After a crowd of nearly 90,000 finished singing Don’t Look Back in Anger, Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher had a question.
“Are we dating?” he asked fans at the Rose Bowl, a stadium just outside Los Angeles, last Sunday night. “America, Oasis, the new hot couple, yeah?”
If the Gallagher brothers and the United States are going steady, it comes after three decades of a turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship. But as the band finished the US leg of their long-awaited reunion tour last weekend, it was clear: Oasis has finally taken over America.
In the days leading up to the two sold-out shows, it felt like the entire city was obsessed. Coffee shops and bars were full of people in Oasis T-shirts, bucket hats and little round sunglasses. On social media feeds, there was an abundance of memes about newly minted Anglophiles and joke T-shirts saying “I made it home from Oasis at the Rose Bowl.” A headline in Variety read: “How Oasis turned LA into glorious Britannia for a weekend.”
That all might come as a surprise to those who were in the US in the 1990s. Yes, everyone knows Wonderwall, and the band has sold 7 million albums here. But by comparison, Nirvana has sold more than 27 million in the US; even Gin Blossoms have sold 10 million, and you probably need a second to remember who they are.
“I had a feeling they’d never take to us,” Liam later said of the US. It was a matter of contrast, as the New York Times pointed out: they had a top-10 song and No 2 album, but it was nothing like the legendary stature they achieved at home. In the pre-2025 US, it was easy to perceive Oasis as part of a parade of 90s rockers with a few big hits.
But in 2025, things have been very different. The US tour, with stadium dates in the Chicago, New York and LA areas, sold out in an hour. Huge billboards showcased Liam and Noel’s faces. There were pop-up exhibitions and pre-show parties. The LA shows drew a flock of celebrities, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Kristen Stewart to Doug Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris. Even Mark Zuckerberg, whose circuitry was just coming online in the 90s, was there.
And these fans were not just there for Wonderwall; nor were many of them even born when the band took off. On Sunday, the last night of the US tour, energy was pulsing through the Rose Bowl as the crowd formed long lines in the field around the stadium, slowly filing in. The queues for merchandise – $50 T-shirts and $25 posters – snaked so far beyond the barriers that it was difficult to tell where one line ended and the next began. But it was unclear why anyone would need the gear, given that nearly everyone seemed to be wearing it already.
The mood in the stands was jubilant, as strangers chatted to each other before erupting into cheers at the sight of the Gallaghers walking onstage. For the next two hours, the crowd was on their feet, singing at the top of their lungs and dancing in front of their seats. The night before, Noel had dedicated a song to a woman in the crowd who had spent the whole night in tears; given the feeling in the stadium, it was easy to see why. And that sense of community was not limited to LA. “Best concert I’ve been to EVER. I’m 59, have seen a lot of shows,and [sic] I was completely blown away,” wrote one fan on Reddit of the Chicago show. “The crowd … people I’ve never met from Texas to Wisconsin where I was standing… were like brothers. They made an unforgettable concert a religious experience.”
But LA – or Pasadena, or wherever the fuck we were, to paraphrase Liam – was, in many ways, an appropriate place to end the reunion tour. It’s the city where the band performed a notoriously disastrous, drug-fueled concert in 1994. A roadie reportedly put the wrong setlist in front of some members, so that “they were all playing different songs at the same time,” Jason Rhodes, a guitar tech, told Rolling Stone. In the aftermath, Noel left town and headed north to San Francisco to see Melissa Lim, a woman he had met earlier in the tour. “I took him in, fed him and tried to calm him down. He wanted to break up the band,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016. She helped convince him not to quit – the subject of the song Talk Tonight, which Oasis played last weekend. This time, Lim herself was in attendance: “30 years and worth the wait,” she posted on Instagram.
But what happened over those 30 years that transformed the American perception of Oasis from merely a successful band into genuine rock icons? The music writer Lizzy Goodman points to the Gallagher brothers’ unfiltered, brash personas – a balm for gen Zers who “have grown up in a world where everyone everywhere is afraid of saying or posting or retweeting the wrong thing”. Meanwhile, the passage of time has proven that the songs are timeless, and the band is a reminder of “a more innocent, obnoxious, fun time, when the world didn’t feel so trapped in fear”. That might explain the sense of overflowing joy at the Rose Bowl last weekend: at a time when every day seems to bring a new horror and more brutal division, it offered a rare chance to embrace camaraderie.
The US tour began with something akin to a threat from the band: “America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”
Maybe we finally have.
