How the Oasis Reunion Became the Feel-Good Event of the Year

My favorite moment from the Oasis show wasn’t watching them sing “Wonderwall” or “Champagne Supernova.” It wasn’t the fireworks at the end of the night or Liam Gallagher’s growling banter. My favorite moment of the night — the first of two concerts at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey — took place outside a Carvel’s stand on the first-level concourse, where I watched two passing men point at each other’s chests and hug tight. Why the embrace? Because they had the same 1998 Oasis tour T-shirt on. 

“Original?” said one 

“You bet!” said the other.

Beyond being the tour of the summer, these Gallagher brothers shows, by all reports, have been surprising in their positivity. “There are New Jersey vibes in the arena!” said Liam when he first got to the microphone. “There are Oasis vibes in the arena!” Who would’ve guessed Jersey vibes and Oasis vibes would be so … cuddly and buoyant?

A few years ago, the event even taking place seemed unlikely. The Gallagher brothers have spent the better part of the past 15 years pelting each other with insults. Liam would tweet photos of Noel with the caption “potato,” and Noel would characterize Liam as useless, expendable, difficult, ungrateful, and more. My favorite burn from this feud — maybe any feud, actually — is Noel describing Liam as so frustrated and helpless that he was like “a man with a fork in a world made of soup.”

Truly a top-tier insult — but depressing. For people who cared, the Gallagher situation was part of the broken timeline we find ourselves in: a moron for a president, aluminum in our deodorant, and one of the coolest bands in the world not on tour because two brothers couldn’t stop hitting each other in the back seat. 

And then, suddenly, that last thing got fixed. 

Oasis announced they were going on the road. Like tens of thousands of others, I secured tickets, planned out how to get to the Jersey swamps from New York City, and tried to not get too excited, even though rapturous footage from their U.K. leg was showing up on Instagram. “There’s a chance,” said a friend of mine, “that they never make it to the stage.”

There may be — as my fellow concertgoer Sloane Crosley guessed — separate greenrooms, but when they come on holding hands, it feels like everyone is thinking the same thing: “Oh, my god, it’s happening.” You don’t have to just think it, either. You can shriek it, like the man in front of me did. 

There is a sense of occasion to this. The walk to the stadium through the vast expanse of parking lot feels like the walk to Wembley from the tube. There’s tailgating and unauthorized merch and people in bucket hats. There’s Man City colors and Oasis Adidas jerseys that were gone from nearly every merch stand before Cage the Elephant had finished their opening set. A religious experience, if the religion was “football hooligan.”

And Oasis sounds great, by the way. Liam’s voice sounded like it did on the albums, like he still sounds in your headphones, like you remember from Oasis being background music at the first house parties you got drunk in. And they play mostly the hits, mostly pre-1996 stuff, mostly sing-along-friendly stuff. An unexpected highlight is “Half the World Away,” a theme song to a British sitcom that didn’t chart in the United States, but whose chorus is enthusiastically echoed by the crowd when the band leaves room for them.

And beyond getting to witness the concert, you got to witness people for whom this was long-awaited: the guy in front of me was a Brit in his sixties; I didn’t get his name when he shouted it into my ear, but I’ll call him Terry. When he first saw Oasis, he told me, he had just met his wife, and his children existed only in his imagination. Now, he was standing next to that wife and a daughter — who works for Gotham FC, the tristate area’s National Women’s Soccer League team — drunk on Heineken and Britpop and the time machine he found himself in. “I think,” Terry said, close to tears, “this might be the best night of my life.”

You get the sense from the production — intentional, but surprisingly spare outside of ear-busting sound and a closing fireworks show — that these Oasis concerts seem to know exactly what they are: a collective exercise in nostalgia, without the sad patina of has-beenship. The attraction is the boys back together — and you being there, getting to roar the songs along with them. “You may have been wondering what it’s like to sing this along with 60 or 70,000 Oasis fans. You’re about to find out,” said Noel, introducing “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” I had actually never wondered that, but I really enjoyed getting to do it when the moment came. 

Noel, almost entirely tight-lipped through the first half of the show, mostly leaving the posturing to his younger brother, seemed genuinely emotional. “Nobody has fans like these,” he said. “Nobody.”

It’s obviously not unusual for people to sing along with a concert, especially in a stadium, but the lack of self-consciousness was noteworthy. These two Mancunians — especially Liam — are nearly characterized by the presentation of coudn’t-give-a-fuckness. But you don’t squash a Cain-and-Abel feud, sell a million tickets in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Friends, and design endless amounts of custom merchandise on a lark. You don’t pay $40 for parking on a lark. You don’t drive to New Jersey for fun. You do it because you want to, and because you’re a decade past pretending you don’t.

Oasis in 1996 felt subversive in its naked desire to be rock stars. Oasis in 2025 is subversive in understanding that it’s a bit silly to want that, but utterly nonjudgmental about the time when you did. At these concerts, as people scream — scream — along to “Cigarettes and Alcohol” with 50,000 others, and a few folks Google the lyrics, you can’t pretend you don’t care. Cynicism is for the irony-soaked, the terminally online, and the reason this tour is a “must experience” is simple: For a few hours in a stadium, as you’re bellowing your lungs out to “Supersonic” and other hits, you’re so glad that you’re not trapped in 2025, that it’s possible to go back in time. 

There are Jersey vibes in the arena! There are Oasis vibes in the arena! 

Alex Edelman is a Tony- and Emmy Award-winning actor, writer, and comedian. He is currently on tour, and writes for — and stars in — The Paper, a spinoff of The Office, now streaming on Peacock.