As The Maccabees celebrate the 10th anniversary of their last album ‘Marks To Prove It’, guitarist Felix White caught up with NME to reflect on that record and tell us about the band’s plans for new music and more gigs in 2026.
Last week, the reunited indie veterans announced details of a series of summer shows to take place in July 2026, including a headline slot at Truck Festival, plus dates in London, Cornwall, Bristol, Brighton and Leeds.
The new dates follow The Maccabees returning to the stage this summer for their first gigs since the band split in 2017. After kicking off that run with a charity gig at London’s The Dome, they played a Park headline slot at Glastonbury Festival, held a series of smaller headline gigs across Europe, the UK and Ireland, and capped things off with a one-day takeover of All Points East.
“Everyone was just a bit stunned at how good it felt,” White told NME of this summer’s reunion. “It was almost like the music that we’d made when we were younger needed to sit and wait and not be fiddled with for so long. And so when we came and did it as older people, there was something more completed about it than when we were younger.”
The guitarist continued to explain that, now, The Maccabees’ original run felt “like it happened to a completely other person, especially as the chunk of time that we had away from each other felt like we were all becoming different people”.
One thing that remained the same, though, was how White experienced the gigs. “When we were younger, [I had this] perception of time changing – it feels like time really slowed down,” he said. “Even though things are happening very fast, it all stretches. I really had that [this year], especially at All Points East. You’re playing, and everything’s happening really fast, but you have these moments to sit inside it and think, ‘Oh my god, I’m here, and this is wild’.”
The band’s return next summer will kick off at London’s Alexandra Palace Park – an almost-mirroring of their final shows in 2017, which ended indoors at Alexandra Palace. “It was talked about a bit to play the indoor Ally Pally, but it almost felt a bit like sacrilege,” White said.
“We felt like you couldn’t really go back in and do anything that compared to the feeling of that, but the idea of going outside – those shows are so great, because when you look out, you can see over London. It would be cool if people that had been at those last Maccabees shows eight or nine years ago were back at these ones [next year] and reflecting on who they were then and who they are now.”
The dates will also see the five-piece perform in Brighton for the first time in 11 years. The coastal city is where the band got their start, and their return will see them headline a gig on the beach. “When The Maccabees first happened, we were all in Brighton and we got this little ball of momentum and energy going where you play two or three times a week, and there was a period of time where we were just the band in Brighton that supported bands that came through,” White recalled, citing gigs opening for the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Maximo Park and The Strokes.
“There was a chunk of time where it felt like things were happening really quickly for us and there were lots of young people coming to the shows, and so obviously it’s always going to be a really special place to us. We got banned from playing Concorde 2 because kids were hanging off the top of things, and people still come up to me and say, ‘I was the one that got thrown off the stage’. We’ve lived our whole lives since then and to be doing those outdoor gigs were for really big, proper bands, so it’d be nice to go back in time and tell those people, ‘You’re going to be doing the beach’.”
The Maccabees have already confirmed that, unless they can come up with new material, these 2026 shows will be their last. “We’re talking about [writing new music],” White said. “These shows will be amazing if we don’t have new music, but then if something comes up, then it could be really wild. We haven’t done the time in the room [yet], but we’re talking about doing that.
“That’s the next testing of how robust this situation is going to be moving into that. We’re all nervous and a bit excited about what we could do there, but I guess we’ll wait and see. We’ve cleared some time at the start of next year, so we’ll see where we get to.”
White continued: “The treacherous but exciting thing is that there is no plan. No one really knows, and we’re just going to let it be whatever it is. So if it just happens that there is some special music that feels like the continuation of The Maccabees’ story, then we’ll do it.”
Reflecting on the band’s catalogue so far, White noted how little music they had made and released in their 15 years together, with only four albums to their name. “That speaks to how much everybody cared about it. Even though, at times, that was torturous when we were young, that has lasted in a good way. The music has really stood up because of that.
“I think The Maccabees is never going to be a thing where you go, ‘Oh, we got another record, another record, another record…’ because, for better or worse, everyone cares too much about it. If we can get together and really feel all the stuff when you’re playing a song together – even if you’re in a bad mood, you can’t help but smile really big and have all the clichés like hairs on the back of your neck [standing up]… if we can find that secret again, then that will be a really amazing thing.”
Performing older songs over this summer revealed some strange prophetic moments in the tracks to White, notably in the likes of ‘Marks To Prove It’ highlight ‘Kamakura’. “That will always be a really special song to me,” he said. “But singing the chorus, ‘Best friends forgive you / Best friends forget / You get old’, those things are very accidentally autobiographical about the band’s situation.
“It felt really emotional singing that because there was obviously a sense of exactly that happening on the stage, so these little lyrical moments on [‘Marks…’] really pierced through or just summed up the whole experience this year.”
‘Marks To Prove It’ was The Maccabees’ first album to hit Number One on the Official UK Albums Chart when it was released in July 2015. Today (November 28), it has been reissued on double-vinyl, 3CD and in digital versions, with a collection of B-sides, acoustic tracks, and radio sessions. The CD and digital versions also include their Glastonbury 2015 set in full, which featured a guest appearance from Jamie T.
When the reissue was announced, the band also gave a wide release to ‘Koya’, which was previously a B-side on an earlier vinyl release. “There were two or three songs which I think we feel like could have been singles, but we just completely lost patience with them or got in a tangle with,” White said. “‘Koya’ was a song that we put out recently for everyone, and then there’s a song called ‘Nimm’ and ‘The Truth’. I felt like, in a different universe, those could have been quite important Maccabees songs.”
He added: “In some ways, they do make you feel like it would be exciting to make [more] Maccabees music, because you’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve completely abandoned this and, actually, there’s loads of really special moments in this music that we just left and was always gonna be unheard’.”
Reflecting on ‘Marks To Prove It’ 10 years on – and with the band now back together – White nodded to how the record encapsulates their whole story in one. “It became a collection of all the different techniques that The Maccabees had made records with before,” he explained. “There’s a little bit of how we did [2012’s] ‘Given To The Wild’, which is a bit more cinematic, atmospheric. But we had gone back to playing in the room, playing quick.
“There’s some mad stuff that was coincidence. The last lyric on ‘Marks To Prove It’ is Land [singer Orlando Weeks] singing ‘Break it up to make it better’. That’s a clue, almost, when you’re thinking about yourself and the way you’ve behaved, and you realise five years later, ‘Oh, that was clearly what that was about’. You can’t tell at the time when you’re too in the fog.”
The Maccabees’ 10th anniversary reissue of ‘Marks To Prove It’ is out now. Their upcoming summer 2026 tour dates are below. Tickets are on sale now and available here.
The Maccabees’ 2026 tour dates are as follows:
JULY
9 – London, Alexandra Palace Park
11 – Cornwall, The Eden Sessions
23 – Bristol, Amphitheatre – Siren
24-26 – Abingdon, Truck Festival
25 – Brighton, On The Beach
31 – Leeds, Kirkstall Abbey