Iconic indie rock act Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their landmark self-titled debut album with an epic world tour. Kicking off their global headline run in North America in March 2025, the tour will also include a run of European dates in September, before bringing the tour down under for a run in Australia & New Zealand in November 2025.
Few bands have burst quite so brilliantly onto the scene as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Fewer still can say their debut defined a scene, a time, and marked a paradigm shift in the music industry. But Clap Your Hands Say Yeah managed all this and more; no wonder the band’s self-titled first album is still considered one of the finest and most influential independent releases of the 2000s.
A heady blend of leftfield pop and melodic, exuberant indie rock, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah repurposed a number of classic musical references for a new generation of music fans. Fun-loving and quirky, the band – formed around the enigmatic singer-songwriter Alec Ounsworth – achieved that rare alchemy, synthesizing a dizzying array of styles and influences into something wholly their own. And that something was utterly glorious, full of buzzing synths, trebly guitars, bustling drums, and Ounsworth’s lilting, wailing vocals. The record’s raw, ramshackle sound was an integral part of its appeal; time has merely magnified that charm. In “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth” and “Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood” Ounsworth wrote two of the most uplifting, celebratory tracks of this millennium, obvious highlights on an album of consistent excellence and one rightly lauded for re-writing the rules of what indie bands could be.
The 20th anniversary of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will further be commemorated with a special new reissue, arriving on limited edition vinyl LP early next year on the band’s own label via Secretly Distribution, the defiantly independent home of Alec Ounsworth’s music for over two decades. The celebration officially gets underway with the premiere of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s original 2004 version of the fan favourite, “Heavy Metal”. The newly remixed and mastered track was recently discovered among the original project files and captures what Clap Your Hands Say Yeah founder and frontman Alec Ounsworth calls “a special moment in time – a young group of guys all piling into one hotel room to wake up and go to a real studio (!) to try and come up with something special just for the fun of it.”
