Oh Wonder is a bit of an understatement. The duo managed to write, record and release their second album Ultralife. They played 113 shows, visited 34 countries, performed to 500,000 people of their 28 million listeners and play live for about 150 hours on stage, they also ended up in the top 150 artists in the world on Spotify.

Oh Wonder first captivated Australian audiences back in 2015 with their debut performances in the country at The Falls Music And Arts Festival, as well as two, sold-out sideshows. In the space of fourteen months after the release of their 2015 self-titled debut, they went from tentatively playing a first live show at London’s ICA to touring the world, playing shows across Australia, Latin America, Russia and Asia, and repeat UK, Europe, US and Canada tours to ever increasing rooms.

In 2017, they returned to Australia to play Splendour In The Grass and to rapt audiences at their sold-out official side shows in Sydney and Melbourne which sold out within 24 hours of going on sale.

In an era in which pop careers require careful planning, Oh Wonder are an anomaly. They’re a band formed by accident not design, a duo who didn’t intend to play live but spent more than a year touring the world, and a major label act who never saw this being anything other than a DIY project.

Ultralife is both Oh Wonder’s extraordinary second album and their debut proper. Its eponymously-titled predecessor, released in late 2015, was a collection of songs they had posted online at the rate of one a month, which millions of listeners fell in love with, turning London-based Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West into reluctant pop stars. Now their first album is fast approaching half a billion streams.

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