The 14 Best Ever WELSH Bands!

The Welsh love to sing. The Welsh nation, in the west of the UK, have in fact been well-regarded for their musical ability for centuries. The medieval epic songs, the famous vocal choirs, the musical lilt of their accents and the poetry of the Cymraeg language all tell us a tale of a national musical tradition.

It goes back to the age of King Arthur, and continues up through the millenia to right now: there have been tons of great Welsh bands, and this blog seeks to gather them all together!

Are you ready? Bwrw ein Blaen!

Why don’t I start with a band who once spent their record company advance on a used military tank? The Super Furry Animals were never a band to do things normally, and their eccentricity found its way onto each of their albums. As well as painting their tank blue and driving it around the countryside, they made furry monster suits (appropriately enough), and lead singer Gruff Rhys later embarked on a solo project where he travelled around America with a puppet version of his ancestor.

Never a dull moment, and that goes for their colourful, effervescent music too.

Are the Manics the most famous band ever to come from Wales? They’ve certainly stood the test of time, and morphed from angsty stadium-rockers through refined indie heroes and into sophisticated elder statesmen of the alternative.

Legends will always surround the Manics due to the disappearance of guitarist/lyricist Richey Edwards: it’ll always be part of the story, but it hasn’t overshadowed their music, or indeed come to define it. While the stylistic focus has changed over the decades, the band’s commitment to quality hasn’t, and in singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield, they have one of British music’s true unsung heroes.

For meat ‘n’ potatoes rock, you don’t get more dependable than The Stereophonics. From the mid 90s onwards, theirs has been a career of rocking solidly and solidly rocking. Everyone knows a few Sterephonics tunes, and they are still a major live proposition, which isn’t true of every band with 30 years’ worth of music. From early songs that focussed on local characters from small-town Wales, the Stereophonics then widened their subjective horizons. Was the early stuff the best? Maybe, buy Kelly Jones and the boys often hit a home run with their popular songwriting style.

Welsh metal direct from Bridgend, which seems to have been ripe with musicians! Formed around the nucleus of Matt Tuck and Michael Paget from the ashes of their former band ‘Jeff Killed John’, Bullet For My Valentine were early developers of what became metalcore. Competing with the big boys from the US, Bullet For My Valentine are a homegrown act who go the full distance with spiky axes, guitar harmonies and bone-crunching riffs in the classic thrash mould.

Though they still seem a relatively new band, Catfish and the Bottlemen actually won their Brit Award for Best Breakthrough band ten years ago! The Llandudno indie rockers are officially only two people - Ryan “Van” McCann and Benjo Blakeway (it’s not clear which one is the Catfish) - and they supplement their live show with additional players. Their bassist and drummer left in 2021, citing ‘intolerable behaviour’, with the bassist still returning to play sessions. The band’s newest album has been a while coming, and there have been gig cancellations in recent years - but their fanbase is massive and will surely be out in force when the Bottlemen return.

Big haired Welsh rockers The Alarm started out in 1977 as The Toilets, before rethinking their approach and renaming themselves in 1981. It was the punk years, after all! Frontman Mike Peters passed away last year, but until then, The Alarm were an active band. Rather like U2 - for whom they frequently opened - The Alarm were born in punk but moved into a more arena-friendly sound as the 80s drew on. Always triumphant through difficult times and health scares, The Alarm even wrote Wales’ anthemic theme tune to Euro 2020.

Classical soprano vocalist Charlotte Church has had quite the varied career! The Cardiff native got her big break as a tiny kid, singing to Andrew Lloyd Webber down the phone on live TV. Since then, she’s sold 10 million albums (!), hosted her own chat show on Channel 4 (where she sang along with every musical act invited to perform), had a go at a pop career,  and recently got ‘murdered’ on Celebrity Traitors. She now runs a nature/health retreat in Wales called The Dreaming.

One of the most unstoppable voices of the 1980s came from Neath in South Wales. Bonnie Tyler’s supersonic vocals carried megahits Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out For a Hero to the top of the charts, and they’ve continued to resonate ever since. The daughter of a coal miner, Tyler’s real name is Gaynor Hopkins!

In memory serves, Feeder started off as a hard rock band that were metal enough to feature in Kerrang, before Britpop moulded their sound into one for the masses. Their huge hit Buck Rogers is still played everywhere, even though it's been years since cars came with built-in CD players.

Genre-bending rockers Skindred are one of those bands who’ve plugged away and put in the work, rising steadily to the top of festival bills worldwide. The Newport natives are one of the few bands out there to successfully blend reggae with full-on metal, and have an audience that loves it! Eight albums in, fans are anticipating a new record in 2026.

Emo/post-hardcore leaders Funeral For a Friend hail from Bridgend in South Wales. Their debut record, Casually Dressed and Deep in Conversation, put them on the map instantly, and summed up a whole scene whilst it did so. A split in 2016 brought the dream to a temporary end, but after a few tentative return performances, the band made a proper comeback in 2023, albeit without original vocalist Matt David-Kreye.

Tom the Jones is obviously a bit of a legend. Anybody who refers to their own singing as ‘The Voice’, is either impressively bold or a complete nightmare, but I reckon Tom’s the former. He has a ton of famous tunes, and then another ton on top of them when you actually go looking. Hit after hit from multiple eras, including a brief renaissance in the late 90s as a sort of Britpop trophy on the Reload album. ‘The Voice’ doesn’t get heard much live these days, but we can always hope.

Electronic rocker Jayce Lewis first found fame across in Asia before gaining traction in his native UK. A musical jack-of-all-talents, Lewis has an industrial pop sci-fi sound that brings ‘the heavy’ via a mixture of synths and twin bass guitars. He’s been quiet for a while in his Bridgend studio, but I suspect he’s busy working on his next major statement.

Notorious rap band Goldie Lookin Chain may be something of a comedy proposition, but it doesn’t mean that their music isn’t great to listen to! The tracksuits, the rhymes flying out in Welsh accents, the subject matter that is so daft you’ll never forget it…it may not have aged well in some cases, but their music is a laugh for sure. There’s a large dose of satire involved in what they do, and they’ve managed to make a go of it for 25 years now, so there’s definitely an audience there!

Forgive the pun there, but it seems pretty obvious that Wales is positively vibrating with great music! For such a diminuitively-sized country, they (like Scotland and Ireland) punch way above their weight in terms of delivering quality tunes to the world.

On this list alone we have thrash metal, pop crooning, sci-fi industrial, classical, comedy hip-hop and a ton of indie. There is, therefore, no ‘Wales sound’, other than a high barometer of quality from all corners of the land. There does seem to be a focus on indie music, and most of the acts appear to be from the southern end of Wales, but that could be down to the location of the big cities. However you look at it, Wales is a titan in the world of international music.

"Da iawn Cymru!"