It felt strange walking into Sebright Arms knowing I’d seen Man/Woman/Chainsaw tear Scala apart just a few months back, 800 bodies packed and bouncing around like a sea of bodies crashing together, in full, ecstatic tide. Now here they were, where the ceiling drips with sweat, the front row might as well be on stage, and it felt like a perfect space to revisit this up close, tight squeeze that chaos into a 150-cap basement.

Opening duties fell to Brighton’s AtticOMattic, a genre-blurring five-piece with a spell of skittering drums, airy keys and restless guitar loops. Their tight, rhythmic grooves moved with an easy fluidity. The band’s subtle shifts in tempo and volume never felt forced. And the vocals added an ethereal layer that echoed around the small room, wrapping the audience in a dreamy haze. When they slipped into a final burst, you could feel the crowd soften, drifting with them. A perfect, dreamy primer for the storm to come.

Between sets, the room filled, and the AC did its best to hold back the heat. MGMT drifted out the speakers, and the walls started sweating long before anyone else did. Man/Woman/Chainsaw walked out to their entrance song, ‘In Da Club’. They slipped into ‘The Boss’ first, a colossal rock tirade that flipped from a wall of noise to a single, creeping violin line before detonating again in glorious unison chants. The heaviest track from their debut EP ‘Easy Peazy’, it’s a song that grips its anger tightly. Watching Vera Leppänen (vocals, bass), Billy Ward (vocals, guitars), and Emmie-Mae Avery (vocals, keys/synths) in perfect sync was something else. By the time ‘Adam & Steve’ landed, the crowd were swaying in that soft push-pull, a controlled chaos humming quietly.

Perhaps one of my favourite parts of Man/Woman/Chainsaw is the way they wield dynamics, from moments of crashing stabs to when the chaos pulls back and you hear how locked in they are. Each tiny part slots into place into some of the softest, most beautiful sounds. ‘MadDog’ was a case in point: it started teeth-bared and snarling, Vera’s voice cracking with frustration, until halfway through the anger melted into something mournful, Clio Starwood’s violin weeping over twinkling piano keys. 

When they hit ‘Ode To Clio’, the room felt like it was holding its breath. The first five seconds, a tight flurry that vanishes as quickly as it came, leaving you chasing it through the rest of the song. What starts as gentle, searching strings and hushed harmonies slowly swells until it can’t hold itself together any longer, the calm crumples, Lola Cherry’s drums and the guitars splinter apart, and for a moment the room is just pure, glorious chaos before those strings cut through again, carrying everyone with them.

Nights like this are why these shows matter. A band like Man/Woman/Chainsaw in a basement like Sebright Arms turns a branded event into a reason to gather, pint in hand, shoulder to shoulder, to lose yourself for an hour or so in something loud and messy. If SON Estrella Galicia keeps backing independent bands and the small venues that give them space to roar, the beer will taste better for it. SON Estrella Galicia brings small rooms, big sounds, and the sense that sometimes the best gigs still happen just below street level in your local independent venue.

All photos by Anna Delf

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A picked bassline fractures the silence, opening the wound that ‘Big Empty Heart’ bleeds from. It crashes forward with intricate drums, colossal swells of reverb-laden guitars, and the accordion’s mournful cry weaving in and out of it all. This comes together into a sprawling dirge for a love sharpened by absence and bruised by regret. Frontman Euan Manning calls it “a love song written from beyond the grave,” and his voice emerges cold, quivering, and folded tight with secrets and ghosts, carrying an unsent letter that still burns the hands that hold it.

Now championed by the likes of Grian Chatten and Belfast’s Kneecap, Cardinals prepare to carry ‘Big Empty Heart’ from the melody guitarist Oskar Gudinovic dreamed up on a Korg at twelve to the roaring crowd of 45,000 as they open for Fontaines D.C. at Finsbury Park this July.

Photo by Emilyn Cardona

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Issue Fifty-Five features Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, The Orchestra (For Now), Westside Cowboy, Car Seat Headrest, Real Farmer, School Fair, Elias Rønnenfelt, feeble little horse, Kissing On Camera, Pooneh Ghana and Rhi Dancey.
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Languid and wrapped in a kind of studied indifference, ‘SWEAT’ holds you at arm’s length. The drums, keyboard, and guitar all keep their heads down, holding a repetitive groove, while the bassline moves in tight circles, pumping steady eighth notes and flickering off into small runs. The vocals barely touch the words, delivered with the kind of disinterest that only draws you in further.

Beneath that apathy and blasé charm, there’s a coil wound tight. That tension beads in the quiet spaces, and underneath that: grief. The song resists its release for as long as it can, but by the final chorus, the mask slips. Whilst everything else holds its own, the electric guitar, once content to shimmer at the edges, starts to snarl with static and feedback, and the vocals crack open, breathless and distorted. ‘SWEAT’ pretends not to care. But inevitably, it admits it does.

As frontman Ethan Ramon puts it, ‘SWEAT’ is an attempt “to overcompensate in the face of grief, one that fails miserably and ends with you being swallowed whole. I tried to capture the moment when the tension breaks and you realize you’re no longer in control of your emotions; your emotions are in control of you. That realization is humbling.”

With a debut that moves between composure and sudden collapse, The Sophs sidestep the usual LA indie gloss. No neon, no posturing. Just a lean groove, a voice on the verge, and the kind of heat that creeps up on you.

Photo by Eric Daniels

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Issue Fifty-Five features Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, The Orchestra (For Now), Westside Cowboy, Car Seat Headrest, Real Farmer, School Fair, Elias Rønnenfelt, feeble little horse, Kissing On Camera, Pooneh Ghana and Rhi Dancey.
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A track they’ve been playing live for the last year, ‘Look Down On Us’ bursts open in a violent exhale, still carrying Maruja’s ever-present tension. Ten minutes of rapture and release, guitars grind and saxophone serrates. Each phrase feels like it’s been clawed from the concrete.

But Maruja, as ever, resists the flatness of rage for rage’s sake, knowing that fury, if left alone, burns out. And so the storm shifts. Midway, the noise thins. Light filters in through the cracks. What began in fire softens into something fragile, almost aching in its beauty. A warmth begins to bloom beneath the rubble, the quiet strength of solidarity, the flicker of something worth holding onto.

In their own words, Maruja explains that, “‘Look Down On Us’ is a reflection of the times we live in. The first half of the song paints a grotesque and vivid picture of the super wealthy and the impact they have on our culture. The second half is about the need to come together in solidarity and embrace love as a wider community, especially in times of oppression. The song ends full circle, arching back to where it began as a reminder to the listener of the struggle from which it came and the struggle that still remains.”

For the past few years, Maruja have been growing, sharpening their sound, their message, and their intent. Now, with their debut album ‘Pain to Power’ on the horizon, they stand before something bold, urgent, and genuinely special, ready to leave their mark.

Photo by Samuel Edwards

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Issue Fifty-Five features Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, The Orchestra (For Now), Westside Cowboy, Car Seat Headrest, Real Farmer, School Fair, Elias Rønnenfelt, feeble little horse, Kissing On Camera, Pooneh Ghana and Rhi Dancey.

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With a clatter of lurching chords and cracked-throat howls, Andreas Christoloudis sings of a thief who cannot help but steal, trapped in the terror that every word he grasps is cluttered with the echoes of others. Even the words that roam around his skull come pre-worn, dog-eared, chewed through, and spat back out.

‘Plagiarist’ wrings its hands and bares its teeth, desperate to both confess and survive, full of guilt, memory, theft, and the slow rot of identity. There is no grand redemption here, no salvation in the purity of creation. And even in all the wreckage, there’s something innately human in it all. The gnawing need to be, to make, to speak, and to just scream into the void, even when it feels like the only way is to copy and reclaim what has already been lost.

Photo by Megan Di Pinto

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Issue Fifty-Five features Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, The Orchestra (For Now), Westside Cowboy, Car Seat Headrest, Real Farmer, School Fair, Elias Rønnenfelt, feeble little horse, Kissing On Camera, Pooneh Ghana and Rhi Dancey.

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Six minutes stretch out, as one slow draw, a deep inhale before the plunge. Twelve years might have been enough for them to slip free of old skin, to moult, and to forget. And yet, here is the same ghostlight glow that flickered through ‘Go Tell Fire to the Mountain’, now drifting ashore in 2025. “Old friends with new scars, trying not to aggravate the wounds of yesterday. We are all surprised by the big music that still plays itself through us, an unexpected gift after the longest exile. A gleaming fragment of then, magnified by who we are now,” the band explains.

Softness first, then force. The build, the weight, and the exhale into huge stabs that bring about WU LYF’s anthemic sound, crashing back down, scattering spray to the sky. The vocals at first delicate, then cracking open into cries of unshackled yelps. A voice that has waited too long, pressing against the surface, bursting through. It’s undeniably pretty, the way the mist catches the light before it disappears. 

A new life is coming. It was always coming.

Photo by Jonathan Flanders

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It sways, slowly. Becoming a breath between words, sagging, unravelling, slipping loose stitch by stitch. Through it all, Pearl Amanda Dickson’s and Richard Orofino’s vocals stay soft, almost impalpable. A whisper of what they dare not shout, but a memory murmured under breath, or a confession caught in the throat. “If you had a heart/ And if I told you/ I do love you/ And if it was so hard/ Then why is it gone?” It’s the remnants of a steamy fling, but the heat lingers in the fabric, bodies once pressed together pulling apart with hesitation. 

Sex Week inside Issue Fifty-One of So Young (Aug 2024).

Looping back on itself, ‘Coat’ is a track that will not let go, a memory that will not settle, an echo folding upon itself. Airy synths and slow, trudging guitars feel silvery, and metallic—glinting one moment and gone the next. Draped over the shoulders of a beat that barely holds itself up, swaying in the wind of its own making. It plunges and stirs in its own quiet dread—dragged down, down, by the undertow of its own unease. It’s a song that effortlessly clings to the skin.

Photo by Alyssa Vitalino and Dillon Camp

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It’s a ‘90s dreamscape, where the magic lies in the tension between soft, breathy vocals and the dense undercurrent of fuzzed guitars. Swaying between tenderness and assertion, as choruses dissolve into a shoegazey mist, it’s all held together by warm, repetitive basslines and hypnotic drums that let these dreamy melodies drift above. Sparkling with the rattling shimmer of tambourine, ‘Love to See You Shine’, drips with the glitter of Mazzy Star.

Opal’s vocals carry a love letter to herself, a soft but powerful affirmation of stepping into the limelight as her most authentic self, proudly claiming her space in the world. As the curtain falls on ‘Love to See You Shine’, Opal Mag takes her final bow. Without hesitation or doubt, there’s just the quiet confidence of someone who knows this stage, this moment, was always hers to claim.

Photo by Rani Maria

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Their lo-fi guitar hums in dense, washed-out waves, haunting and immersive. Each member of the trio—Ari Mamnoon, Jack Dione, and Jay Are—takes their own verse, unflinchingly laid bare and each as saturnine as the last. Within this melancholic haze, a quickly plucked bass line and hi-hat-heavy rhythm pulse like a nervous heartbeat, injecting frenetic groove into the track’s brooding calm without softening the edges. This is love—or rather, heartbreak—in all its self- destructive and apathetic glory.

The enigmatic L.A. based band has a knack for conjuring a kind of beautiful ruin. Their grainy, almost soupy sound recalls the detached melancholy of ‘90s shoegaze and early indie slacker rock while spiralling into something both darker and closer to the kind of internet subcultures of the early 2000s. Bursting with angst, untitled (halo) are becoming a band increasingly hard to ignore.

Photo by Justin Saldana

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