Hope Of The States share seething new single ‘Footage/Steamtrain’ and announce winter 2025 UK tour

Hope Of The States have shared their seething new single ‘Footage/Steamtrain’ and announce winter 2025 UK tour.

• READ MORE: Hope Of The States on their return: “It’s loud, it’s messy, it has all that heart in it”

The Chichester post-rock band announced their huge comeback after 18 years of inactivity last July, after breaking up in 2006.

They revealed a remastered vinyl reissue of their debut album would be released soon, alongside news of a tour and new music.

Now, the band have released a fresh new single called ‘Footage/Steamtrain’. The song is split into two parts; the front half is a rollicking, snarling passage, while the song finishes on a soaring, elegant string section waiting on a “steamtrain up to heaven / a train that never came”. 

Frontman Sam Herlihy also shared news of an October UK tour. Hope Of The States will visit Bristol’s Strange Brew (14) and London’s Islington Assembly Hall (15), closing out their tour with a show at Manchester’s Gorilla (16). “Come and say hello and watch me tap dance/drink heavily”, he wrote on X/Twitter.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow (July 16) at 10am – get your tickets here.

The song called Footage/Steamtrain is now released upon all yer damn streaming oilrigs.

We are also
playing three shows in October. Bristol 14th, London 15th Manchester 16th.

The tickets are on sale tomorrow at 10am.

Come and say hello and watch me tap dance/drink heavily.

— Sam Of Herlihy (@samuelherlihy) July 15, 2025

We spoke to Hope Of The States upon the announcement of their comeback, where they spoke to us about the state of their new music.

“We’re in a rehearsal room and have been smashing it together,” Herlihy told us. “It’s all written and we’re going to go and record with Jolyon Thomas, who is the son of Ken Thomas who made our two records with. He was an absolute hero and I loved him dearly. He was an incredible, artistic, intimidating dude, but sadly he passed away last year. We first met Jolyon when we first met Ken when he was some snotty 16-year-old kid, and now he’s snotty whatever-year-old producer who makes records with U2.

“If the songs weren’t good, then I wouldn’t do this,” he continued. “As fun as it would be to to play the shows and give something back to fans would be lovely, it wouldn’t be enough to just play the old stuff. I genuinely believe that it’s as good if not better than the old stuff.”

So far, Hope Of The States shared their visceral 11-minute comeback song ‘Long Waits In A & E’ last November, and completed a tour the following December.

The band were named as a cult post-rock band in the early ’00s after dropping two acclaimed albums: 2004’s ‘The Lost Riots‘ and ‘Left’ from 2006. The band later split a few months after the release of their second record at Reading & Leeds festival that summer, saying at the time that they felt “cursed” by bad luck. They had earlier lost their guitarist Jimmi Lawrence to suicide in early 2004.

More music from Hope Of The States is “in the pipeline”.

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