We’ve only just passed the halfway mark, but 2025 looks like a landmark year for Parcels. The Ausssie five-piece have already conquered two of the world’s most iconic festivals – Coachella in April and Glastonbury in June. Now, they’re gearing up for a huge European arena tour that includes their biggest UK headline show to date: at London’s 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena on September 12.
“That’s the one concert I tell all my friends about – it’s definitely a claim to fame,” says guitarist and vocalist Jules Crommelin. “And all these things that we would have dreamed about years ago, it’s surreal to be doing them now,” adds his bandmate Patrick Hetherington, who plays keys and guitar as well as providing vocals.
We’re speaking in a quiet corner of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a beloved east London venue with authentic 1970s decor: if the patterned carpets could talk, they’d complain about decades of spilled drinks. There’s a fair bit of hubbub as the retro interior is prepped for Parcels’ ‘Bose x NME: C25’ shoot, but the duo themselves radiate calm.
Their bandmates Noah Hill, Toto Serret and Louie Swain are getting ready downstairs, but no one seems fazed or frantic – impressive given that Parcels are midway through a bustling summer of festival gigs. Today, it’s less than 48 hours since they played Glastonbury’s West Holts stage. “We’ve all got an Excel spreadsheet that we can log into at any time,” says Hetherington, noting that it plots the band’s schedule a full year ahead, “but I actually think it’s healthier just taking it day by day.”
This sounds sensible given that Parcels are also preparing to drop their third studio album, ‘Loved’, on September 12. They’re previewing the LP by contributing exclusive single ‘Summerinlove’ (which you can stream now), the album’s designated “slow jam”, to ‘Bose x NME: C25’ (dropping in full September 19). “It’s a really smooth, well-recorded song that feels like it can stand alone on the [‘C25’] mixtape,” Crommelin says. “But,” Hetherington adds, “I also think it’s very reflective of the album”.
They describe ‘Loved’ as “light and joyous” by design. “Our last record was this very conceptual double album that was very vigorously planned,” says Crommelin, referring to the way Parcels explored the duality of post-sunrise brightness and nocturnal murkiness on 2024’s ‘Day/Night’. “And so this time,” he continues, “we went the opposite route, which was just writing songs and waiting for the album to kind of appear.”
This looser, more intuitive approach was also rooted in practicality. Having moved to Berlin as a band in 2014 – “we were so young that we didn’t overthink it, we just did it,” Crommelin says – several band members are now based in Australia again. “Because we’re living in separate parts of the world now, the moments where we’re all together are becoming rarer,” Hetherington says. “So if we ever found ourselves all in the same place, we’d jump in the studio and jam.”
In other ways, the band members are closer than ever. “Because we were teenage friends and grew up in high school together, it feels like a safe place when the five of us are in the same room,” Crommelin says. Hetherington notes that the quintet have grown more “sensitive and supportive of each other” in the 11 years they’ve been playing as Parcels. “We’re very aware of how we’ve all developed as individuals, and I think that’s what keeps us together,” he says.
Parcels formed in their final year of high school in Byron Bay; six months later, they caught a flight to Berlin and never looked back. After Daft Punk watched the band play in a bijou Paris basement in April 2016, the elusive duo invited them into the studio. A year later, Parcels released ‘Overnight’, a glistening disco-funk nugget that has become unexpectedly historic: as things currently stand, it’s the last song that Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem Christo ever produced together.
At the time, Parcels told NME they were impressed that “there was never any ego” from the Gallic house visionaries. “From the start to the finish, it was an equal collaboration with no pressure, only a desire to create something meaningful together. That gave us a lot of confidence in ourselves, as well as respect for those two,” they said.
The band have carried this grounded approach with them as their career trajectory has continued to level up. ‘Overnight’ sent Parcels global, but their 2018 single ‘Tieduprightnow’ has comfortably exceeded it on streaming platforms: on Spotify alone, it has amassed 258million spins and counting.
“It’s a really strange thing, measuring success – it’s so easy to get trapped in the rat race of it all,” Crommelin says. “But on the other hand, you just have to focus on doing what interests you. I think we’re realising now that success is actually [about] committing to an everyday practice of forgetting about it.” Hetherington nods in agreement: “There’s always gonna be a bigger show [to play], but that’s just not what matters.”
Stay tuned to NME.com/C25 for more on the return of the iconic mixtape