Fifteen years after emerging from Menangle with ‘Lay It Down’, The Rubens are preparing to cover a considerable amount of Australian ground again, announcing an extensive national tour alongside their sixth studio album Group Therapy and new single ‘Love Me America’.
The tour will reach capital cities, regional centres and suburban venues across the country, with further dates still to be announced. Rather than concentrating the run around the usual metropolitan stops, the band are continuing a relationship with regional Australia that stretches back to their early appearances following their triple j Unearthed breakthrough.
The Rubens have also deliberately lowered ticket prices for the tour, citing the cost-of-living pressures currently facing audiences.
Joining them on the road will be SELVE, the alt-rock outfit fronted by Jabirr Jabirr musician Loki Liddle, who will appear at all shows outside Western Australia.
The tour arrives alongside Group Therapy, the band’s sixth album, and its latest single ‘Love Me America’, a song that looks back at The Rubens’ complicated and enduring relationship with the United States.
Opening with a wall of guitars before moving through quieter acoustic passages, ‘Love Me America’ draws directly from the band’s earliest encounters with the American music industry. Major-label courtship, expensive steak dinners and LA Kings games offered an intoxicating glimpse of what their future might look like, even if the American dream that followed did not unfold quite as they initially imagined.
“We naively ventured to New York to make our first record,” says singer Sam Margin. “It was terrifying, exciting, a blur and our introduction to a country that has fascinated us ever since.”
“‘Love Me America’ is a love song to America, but not a simple one. It’s about the scale of its promise, the thrill of chasing something big, and the strange desire to belong somewhere that can still feel just beyond your reach. A love song with all the baggage that comes along with it.”
Formed in Menangle in 2011 by brothers Zaac, Sam and Elliott Margin alongside Scott Baldwin and William Zeglis, The Rubens uploaded debut single ‘Lay It Down’ to triple j Unearthed before winning the Unearthed Homebake competition that same year.
Their self-titled debut followed in 2012, eventually earning Platinum certification and producing Hottest 100 entries ‘My Gun’ and ‘The Best We Got’. But it was second album Hoops that pushed the band into another league.
Released in 2015, Hoops reached number two on the ARIA Albums Chart, while its title track topped triple j’s Hottest 100 and went on to surpass 100 million streams. The song has since become one of the defining Australian alternative singles of its period.
The years since have brought little indication of The Rubens settling into a predictable rhythm. LO LA RU arrived in 2018, followed by chart-topping fourth album 0202 in 2021 and SODA, which the band subsequently took across regional Australia on a 28-date tour in 2024, playing to more than 30,000 fans.
Their catalogue now exceeds 350 million streams, while their touring history includes support slots with Bruce Springsteen, The Black Keys and P!NK, the latter putting The Rubens in front of approximately half a million people across Australia and New Zealand.
Recent singles ‘Goanna’ and ‘Are You Getting High’ have pointed towards another phase, with ‘Love Me America’ now providing a further glimpse of what awaits on Group Therapy.
But the scale of the accompanying tour may be just as important as the record itself. At a time when extensive regional touring has become increasingly difficult for Australian artists, The Rubens are deliberately heading beyond the capital-city circuit and keeping ticket prices in mind while doing it.
Fifteen years after their first triple j breakthrough, Group Therapy finds The Rubens looking back at some of the promises and ambitions that accompanied their beginnings. The tour, meanwhile, takes them back to what has remained constant throughout it all: getting in a van, heading around the country and playing the songs to people in the room.
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