Basement On ‘WIRED’ And Needing To Meet Ed Sheeran

Alternative rock British favourites, Basement have released their first album in eight years after a reunion with their original label, Run For Cover Records. WIRED is Basement’s most decisive artistic statement yet, it was forged through a journey of monumental highs and lows and even talks of calling it a day. Out of that came the ‘best version of the band that we’ve ever had’.

Guitarists Ronan Crix and Alex Henery speak to Hi Fi Way in a hotel room in Brighton, England. It’s the week of the album release and they’re back for another WIRED launch show. They were just in LA launching the album where Crix and Henery were airbrushing t-shirts, meeting fans and playing new songs live. It’s been a larger than life week topped off with a billboard in California, a ‘dream bucket list’ moment.

‘We’d taken a break in 2019 just before Covid and said we were going to take a year off,’ Henery explains.

‘COVID extended that pretty heavily. The conversation of writing and being creative again through the means of the band probably started in 2022-2023. [That’s] when we started getting together as a band and writing demos and just seeing what was there musically for us. Probably half and half of that was COVID time versus us being together.’

‘But writing consciously for a new record, I guess would have happened in around the sort of 2022-2023 era,’ Crix adds.

‘There wasn’t really talk of a new record until a little bit later we thought about doing maybe an EP or something like this. Then eventually that kind of became more. The more songs we wrote the more sense it made to just release a full length again. That was really exciting. We were like ‘woah we actually have, like another album in us,’ which is great. We have more than enough material for an album.’

Since the band formed in Ipswich, Suffolk in 2009 it’s been the same five members. They’ve been able to stick together and keep making records and performing live. There was a brief hiatus for the band in 2012 but that was short lived and they got back together in 2014. Their biggest down period was actually from 2019 – 2024 where they only performed one live show.

‘Yeah, for me, it was kind of tough,’ Henery confesses.

‘We weathered a lot of highs and lows, but that was probably a pretty intense low point. COVID for a lot of people universally across the globe was really, really tough to navigate. Even more so when you can’t do the thing you love, which is being with your friends, writing music, touring. It felt like, oh, that’s never coming back. Then off the back of the record we’d just done [Beside Myself] – things didn’t go exactly how we wanted. There’s some level of, ‘I wish this had happened. I wish we’d done this.’

‘At one point I thought it would just be easier to call it a day, let it go, because COVID just felt like it destroyed touring or whatever it looked like to be in a band. But thankfully it didn’t go that route.

‘We actually ended up being able to reconnect in person together and started being creative again,’ Henery continues.

‘Out of that, I feel like we’ve found the best version of the band that we’ve ever had – one that’s the most confident and creative. So I’m really excited that we’ve been able to weather the storm.’

‘I’m very glad that time happened, because I feel like we genuinely needed a break of a certain amount of time,’ Crix explains.

‘Now we have the clarity of being like, ‘Ok, we know how we want to operate.’ We’ve seen how it can be when we’re not together at all, and we’ve seen what it is like when we’re doing stuff we’re not purely comfortable with.

‘So let’s do us now. Let’s actually do this band exactly how it should be done – we write together, we play together, we do it ourselves. We have control, and it feels awesome. Really grateful to be able to come back and have this freedom to operate how we want to operate. I feel like the break was tough but necessary, honestly.’

Australian fans have been absolutely spoiled by Basement. The band visited twice in a one year period, the first time in March 2025 – off of the back of New Bloom Festival for headline shows around the country – and then the band returned to support Turnstile across new years 2026 in January. They even filmed the music video for Broken By Design in New South Wales on their recent tour. They love it so much that they are already planning their next trip to Australia to perform new songs off of WIRED.

‘Maybe early next year,’ Henery reveals.

‘We love going to Australia. I really felt like on the last tour even with just supporting Turnstile that people were very receptive to us again. We’ve been going there a long time, it really does feel like a second home. To feel that love and to feel that support, we teased some of the songs and showed people some songs on that tour and made a little video of it. The response has always just been really solid from Australians. Making [Broken By Design music video] is another thing and doing stuff with triple j, the connections run really deep there. So we’ve always felt really supported. So I’m really excited to go back and do a headliner.’

This Adelaide based interviewer grew up in the same town as Basement, Ipswich in Suffolk, England. After some small talk about Ipswich and working out Crix and this writer went to the same high school, the talk turns to the admittedly slightly larger star from Ipswich, Ed Sheeran. Compared to Sheeran – who is a minority shareholder in Ipswich Town football club and still lives in the area – Basement are not as celebrated as a hometown success story.

‘We haven’t been there in such a long time, we haven’t played a show anywhere really near there for ages,’ Crix recalls.

‘We’re like ‘should we play Ipswich again?’ We keep thinking about it. Would people come? Do they know that we are who we are? I think it’d be awesome to play – if it was possible – a bigger show in Ipswich. It would be incredibly gratifying, it would be awesome.’

‘I’m putting it out there, Ed Sheeran, we need to connect somehow,’ Henery adds.

‘I remember him playing the Steamboat Tavern [comparable to the Hotel Metro in Adelaide] and me not really getting it, thinking, ‘Oh, whatever, who is this kid doing this thing?’ Now I’m like, you know what? I have a lot of respect for him because he’s always put on for Ipswich – investing in HOAX the skate shop, the football team, doing events. It’s been really cool to see and the fact that he still lives there… bro, we need to say what’s up at least once.’

‘We’re probably related!’ Crix quips and they both laugh.

Interview By Thomas Jackson

WIRED is out now. Stream HERE By HERE