Ash complete Bittersweet Blue thirty years on

Ash released Bittersweet Blue on 16 September 2026. The song was written before their 1996 debut album 1977, was performed live as early as 1995, and has only now been finished and issued as a seven-inch. Rick McMurray described it as “30 years in the making”.

The single sits inside the wider 30th-anniversary campaign for 1977. An expanded edition of the album is due on 16 October 2026 on double LP, double CD and digital formats. Alongside Bittersweet Blue it carries 2026 mixes of Oh Yeah and Girl From Mars, an acoustic reading of Gone The Dream, and a live disc. The package is the first new material tied to the anniversary.

Downpatrick beginnings and the record that stuck

Ash formed in Downpatrick, County Down in 1992 as a three-piece of vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray. They issued the mini-album Trailer and then the full-length 1977 in 1996, the record that fixed their place in British and Irish guitar music and was later named among the 500 greatest albums of all time. After that breakthrough the band brought in Charlotte Hatherley on guitar and vocals and released Nu-Clear Sounds in 1998. Having emerged from near-bankruptcy, they returned with Free All Angels in 2001 and a string of successful singles.

The years since have not been a museum piece. Race the Night arrived in 2023, followed by an expanded edition the next year, then Ad Astra in 2025 and further singles including Jump in the Line and Keep Dreaming. Bittersweet Blue therefore bridges two points on the same line: a song from the earliest writing sessions, heard on stage three decades ago, now completed and set among the anniversary extras rather than left as a footnote. McMurray’s hope that the wait has been worth it frames the seven-inch as finished business from the debut, not a vault clear-out.

Girl From Mars and Oh Yeah, both given fresh 2026 mixes on the reissue, remain the most immediate points of contact for many listeners who first met the band through those singles. Placing new and revisited versions of that material beside a long-lost contemporary track underlines how tightly the anniversary is built around the original album’s world rather than a general career overview.

1977 on the road

The band are touring the album from September 2026, opening with dates across Australia, New Zealand and Asia before moving through Europe and the UK and Ireland in November and December. The run ends at London’s Roundhouse on 17 December. Remaining dates include shows at Dublin’s Olympia on 9 December and Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 10 December.

For a Northern Irish band whose breakthrough still defines the first chapter of their catalogue, the combination of a completed early song, a full expanded reissue and a dedicated tour gives the thirtieth year of 1977 a clear shape. The October release date and the December homecoming shows are the next fixed points. What further extras or set-list choices emerge once the reissue is out remains to be seen, but the core of the campaign—the single, the double-disc set and the dates still ahead—is already in place.