Oasis rock MetLife Stadium in New Jersey as reunion tour begins in US

Is this what it's like to participate in the tying of cosmic loose ends? Photo / Big Brother Recordings

So what’s this Oasis reunion really all about? Pomp. Circumstance. Second chances. Picking up where we left off. Nostalgic comfort. Ego maintenance. Fraternal reconciliation, maybe. Cashflow, definitely. A confusingly disproportionate amount of fame generated by four extraordinary songs. Loud thrills with strangers in the dark. Laughter. Belonging. Communion across generations X-Y-Z. Karaoke night for humanity. The re-mystification of rock’n’roll.

And if you managed to soak up any of these ideas in the high-decibel churn at MetLife Stadium on Sunday night (local time) – where the increasingly beloved Brit-pop group was ramping up the American leg of its global reunion tour – you hopefully felt a sensation of relief. Turns out, singing Wonderwall at the top of your lungs inside a football stadium crammed with hype and serotonin is to personally participate in the tying of cosmic loose ends.

Oasis hadn’t necessarily left the world hanging when the band fell apart back in 2009 (was it really that recently?). But as the greater reunion reflex continues its sweep across every last precinct of rock music, forecasters have been forecasting when the band’s notoriously antagonistic founding brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, might finally forgive, forget and cash in. Here we are.

Meantime, Oasis songs have remained the suffusive, omnipresent sound-stuff of our everyday American lives. Don’t Look Back in Anger promises to crush eternally at karaoke bars and wedding receptions; and whenever some kid strums an acoustic guitar on a college quad, as if contractually bound by the hidden laws of the universe, it’s always Wonderwall. The Gallaghers have been loitering in our digital lives, too – frequently as memes that have invited us to laugh along with their ridiculous anger. One viral clip finds Liam backstage at some concert, whinging about how “in the ’90s” he had an entire squadron of lackeys to brew his afternoon tea: “And they wonder why there’s no real rock’n’roll stars around.”

These were real rock’n’roll stars onstage on Sunday night, though, reanimated and roaring, making it easier to imagine the experience of a child vacationing in Jurassic Park. Obviously, the brothers are older now – Noel is 58, Liam is 52 – but they seemed proud, poised, totally present, totally alert, their respective haircuts looking fabulous all the while. Joined by original Oasis guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, one-time replacement guitarist Gem Archer, bassist Andy Bell of Ride and drummer Joey Waronker, the Gallaghers didn’t do much to sell their reconciliation narrative, simply beginning the set with a friendly chest bump and closing it with a congratulatory back-slappy embrace. During the 23 songs they unfurled in between, their most significant interactions manifested in familial harmony – searing on Morning Glory, soaring on Slide Away, a special kind of music that siblings can make only with each other.

A fan holds up an Oasis banner at MetLife Stadium. Photo / Big Brother Recordings

And that has to be the very thing that makes all of these melodically nifty, relentlessly mid-tempo Oasis songs actually feel exciting: the brothers treating their fragile chemistry with such rough hands. Noel is the Apollonian songwriter-lyricist (most of the time), and Liam is the Dionysian singer (most of the time), and together, they’ve crafted these easy-peasy sing-alongs, but with one catch: the guy at the mic is shooting them through his sinuses. Back in those storied ’90s, after grunge had so thoroughly demystified rock music with its disenchanting noisiness, the Oasis boys got hungry for the glory and grandeur of yore – but to revive the British invasion, they had to pass through UK punk in the rock’n’roll time tube, eventually spilling back out into the popular consciousness sounding like the nettled Beatles.

Onstage, the band’s defiant posture was a physical thing – in that Liam Gallagher has one of the best slouches that rock’n’roll will ever know. Basking in its presence could make you feel like the Greek sculptor who figured out contrapposto in the fifth century BC. The front man spent nearly all of the show with his hands tucked behind his back, bending forward to the microphone with a slight hunch, the same way a shy cartoon leans in for a kiss.

But once those lyrics began flying out of his face, he transformed into a schoolyard tough, stooping down an inch or three to deliver his musical taunts, daring some diminutive rival to punch him in the teeth. Telegraphing menace and politesse, he made clear that he has long known how to carry the meaning of Oasis in the curve of his spine.

So what could possibly make Liam Gallagher angry in 2025? In song, he sounded youthful in his orneriness, but his banter felt almost involuntarily combative, including a boast comparing the capaciousness of MetLife Stadium to his house, plus the recounting of a decades-old grudge with some American record industry suits who once insisted Oasis “play the game”. At the opulent rock reunion, aren’t we all playing the game?

It was during the fifth-best Oasis song, Supersonic, when he sang, “No one’s gonna tell you what I’m on about” that the band’s vague antagonism felt even blurrier than it did three decades ago. The anger in an Oasis song seems like proof that we – as a society perpetually blinkered by capitalism – still don’t know exactly what we’re mad about.

Moments later, tah-dah, the band launched into Don’t Look Back in Anger. Then Wonderwall. Then a curtain-closing Champagne Supernova. Their set list – which has unspooled identically on every stop of this tour – wasn’t a thing of peaks and valleys so much as an exponential curve upward, upward, upward, into this ecstatic epiphany of vowels.

The avalanching “OHHHH” that comes before “Sally can wait” in Don’t Look Back in Anger. The “AYYYYY” of “maybe” and “me” in Wonderwall. The “YIYYYY” (plus, the so-called “intrusive R”) of that “champagne supernoverr in the skyiyyy”. Maybe we weren’t singing along so much as joining Oasis in their sound-making, creating new meanings outside the edges of the language we speak.

Then again, sometimes, if you stare at the wallpaper long enough, you can start to feel like you’re code-breaking the secrets of life – which is why one particularly zero-calorie Oasis lyric felt especially profound once the show was over. It was the hook of their lovers’ invincibility pledge, Live Forever, in which these mortal brothers promise that we’re all going to do exactly that. No matter when you first encountered this song in your own life, you’re closer today to finding out that it can’t be true. But if you were fortunate enough to sing it alongside tens of thousands of strangers in the bittersweet cool of a late summer night in 2025, for a few fleeting minutes, you had no choice but to believe it completely.

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