Elbow: 2026

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Elbow's return to North America in the autumn of 2025 — a tour documented with joy, gratitude, and a lot of humor on the band's Instagram — was their first visit to this side of the world since 2017, a long-overdue trip that came on the heels of their 2024 album, Audio Vertigo, and their 2025 EP, Audio Vertigo Echo.

Audio Vertigo is a groove-laced blast of album, and a kind of reset for singer and lyricist Guy Garvey, keyboardist (and producer) Craig Potter, guitarist Mark Potter, bassist Pete Turner, and drummer Alex Reeves following 2021's more contemplative, lockdown-era Flying Dream 1. 

Elbow has been touring with Cat Parker and Fiona Brice on strings and Sarah Field and Carol Jarvis on brass (all four are backing vocalists too), and the nine musicians played a gorgeous trifecta for this FUV Live session, songs that embraced three albums: "Her to the Earth" (Audio Vertigo), "The Seldom Seen Kid" (Flying Dream 1) and "Magnificent (She Says)" (Little Fictions).

It was also the full band's first return to FUV since 2011 — and having them back in the studio was a very happy experience of stories, brotherly band camaraderie and laughter.

In our interview, Garvey spoke tenderly of the late Manchester musician Bryan Glancy, the band's beloved friend, who passed away nearly 20 years ago. Like a guardian angel, Glancy remains a presence in Elbow's canon, as in Garvey's ongoing dialogue with him in the exquisite "The Seldom Seen Kid."

Elbow also touched on their pandemic experience in the making of Flying Dream 1 ("We were very lucky in lockdown to be musicians and to be able to do what we do," said Turner) as well as their deep appreciation of being a not-as-famous band in the States, as opposed to their arena-level status in the UK, affording them the pleasure to play more intimate venues. As Garvey explained, their return to New York and Brooklyn Steel in September was especially sweet.

"It's a tough city to live in, New York," he said. "[The city] is held together by goodwill and by cooperation and that spirit sings out in the crowd when you play them music."

[Recorded: 9/30/25. Engineered by Jim O'Hara with Erin Merriman, Nadia Garriga, and Thomas Lapus. Produced by Meghan Suma. Videographers: Gina Slavin, Mia Vilke, Alena Godas, and Bella Lipayon.]