UPCOMING SHOWS

 
 
  
Pip Blom
Tom Sharkett
Thursday 5th December, 7.30pm  
 
Bobbie saw the Amsterdam 3-piece make a bold and successful sideways musical leap and while admitting to the cliché of a guitar-orientated band “grabbing the synths” for album three, their new direction had a real and genuine draw for Blom. Foremost in their mind was cult 2010s English pop band Micachu and the Shapes, led by the effervescent Mica Levi. Across four studio albums and several artist monikers, Levi’s band made colourful and vivacious pop music that burst outwards from a grounding in indie music. On Bobbie, Blom made similar jumps which blew their own musical landscape wide open.

The album saw Pip Blom reach new heights and audiences and the campaign was capped recently when they scooped a prestigious Edison Award in their native Holland. One of the oldest music awards in the world, first presented in 1960 at the inaugural Grand Gala du Disque, the award itself is a bronze replica of a statuette of Thomas Edison, designed by the Dutch sculptor Pieter d'Hont and the prize is recognised as one of the most respected in world music.
 
 
Press for 'Bobbie'!:
 
'Filled back to back with dance worthy bangers, the collection welcomes us into a new era of the band: one that's carefree, light-hearted, and unapologetically synth-heavy.'
Dork Magazine ★★★★

'Bobbie boosts their sharp, lyrically intriguing indie-pop songs to fulsome, dance-floor friendly dimensions without masking their character, to which songwriter Blom's Nina Personn-ish tones lend a soulfully reflective edge.'
Uncut Magazine

'Kiss Me By The Candlelight has her interweaving husky vocals with IRL partner Willem Smit from fellow Dutch band Personal Trainer, the whole thing drenched in Moloko-style electronica, while Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos sounds truly debauched on the urgent, vocodered disco of 'Is This Love?.'
Mojo Magazine

'A strong departure from their tried-and-tested punk-infused sound to deliver a more well-rounded baker’s dozen of electro-infused lush cuts .'
The Line of Best Fit 
 
Tickets for this show are £16.50 in advance.
You can get tickets online from here.

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One Leg One Eye
Wharf Chambers, Leeds
Thursday 5th December, 7.30pm

One Leg One Eye is the project of Ian Lynch (founding member of Irish group Lankum) that explores submerged leylines of music and song, drawing on the raw aesthetics of black metal, noise and drone, while also being deeply embued with a sense of Irish history and myth.Debut album …And Take The Black Worm With Me (released on Nyahh Records in 2022) is a slow burning suite of five expansive songscapes that has found its audience largely by word of mouth. Partly recorded in an abandoned Dublin factory where his father worked when he was a child, Lynch’s harrowing vocals are underpinned by vast pillars of uileann pipe drones, overlaid with effects and field recordings to conjure up a sound that is at once dark, mysterious and ultimately transcendental.
 
Listen / Listen
 
 You must be a member or a guest of a member to attend any events at Wharf Chambers.Annual membership costs £2/year and a lifetime membership is just £15.By signing up for membership at Wharf Chambers, you agree to our and .Non-members are welcome to our space as guests of members. One paid member may bring up to 3 guests to Wharf Chambers.

Safer Spaces agreement policies

Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.

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Mick Head & The Red Elastic Band
Paul Molloy (The Coral)
Tuesday 10th December, 7.30pm  
 
Michael Head (Pale Fountains, Shack, The Strands) & The Red Elastic Band return to York this December. His new, Bill Ryder-Jones produced album Loophole, promises to be a creative milestone document for the much-fitted Liverpool songwriter, performing live here with his great band, right on the top of their game.

Watch

Static-fuzz seventies guitar riffs, cowbell and bursts of brass herald the imminent arrival of Michael Head and The Elastic Band’s latest album as they release the glammed-up, Bowie and Ronson-indebted rush of The Human Race. Aptly evoking the renewed artistic vitality of the cherished songwriter, who this year celebrated the 40th anniversary of the release of his first album with The Pale Fountains, the track comes ahead of the release of the 12-track, Loophole album, released on Fri 17 May 2024 on Modern Sky.

As much matter-of-fact documentarian of life as it passes in front of him as he is a poet and healthy, new world-conjuring fantasist, Head’s work rate has accelerated to provide fans with an unprecedented two albums inside two years. With a catalogue of well-documented missteps and blameless, release-delaying mishaps dotted through his life with not only The Pale Fountains but also later, feted bands Shack and The Strands, a sense of personal and artistic equilibrium arrives at the same time as his timely suite of beautiful new songs.

Having already revealed the evocative song sung from his own cradle, Ciao Ciao Bambino, the ‘Toxteth Ghost Story’ that is Shirl’s Ghost, a forbidden romance in Connemara, the vivid picture-painting, 90’s tour story of Ambrosia and straight-up, from-the-heart  Tout Suite, the latest track released from Loophole adds another level of expressive Bill Ryder-Jones-produced musicality cut with evocative lyricism.

Head says of the track: ““The human race is from the perspective of someone who’s not from our world. Sent from the Gods to see how civilisation is baring up.”

After passing through major UK cities on a recent domestic tour to bring some of Loophole’s songs to the stage before they have arrived in fans’ homes or added to playlists, Head and his band continue to announce live dates that make special events of each appearance. While announcing a series of special SOLD-OUT album shows at St Michael-in-the-Hamlet Church in South Liverpool at the end of this month, Head looks ahead to the year-ending, career-defining high of a night at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Fri 13 December 2024.

With more live dates rumoured, fans are also still held in suspense as to what may lie in store between the covers of Head’s autobiography. Although delayed by a year, Head continues to delve into his storied past to finish the chapters of Ciao Ciao Bambino: A Magical Memoir, to be published by Nine Eight Books on Thu 14 August 2025. Inevitably beginning in his 1960’s childhood in inner-city Liverpool and traversing decades of observation as music, fashion, film and more found and fell out of trends, the book promises a tour through seven decades of British popular culture as it does a hand-held stroll into every important moment of the songwriter’s life and career.

Loophole was recorded at the celebrated YAWN Studios in West Kirby in the company of Ryder-Jones, and features all of The Red Elastic Band’s gifted musicians, Phil Murphy (drums), Tom Powell (bass), Nathaniel Cummings (guitars/backing vocals) and Martin Smith (trumpet).

9/10 – UNCUT
★ ★ ★ ★ – MOJO
★ ★ ★ ★★ – Record Collector
★ ★ ★ ★ – Classic Pop
 
 Tickets for this show are £25 in advance.
You can get tickets online from here.

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The Magic Numbers
Wednesday 11th December, 7.30pm  
 
*This show is now sold out*
 
The Magic Numbers are an UK-based four piece comprising two pairs of siblings (Romeo and Michele Stodart, Sean and Angela Gannon) who are known for their unique harmonies, melodic hooks, songwriting craftsmanship and timeless sound.

Their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album was released in 2005 to outstanding critical acclaim, and contained top ten hit singles such as 'Forever Lost', 'Love Me Like You' and 'Love is a Game'. It went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, making them one of the nation’s best-loved bands. They have earned a reputation for their exciting and uplifting live performances, leading them to tour the world, building a loyal fan base, as well as supporting the likes of Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Radiohead, The Flaming Lips, The Who, U2, Elbow and Bright Eyes amongst many others. The Magic Numbers have released five successful albums to date, and are currently working on new music.

The band have also become known for their collaborations with a diverse range of artists over the years - from Romeo writing and producing songs for the late Jane Birkin, Natalie Imbruglia, Ren Harvieu to co- writing ‘Close your eyes’ with the Chemical Brothers for their Grammy-Award-winning album ‘Push The Button’, and producing Billy Bragg’s most recent album. His sister, Michele Stodart has released three critically acclaimed solo albums, and is also an award-winning artist and collaborator.

The Magic Numbers' outstanding musicianship, blood harmonies and skilfully crafted songs, make them a truly unique, exciting and unmissable live band. They continue to tour the world building their audiences and explore new ground in the studio together producing albums.
 
 Tickets for this show are £25 in advance.
*This show is now sold out*

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Simon Joyner 
Saturday 18th January, 7.30pm
 
It's our pleasure to welcome Simon Joyner back to York in January. Simon has just released a stunning new album, 'Coyote Butterfly', which you can read more about and listen to below. 

 
Coyote Butterfly is the first album of new songs in two years from singer-songwriter, Simon Joyner, following the overdose death of his son, Owen, in August of 2022. Drawing on the kaleidoscopic nature of grief, Joyner explores his loss through a series of imagined dialogues and raw confessions. The album is a tribute to Owen, but what Joyner generously delivers is an intimate glimpse at his attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible.The album is bookended by field recordings overlaid with minimalist guitar laments. The first, a spring thrum of sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, functions as an invitation to the elegies which follow, while the last, the late- August drone of cicadas returns us to a life of sweat on the skin, sirens in the distance, and the things we cannot change but must somehow accept. In between these instrumentals, Joyner grapples with regret and fear, shame and love. From the opening song, “I’m Taking You With Me” to the gut-wrenching remorse of “My Lament,” Joyner lays bare the struggles of those left in the wake of personal devastation. On the title track, we hear Joyner perform an elemental incantation, a heartbroken ode infused with forgiveness. The final song of the album, “There Will be a Time,” is a meditation on a future where such suffering, both personal and universal, might be softened by understanding.In creating an album of such intimacy, Joyner reminds us of the importance of using art to alchemize the deeply personal into transformative beauty. Throughout the album we are invited to stand with him in the aftermath and have our own hearts crack open. Coyote Butterfly is a beautiful evocation of a father’s grief but also serves as an enduring testament to love and the life that endures after loss.The musicians playing alongside Simon on Coyote Butterfly are among his closest friends; David Nance, James Schroeder, Kevin Donahue, Ben Brodin, and Michael Krassner. It’s thanks to their sensitive arrangements and loving support that the songs on Coyote Butterfly could be performed and documented.

Tickets for this show are £15 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Adwaith
Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds
Wednesday 20th February, 7.30pm
 
Dynamic Welsh trio Adwaith proudly announce the release of their highly anticipated third album, Solas. Meaning “light of being” or “enlightenment” in Celtic, Solas marks a significant milestone in the band’s journey. Recorded across diverse locations—including the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, Lisbon in Portugal, and multiple studios in Wales—Solas reflects Adwaith’s growth and evolution as artists. Overflowing with romance and magic, this 23-track double album completes a coming-of-age trilogy chronicling their transformation from teenagers into empowered women, exploring themes of self-discovery, escape, and resilience. Watch / Listen


 
From the moment Hollie Singer, Gwenllian Anthony and Heledd Owen first formed Adwaith ten years ago the notion of home has always coursed through the veins of the band, even when they hungered to escape it. First influenced by the counterculture music scene of their Carmarthen hometown, and the Welsh-language bands who passed through the doors of iconic local venue The Parrot, the band felt an impulsive desire to escape their hometown early on, but the pulse of Camarthen has always remained. Solas represents the closing chapter of an evolution that has taken them around the world and brought them back home to the sprawling beauty of West Wales. The trilogy began in 2018 with the Welsh Music Prize-winning album Melyn, followed by 2022’s Welsh Music Prize-winning Bato Mato, which took the band on a literal and figurative journey far from home. After travelling across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway for Bato Mato, Adwaith found themselves reflecting on home even in the unfamiliar landscapes they encountered. Now, Solas offers a raw yet uplifting exploration of self-discovery and grounding. “It’s about finding that home, and that safe space, within yourself,” shares Hollie Singer, “and rediscovering what makes your inner child happy.”At its core, Solas is about finding the light after darkness. The album tells a story of overcoming life’s challenges—be it heartbreak, isolation, or depression—and emerging stronger, more self-aware, and more connected to one’s roots. The album is unapologetically Adwaith, as they embrace both vulnerability and joy, exploring themes of escape from the “city” life of London and Cardiff, contrasting this with the wild beauty of their rural home.Sonically, this record marks a shift from the band’s earlier post-punk influences, drawing instead from a rich tapestry of musical tastes. Over years spent touring the UK and Europe in their small trusted hatchback, the trio has built a vast collection of playlists, covering all the bases from ABBA to Turkish rock, fueling their journeys with eclectic sounds. Key influences on the album include The Cure’s moody rock, the avant-garde rhythms of Lizzy Mercier Descloux, the nomadic blues of West Africa, the psychedelic folk of Jessica Pratt, Björk’s left-field pop experimentation, and the pioneering, unwavering rhythms of CAN. The album opens with ‘Planed,’ a call to collective action and hope, and moves into ‘Mwy,’ which draws listeners into a timeless celebration of nature, evoking a primal sense of unity. Songs like ‘Tristwch’ and ‘Solas’ delve into personal darkness, capturing the weight of depression and nighttime anxieties, while ‘Gofyn’ explores the emotional toll of toxic relationships.Other tracks emphasise reconnection with both place and people. ‘Heddiw / Yfory’ honours the comforting familiarity of West Wales’ landscapes, echoing a deep nostalgia for the past and optimism for the future. Meanwhile, songs like ‘Ni’ and ‘Miliwn’ celebrate human connection, unity, and the beauty of fleeting moments. ‘Deffro,’ the album’s final song, brings Solas to a melancholic yet hopeful close, guiding listeners through memories of childhood and the resilience needed to embrace life’s uncertainties. This milestone project solidifies their uncompromising creative vision, weaving Cymraeg into their music as a vital instrument that resonates on an instinctive level. “The use of Cymraeg throughout Solas feels natural, truthful, and necessary,” shares Gwenllian Anthony. “We wanted listeners to feel something instinctive and emotional in the music, whether or not they understood every word. Just as much as the lyrics tell a story, the musicality itself is a way of speaking, one that we hope resonates on a deeply emotional level.”As the spearhead of the Welsh-language music scene, Adwaith are being hailed as the most significant Welsh band in over three decades, with a dedicated following across Europe and two sell-out tours in the past year. They are the first Welsh-language band to find such success beyond Wales, carrying Welsh music and identity to an international audience. With Solas, Adwaith breaks new ground, becoming the first female Welsh-language band to release a double album, embodying the fearlessness and clarity that has always driven them. “I feel like we’re confident in ourselves as musicians, and our sound, and the world that we want to create,” says Hollie Singer. “We feel fully realised.”.

















Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
 
 
You can get tickets online from here.
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Man/Woman/Chainsaw
The Crescent, York
Saturday 22nd February, 7.30pm

Man/Woman/Chainsaw are Billy Ward (vocals, guitars), Emmie-Mae Avery (vocals,keys/synths), Vera Leppänen (vocals, bass), Clio Starwood (violin) and Lola Cherry (drums).

Watch
 
A precociously talented band from London, who recently celebrated their 100th gig. Since their debut at 16 years old and across three self-released singles,the band have proven themselves as one of the most exciting and unpredictable young acts in the capital, both joyous and raucous in equal measures. Last year’s “What Lucy Found There” was to be their breakthrough, securing attention for the band from the likes of The Quietus, NME, The Line Of Best Fit, So Young, BBC 6 Music and more. This November the band truly come of age with their debut EP, “Eazy Peazy”, to land on the indie taste-maker label Fat Possum Records. Recorded with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox at Echo Zoo studio in Eastbourne, the group present us with cinematic arrangements, mauled by moments of cacophony; the band’s Billy Ward says of their writing process,“we thrive on the thin line between pretty and noisy, often trying to jump between the two-it’s that chaos that excites us.”From the driving immediacy of opener “The Boss”, to the robust backbone of “SportsDay”, to the theatrical beauty of “Grow A Tongue In Time” and orchestral highlight “Ode To Clio”, the six track EP captures all the cerebral intensity, and celebratory melody, of the Man/Woman/Chainsaw live performance. It signals the start proper for a band who have been allowed to experiment, given the time to find their sound and line-up in a vibrant, supportive DIY community, and who will surely finish the year ready to take on the next with unbridled confidence. With boundless potential like theirs, you’d not bet against them.

Tickets for this show are £11 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Shovel Dance Collective
The Crescent, York
Sunday 23rd February, 7.30pm

Shovel Dance Collective are a group of nine musicians united by a passion for the beauty, force, and political charge of the traditional musics of Britain, Ireland and beyond. They are committed to Folk music not as an archaeological artifact to be unearthed, but as a living communal activity - inviting and generous to those it speaks to. They arrange the source material into a kind of musique boue (mud music), simultaneously traditional and experimental they engage a deep, cross-temporal synthesis of free improvisation, tape manipulation and field recordings. Their music appears as a patchwork as pieces are stitched together, rearranged and recontextualised. The yarn is threaded with both their sense of aesthetic innovation, and with a deep sense of the ways in which traditional music holds the voices of the oppressed, the everyday and those who, by their labour, create the wealth of the world. / /

Watch Watch Watch
 
They have performed sold out shows across the UK, with headline concerts at venues such as Cecil Sharp House, Kings Place and Cafe OTO. The collective have appeared at many major festivals: Glastonbury, Roskilde, SXSW, Green Man, End of the Road, Sidmouth Folk Festival, Supernormal and Supersonic festivals among others. Publications such as The Wire, Loud and Quiet, NME, Financial Times and The Times have heralded their live performances across the years. Their first record ‘The Water is the Shovel of the Shore’ has been championed by The Wire, Folk Radio, Tradfolk and was named one of the albums of the year by The Quietus.Their second album ‘The Shovel Dance’ will be released in October 2024 by American Dreams Records.
 
 Tickets for this show are £15 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Katherine Priddy
Wednesday 26th February, 7.30pm  
 
*This show is now sold out*
 
Since Richard Thompson chose Priddy as “The Best Thing I’ve Heard All Year” in Mojo Magazine on the strength of her 2018 “Wolf” EP, her star has risen exponentially. Winning fans from Guy Garvey, Mark Radcliffe, Stuart Maconie and the late Janice Long and garnering glowing press reviews across the board for The Eternal Rocks Beneath including The Observer, The Sun, Uncut, Songlines, Folk Radio UK and more, Priddy crossed genres, charting at number 1 in The Official UK Folk Chart and number 5 in the Official UK Americana Chart, and rounded off 2021 on Mojo’s Folk Albums of the Year list.

She is in demand as a performer and collaborator, playing Cambridge Folk Festival (where she won the prestigious Christian Raphael Prize), Glastonbury (where she appeared on the coveted BBC2 TV coverage), Green Man, End Of The Road, Beautiful Days and the BBC Proms. As well as sell out headline tours, Priddy has been chosen to support world class artists including Richard Thompson, The Chieftains, Loudon Wainwright III and Vashti Bunyan.

In 2022, she took her music worldwide with a series of shows in Australia, including a performance at Port Fairy Folk Festival, plus a showcase in Kansas City USA as part of Folk Alliance International. 2023 saw no sign of her momentum slowing; highlights included a new single on Chrysalis Records as part of a Double LP of Nick Drake covers from artists such as Self Esteem, Aldous Harding, John Grant, Bombay Bicycle Club and more, as well as a show supporting Guy Garvey at The Roundhouse.

Now, Feb 2024 saw the release of her eagerly awaited second albums: The Pendulum Swing. Once again recorded in Birmingham by producer Simon J Weaver, guest musicians comprise John Smith (lead guitar), Harry Fausing Smith (strings), Marcus Hamblett (brass/double bass), George Boomsma (guitar, backing vocals, co-writer on track “Ready To Go”), Polly Virr (cello) and even a brief appearance from Priddy’s family members right at the end of the album, in keeping with its themes.

The Pendulum Swing was greeted with critical acclaim in the press as it landed at #1 in the official UK Folk Charts. It saw the likes of Iggy Pop, Guy Garvey, Craig Charles, Mark Radcliffe and Gideon Coe giving it a spin whilst RTE in Ireland added tracks to their recommendations list for 3 weeks running. With her biggest headline tour to date selling out most cities and her reputation growing, she was asked to perform on the legendary Later with Jools Holland (aired 25th May).

She now returns for the final run of The Pendulum Swing Tour in March 2025.

Press:
 
'Utterly brilliant…one of my favourite voices in contemporary music.'
Guy Garvey

'One of The Albums of the year'
★★★★★ - SONGLINES

'Deserves a Grammy'
★★★★★ - MAIL ON SUNDAY

'simply brilliant'
★★★★ - MOJO

'a rich, poised second album'
★★★★ - THE OSBERVER

'One of the most exciting Singer songwriters in the UK'
THE IRISH TIMES
 
 Tickets for this show are £18 in advance.
You can get tickets online from here.

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McGoldrick, McCusker & Doyle
The Trades Club, Hebden Bridge 
 Tuesday 11th March, 7.30pm

Folk music’s legendary triumvirate of musical magpies Mike McGoldrick, John McCusker and John Doyle are on tour again in 2025, bringing you their own blend of top -class folk songs, tunes and charming bonhomie.
 
All three musicians have won global acclaim: John Doyle (Dublin – vocals, guitar, bouzouki, mandola) is an Irish music linchpin and a founder member of acclaimed group Solas, who has worked with Joan Baez, Linda Thompson and Mary Chapin Carpenter. BBC Radio 2 Folk Award Winner John McCusker (Glasgow – fiddle, whistles, harmonium) has played with The Battlefield Band, Mark Knopfler and Bob Dylan, recorded with Paul Weller, and recently produced albums for Eddi Reader, Heidi Talbot and Kris Drever. 
 
Mike McGoldrick (Manchester – flute, whistles, Uileann pipes, bodhran, clarinet, congas) is a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner, founding member of Lúnasa, and current member of Capercaillie, who has worked with Mark Knopfler, Eddi Reader, John Cale. And that's just for starters.With their vast repertoire, this will be an evening to remember. Described as the masters of flute, fiddle, song and guitar they have worked with the biggest and brightest and bring you a night of  beautifully crafted music.
 
Having shared stages and recording studios with everyone from Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler to Paul Weller, Joan Baez and Linda Thompson, Mike, John & John are a rare musical treat you’ll savour for a very long time.

'The Wishing Tree is exceptional and has to be a front-runner for album of the year'
Folk Radio

'A sparklingly tight programme... an excellent sound balance... never tiresome'
The Scotsman

'It takes a lifetime of playing to sound as effortless as these guys'
The Herald

'What an absolute pleasure to share in their warmth, intimacy and richly talented company'
Folking.com
 
 Tickets for this show are £22.50 in advance. 
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Snapped Ankles
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 12th March, 7.30pm

Psychedelic post-punk made for the dancefloor delivered by an awesome crew who put performance right at the top of their agenda. A proper party. Always.

Watch / Watch / Watch

Tickets for this show are £17.50 in advance.

You can get tickets online from here.

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Nadia Reid
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Wednesday 12th March, 7.30pm

There is a photograph that Nadia Reid still keeps, taken ten years ago now on an old iPhone 4. It shows the singer at just twenty two, standing in a backyard in Auckland, her face obscured by a bright bloom of sparkler flame. “It was just a throwaway photo, but I clung to that image through the years,” she says. “You have those points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change. And that was one of those points; all my cells were changing.”

Reid was drawn to this image once again in the making of her fourth album, details of which are to follow soon. This was the obvious choice for the artwork for her first single 'Changed Unchained'. Her first new music for four years and first for new label Chrysalis Records.

Listen
 
Much had changed since Out of My Province, the album she released in early March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic sent the world into lockdown. In her native New Zealand, restrictions were some of the toughest in the world, the country’s borders remaining closed for over two years. Reid toured the record as best she could, she put on hold her plans to move to the UK, attended to the steady rhythms of living. In July of 2021, she gave birth to her first daughter, Elliotte; her second, Goldie, arrived this past Spring.

On the new single, Reid moves away from her earlier folk inclinations. “I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk and being a folk singer. It makes me sort of cringe. It’s too confining.” Reid expands on her new fuller sound. "’Changed Unchained’ is a great example of me bringing lyrics and a melody into the studio, then Tom (Healy, producer) and the band letting the mojo/muse/spirit do its thing in the room. That was a really freeing feeling for me. The song begun in this delicate introspective way and formed into something quite powerful."

Aswell as a taste of what's to come next, ‘Changed Unchained’ closes a chapter on her first three records as something like a trilogy; music that belonged to a time before everything changed.

Tickets for this show are £16.50 in advance.

You can get tickets online from here.

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KEG
, YorkThe Fulford Arms
Wednesday 19th March, 7.30pm
 
Showcasing whip-smart spikiness remains, and a gorgeous weirdness matched by very few others, it's easy to see why wonk pop 7-piece KEG are one of the most talked about bands of 2024. Soon they'll be THE band of 2025. Their forthcoming debut album Fun’s Over represents the culmination of KEG's initial forays into life, and as such leaps all over—from the melodic to the demented with all the enthusiasm of a very lively bean salad. Sharp angling guitarwork that would be at home both on a Fugazi or a Wilco record. Cascading synths and drums, pepperings of trombone and lyrics which invite you into a baffled man's brain full of joy and anxiety. 

/
WatchWatch
 
Contrary to the previous releases the album takes its time, allowing Keg to showcase the orchestral leanings of the band, melding textures and battering-ram rhythms, whilst all the time managing to hone their carefully manipulated balance of chaos and order. Recorded between the studio and home, Keg have refined their DIY approach this time around, producing the record themselves with engineering help from Pozi’s Toby Burroughs and mixed by Connor Simpkins. Offsetting the braggadocious shredding and bombastic instrumentation the lyrics on the album take a much less cocksure approach—beckoning you into a yearning for suburban living, slightly embarrassing admissions of inadequacy, the feeling of creative failure freeing the imagination, taking pleasure in the mundanity of an unsure mind, bathing for freedom, and just a couple simple love songs.





Tickets for this show are £13 in advance.
 
 
You can get tickets online from here.
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The Delines
Thursday 27th March, 7.30pm
 
The Delines return to tour the UK and EU in support of their 4th album out February 2024. The album was just mastered and bring more of their country-soul.The debut record, COLFAX, appeared in 2014 and surprised fans and critics alike.
 
Evoking a beat-up Dusty Springfield or a weary Rickie Lee Jones, COLFAX made over a dozen top ten year end lists. It was a four-year wait until their sophomore effort, THE IMPERIAL was released. Singer, Amy Boone spent much of that time in hospital beds recovering from serious injuries sustained in a car accident in Austin, Texas. When she was just strong enough to stand she finished THE IMPERIAL, a record that spent two weeks on top of the UK official Americana charts with the band playing sold out shows across the UK and Europe.
 
The band returned with their cinematic third album THE SEA DRIFT which Americana UK and BBC6 Gideon Coe both made their ‘Album of the Year’. Penned by guitarist and songwriter Willy Vlautin with arrangements by keyboardist Cory Gray and the rhythm section of Sean Oldham and Freddy Trujillo. Vlautin is no stranger to critical acclaim, enjoying cult success and rave reviews from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, Uncut, Rolling Stone and Mojo, both as a novelist with seven books under his belt (two of his books have become major films with Lean On Pete currently being made into a Netfilx movie out 2025).
 
 
Willy, Oldham and Trujillo also lead the alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine whom released over ten albums before breaking up in 2016. 2022/23 saw The Delines performing at EU festivals plus releasing two more singles plus a soundtrack, the band will be playing songs from including past classics. 
 
Tickets for this show are £26 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.

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The Loft 
Thursday 27th March, 7.30pm

The Loft, original Creation Records legends, set out on a UK tour next March in support of their forthcoming, ‘debut’ album.The original line up of Pete Astor, Dave Morgan, Bill Prince and Andy Strickland, embark on their first ever UK club tour, 40 years after the classic ‘Up The Hill And Down The Slope’, topped the indie singles chart. /

Watch Watch
 
Since their infamous onstage split at the Hammersmith Palais in ‘85, their status as one of the UK’s most influential guitar bands of the 80s continues to grow and to influence a host of younger artists.“It’s incredibly exciting to not only be setting out on tour again, but now with a brand new set of songs to play alongside some of our, ahem, ‘greatest hits’, says drummer, Dave Morgan.“The Loft has always been just the same four people and it’s a real thrill to be playing across the UK with the band again. We’re sounding better than ever…”“Seminally seminal…” - Steve Lamacq

Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Laura Veirs
The Crescent, York
Thursday 27th March, 7.30pm

Laura Veirs announces today a spring UK tour. This will be her 22nd year of touring the UK. She will be performing solo with her nylon string guitar and will play songs from her 25-year catalog. Veirs will be accompanied on the road by her fiance Morgan Luker who is a Reed College music professor. The two met when Veirs was teaching a songwriting workshop in his class. They will marry in the summer of 2025.
 
In recent years Veirs has branched out into making visual art and she will be selling prints of her paintings at her live shows. Veirs also teaches songwriting workshops and will be heading to Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico this December to attend her ongoing residency there. She will also travel to Angouleme, France in May 2025 to accompany a French children’s choir in a performance of a concert of her songs. 
 
Veirs is currently working on new paintings, an instrumental guitar album and a book about creativity. 
 
Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter Laura Veirs has produced 14 albums over 25 years, toured internationally, and collaborated with numerous luminaries such as kd lang, Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens, Bill Frisell, Jim James, Colin Meloy, Kate Stables, Sam Amidon, Karl Blau, Shahzad Ismaily and many others. Veirs was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in October 2024. Her music blends the poetic sensibilities of contemporary folk with the rough edges of indie rock.

Watch / Listen
 
Tickets for this show are £22 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Jane Weaver
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 2nd April, 7.30pm

Reclaiming her universe, Jane Weaver returns with brand new single ‘Love In Constant Spectacle’, evoking spectacular images perhaps impossible to capture with the human eye, nor aperture.Taking measured steps that lead you to something very special, our protagonist pours all her creative resources before the needle drops. Secretly, this might be more conceptual in its execution, than initially meets the eye.“It’s about searching for joy, wanting to love and feel loved, then uncovering it in unusual places and in the smallest, hidden things in life. Magnified under rocks and stones, it explores connecting with nature and your surroundings as opposed to other people - focusing on autonomy, new beginnings and feeling bewitched” adds Jane Weaver.
 
This is the poetic vision of one woman only, turning a new chapter, erecting a new scaffold, drawing empty landscapes as we slowly watch new colours, codes shapes and languages fill the frame. Produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning), this is evidently a new awakening.Accompanied by a new video animated by Kamran Kaur she describes “The woman here is always moving forward in pursuit of something but constantly finding herself succumbing to nature's spell. Nature leads her back to herself, as that which she was searching for was there all along.”From a long-standing pillar of the UK’s independent pop landscape, this is Jane Weaver’s first single since her unanimously lorded top 40 album ‘Flock’ and one-off single ‘Oblique Fantasy’.“Genuinely different and exhilarating”Jane Weaver continues to enrapture and expand her legacy into 2025 with a freshly announced tour.  
 
★★★★ The Guardian

Tickets for this show are £20 in advance.

You can get tickets online from here.

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Lambrini Girls
The Crescent, York
Monday 7th April, 7.30pm

After a busy summer of playing Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds Festivals, Green Man, End Of The Road, and supporting Amyl and the Sniffers around the US, the ferocious Brighton-based noise-punk duo Lambrini Girls show no signs of slowing down with new single ‘Company Culture’.
 
 
Elsewhere in 2024 the pair released the singles ‘God’s Country’ and ‘Body Of Mine’, both of which were BBC6 Music Playlisted. The two piece are Phoebe Lunny (Vocals/Guitar - she/they) and Lilly Macieira (Bass - she/they), augmented live by drummer Banksy.The band have made a name for themselves through unforgettable live performances and support from the likes of Variety Magazine, BBC Radio 1, NME, The Line Of Best Fit, KEXP, Consequence, Evening Standard, CLASH, So Young, and covered Kerrang! Magazine alongside Sleater-Kinney, bagged a nomination for Rolling Stone UK’s Rising Stars Award, and even Iggy Pop is a fan.

Press:

'…you see the sense of community they can foster in just 30 minutes.'
Rolling Stone UK (Wide Awake Festival)

'Lambrini Girls were built for a place like Glastonbury.'
DORK (Glastonbury Festival)

'They don’t yet have an album to their name, but believe us when we say Lambrini Girls are a festival must-watch.'
Kerrang! Magazine (Reading Festival)

'Lambrini Girls’ draw an enormous Far Out crowd with their razor-sharp punk and impassioned inter-song speeches.'
CLASH Magazine (Green Man)

'an as-expected riotous late-night show'
DIY (End Of The Road)

'Lambrini Girls aren’t afraid to piss people off'
Variety Magazine
 
Tickets for this show are £12 in advance.
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Alabaster DePlume
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Wednesday 30th March, 7.30pm
 
Gus Fairbairn, aka Alabaster DePlume, has a pocketful of phrases that he uses all the time whether he’s walking down the street or holding court with musicians and an audience. For a long time the Mancunian would tell anyone who’d listen that they were doing very well. More recently, it’s another phrase which has a similar effect and which belies his unwavering commitment to personal vulnerability and collective politics: “Don’t forget you’re precious.”

A process that is people-first not product-first ensures that the music is unique; often gem-like. Alabaster DePlume’s songs are built on sonorous circular melodies and luminous tones that transmit calmness and generosity in warm waves – unless they’re raging against complacency and the everyday inhumanity of end times capitalism. Most importantly, he brings a valuable transparency to his work. “This is what I’m really doing,” he says. “I want to talk about why I’m doing this, and how I’m doing this.
Press:

'[DePlume] delivers a serene reminder of what matters most.'
Pitchfork

'DePlume is a fixture on the London avant-jazz scene whose greatest value is openness.'
NPR

'He’s a garrulous, heart-on-sleeve rabble-rouser, an anti-cynic keen to reduce the fourth wall to rubble.'
The Observer

'An incredibly unique record. Every second of the precious hour and seven minutes is dedicated to vulnerability and collective politics.'
CLASH 

Tickets for this show are £17 in advance.

You can get tickets online from here.

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Nap Eyes
Hyde Park Book Club, York 
Wednesday 14th May, 7.30pm

Nap Eyes’ metamorphic fifth long-player collects a cache of nine fascinating songs recorded over the four years since Snapshot of a Beginner. The Neon Gate reveals classic touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, perambulatory meditations, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date) and narrative and lyric formality (including adaptations of thorny poems by Alexander Pushkin and W. B. Yeats), imparting the sense that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.
 
The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, / Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy. – W. B. YeatsIn 1922, as the Irish Civil War raged, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) wrote his “Meditations in Time of Civil War” while summering in Thor Ballylee, a Norman tower. In the final section of this visionary poem, tortuously titled “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the poet climbs “to the tower-top” to survey (or conjure) a fantastical scene involving, among other things, ladies riding “magical unicorns,” Babylonian prophecies, and Jacques Molay (the final grand master of the Knights Templar, burned at the stake in 1314 for his supposed heresy and homosexuality). 
 
“Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind,” Yeats writes. “Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.”After three years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). The Neon Gate, their metamorphic fifth long-player, collects a cache of nine fascinating reveries recorded over the four years since their last album, Snapshot of a Beginner (five of which were released episodically throughout the spring and summer of 2024).
 
“I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the album’s colossal penultimate track, is, along with “Demons,” their languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), one of two ambitious but adept adaptations in which singer and principal songwriter Nigel Chapman unravels knotty, century-old verse into a fluid, memorable melodies across the loom of the band’s pulsing instrumental syncretism.This fresh engagement with narrative and lyric formality complements the seven original songs on the record, which reveal classic Naps touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, the nexus of fantasy and science fiction, perambulatory descriptions of landscape and weather, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, technologi- cal anxiety, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisa- tional composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date).
 
With The Neon Gate Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.That all sounds deadly serious, but these songs are also as funny, quirky, and touching as ever, juxtaposing absurdist Middle Ages settings with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes (see the picaresque “Passageway” in particular). Castles and mystical critters abound, and faith in chemistry, astrophysics, and naturalistic observation tempers the spiraling doubt that can accompany deep cogitation. So the humble titular birds of opening track “Eight Tired Starlings” (Star Birds) must navigate light beams, curving spacetime, gravitational waves, and “billion-years-distant” galactic collisions.
 
The pocket light beam, “complacent wizard,” and “breakfast plate” of eight-minute closing track “Isolation” (written, naturally, during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown) catalyze an uncomfort- able revelation in the form of a one-liner: “how to get crushed under a gigantic / metaphysical rock.” In between, piloted by the band’s subtle, synthetic rhythms, “Feline Wave Race” emerges from Chapman’s current improvisational writing practice and experiments with spontaneous composition. We are transported, in the company of a digital wildcat, from deep space through telescoping deep time—“when the gas clouds / pass away and / the molecules / distribute / all across the fabric / of the horizon”—from “the edge of the moat / of the 13th-century castle” to 1996, the year Nintendo released the jetskiing video game Wave Race 64.The recording methodology informed how the other band members—Seamus Dalton, Josh Salter, and Brad Labelle, often supplementing or supplanting their customary respective roles on drums, bass, and guitar with synthwork and drum programming—kept pace with this dream logic. Nigel recorded demos—many involving loops—and the band built recursive fractal patterns upon those skeletal armatures, often remotely (sometimes with assistance from engineer René Wilson). The origins of even the most otherworldy songs were often intimately domestic.
 
Although most vocals were tracked live with the band, Nigel recorded his vocals for “Feline Wave Race” and “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird,” two disjunctive fables about animals told through stream-of-consciousness narratives, in a blanket-draped children’s cardboard castle in his parents’ basement.When they exist at all verse-chorus-verse structures often disintegrate in favor of an unhurried unfolding, an emphasis on marking, attenuating, and collapsing time over standard musical notions of progression or refrain, a foregrounding of ellipsis over resolution. 
 
Only the careening “Ice Grass Underpass,” written in 2009, predating the band’s existence but prefiguring the sonic signature of their foundational first two albums, closely resembles, with Labelle’s snowy guitar squall (also evident in his lacerating, atonal leads scribbling through “Tangent Dissolve”), their older material. Speaking of snow: half-blinded by a blizzard and in danger of losing their way and plunging “headlong into some damned ravine,” the “master” and coachman of “Demons” are first mystified and then petrified by eerie apparitions of uncanny but uncertain spectral nature. “Is there a witch who is getting married?” the coachman speculates earnestly. “Some goblin they’re burying?”
 
These are demonic images, for sure, and this is familiarly eldritch territory for Nap Eyes, who in 2021 released “Blood River,” a song inspired by their online Dungeons and Dragons campaign. But beyond the Neon Gate, Yeats’s “wisdom of daemonic images”—in the ancient Greek sense of an animating human spirit, lacking any suggestion of evil—pertains more in these songs, inscrutably beautiful riddles which, a full decade into Nap Eyes’ career, “suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.”
 
 Tickets for this show are £13 in advance. 
 
You can get tickets online from here.
 
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Throwing Muses

Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Sunday 18th May, 7.30pm

Manchester Academy 2
Saturday 24th May, 7.30pm
 
One of the greatest college bands of the 90’s, Kristin Hersh formed Throwing Muses with high school friends. The band, currently consisting of Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo and Bernard Georges, pioneered a new alternative sound, releasing a string of critically celebrated albums and touring the world. 
 
Arresting masterpiece ‘University’ saw the band hitting US and UK charts and marked the beginning of a dedicated fan base that would support them for decades to come. After signing to a major label, Hersh quickly realized she wasn’t interested in entertaining the greed of the corporate recording industry, so she traded her first solo album, the widely acclaimed ‘Hips and Makers,’ for her band’s freedom. 
 
‘I felt morally obligated to no longer participate in an industry without substance. We need real women, we need real music,’ says Hersh.
 
Released from her contractual obligations, Hersh was free to indulge her musical passions, including the inventive, no-holds-barred, noise rock trio 50 Foot Wave, who pioneered the pay what you want model and continues her unique brand of independence, fostering close relationships with listeners and touring across the globe with all her projects. 
 
Throwing Muses are now signed to Fire Records -a label that shares Hersh’s fiercely independent ethos- and due to release their latest effort ‘Sun Racket’, the follow up to 2013’s ‘Purgatory/Paradise’. The new album is an outpouring of modal guitars and reverbed shapes set behind Hersh’s well-thumbed notebook of storylines and haunting vocals that get into your psyche.“
 
Three shy friends from a little island, freaking the f*** out” is how Hersh describes her band. “We play because we’re addicted to the noise and because we love each other. We’ve never stopped playing. Thirty years on a bus together only encouraged us to play more and no one has told us to shut up yet.”
 
'Sublime riffs and hair-standing-on-end vocals giving you a jolt. Throwing Muses has maintained the inimitable ethos that has distinguished their music for decades.'
Pop Matters
 
Watch
 
Tickets for this show are £26.50 in advance. 
 
You can get tickets online or Leeds and Manchester .
herehere
 
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