When: 7.30pm on Saturday 29 November 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Junior Brother again!

Carefully pushing the boundaries of what modern Irish folk can look and sound like, Junior Brother is an idiosyncratic, challenging, and richly lyrical singer/songwriter from County Kerry. His much-anticipated third album, The End, is due to arrive on 5 September via Strap Originals, a label forged with love by Pete Doherty of The Libertines.

In a statement from the label, Strap say: ‘We’re beyond excited to have this extraordinary Irish artist join our label. One of the most unique and powerful voices out there.’

Junior Brother shared his excitement about the signing: ‘I’m delighted to be bringing my record The End out on such a great label – I look forward to sharing the same roster as such favourites as Peter Doherty, Real Farmer, Warmduscher and loads more. Excitin’ times ahead!’

Following the success of his 2024 single Take Guilt, Junior Brother offers another taste of his upcoming LP with Small Violence, a powerful track that addresses the growing influence of misinformation and the escalating wave of conspiracy-fuelled hatred.

Speaking about the new track, Junior Brother says: ‘Small Violence follows a character pulled in by a small few who enjoy using violent words to stoke real violence further down the line. The intro riff was heavily inspired by the Opening Titles of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a Folk Horror from 1971 which I highly recommend to anyone except the sensible.’

The End is a deeply instinctive yet carefully considered response to the chaos of modern life, with Junior Brother weaving the recent years of upheaval into the eerie folklore of Fairy Forts. These ring-shaped earth mounds, scattered across the Irish countryside, are known to possess an energy that can bewilder, curse, or even lead the unwary astray. Stepping into one is to risk losing yourself – both physically and spiritually. To Junior Brother, this ancient folklore mirrors the disorienting reality of today’s world.

‘The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else,’ Junior Brother explains, ‘like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from Fairy Forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing.’ The End captures this essence, blending the raw textures of traditional Irish music with spectral, unearthly elements.

Much of the album’s inspiration was drawn from UCD’s Folklore Collection on duchas.ie. ‘I delved into the manuscripts – endless eyewitness accounts of Fairy Forts being stepped into and the land altering, the familiar mutating,’ Junior Brother shares. ‘Farmers, teachers, the sober, the smart – all losing their way home one way or the other.’ In these uncanny tales of displacement and confusion, he found striking parallels to the instability and distortion of contemporary life.

Thematically, The End explores forces that work against nature (New Road, Welcome to My Mountain), the rise of the far-right (Small Violence, Today My Uncle Told Me), and confrontations with mortality (Old Bell, Start Digging). Through the lens of rural Irish folklore, the album reflects the bewildering madness of the present moment.

‘The title The End represents the moment after being led astray, when the grip of madness releases you and you suddenly see your way home,’ says Junior Brother. ‘It may reflect the doom of a world gone mad, but it also represents the end of darkness, and the start of a new road.’

Special guest is Pearl Fish.

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When: 7pm on Monday 1 December 2025
Where: The Strines Nightingale, 105 Strines Rd, Strines, Marple, Stockport SK6 7GE

PLEASE NOTE: This show has already sold out! But fear not, Beans on Toast and his band play Band on the Wall on Saturday 14 March – book tickets now. 

Note the early show times: doors 7pm, with Nuala on at 7.30pm and Beans on Toast at 8.30pm (until 10pm).

We’re excited to hosting Beans on Toast’s album launch show at The Strines Nightingale!

Following the announcement of Kill Them With Kindness, the new album from Beans on Toast, due for release December 1st via BOTMusic, the Essex-born folk troubadour has now released the first single to be taken from the album.

Titled The Glastonbury Oak, the breezy, feel-good song tells the true story about a tree Beans on Toast acquired at Glastonbury in 2024, and how it ended up being planted at a pub on the outskirts of the Peak District.

“It’s a story song,” he explains. “I’ve got a lot of songs that celebrate trees, a lot of songs that celebrate music festivals and a lot of songs that celebrate music venues; this song celebrates all three.

“In a sense, it’s a song about ritual, and about giving our lives meaning by placing importance on things that might sometimes be overlooked,” he continues. “This summer, I took a stunt double of the tree to Glastonbury and invited friends, along with random folk I met there, to take the tree on adventures around the festival and film it. The music video is a collection of those clips, alongside footage filmed when I returned to The Strines Nightingale to play another show. This is the fantastic pub where The Glastonbury Oak still stands proud.”

Perfectly, on the very day that the ‘Kill Them With Kindness’ album is due for release on December 1st, Beans on Toast will launch the album at The Strines Nightingale and will check in on The Glastonbury Oak’s growth!

“We’ll be celebrating trees, music, ritual, tradition, and my birthday, Let it grow,” he says.

Recorded at Greenmount Studios in Leeds with The Beans on Toast Band, ‘Kill Them With Kindness’ features a collection of insanely talented musical friends hand-picked from the UK music and festival scene.

“We’ve done a few tours together, but this was our first venture into a studio. Each one of them is amazing, and together… well, I’m proper chuffed with how it sounds,” Beans on Toast explains. “This album is a bit of a juxtaposition, as is the title. There are songs that deal with the current state of the world. Wars, maniac leaders, the rise of AI and the fall of the establishment. Then there are songs about trees, late nights in music venues, art, love and my new cat. As usual, it’s a time stamp of my thoughts and feelings from the past year on planet Earth.”

Beans on Toast hits the road with his full band in March 2026 – including a show at Band on the Wall on Saturday 14 March.

The new record is up there with his finest work to date, bouncing between songs about the shitshow of planet earth and the fall of the establishment, to family life, planting trees, and the absurdities of modern living.

Expect songs, stories, chaos and community in equal measure.

Tour support comes from Nuala.

This show takes place at the Strines Nightingale – a lovely country pub, formerly called the Sportsman, which re-opened in autumn 2022. Strines is on the Piccadilly-Sheffield train line, and on the 358 bus route from Stockport to Hayfield. This show will run until 10.30pm at the latest.

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When: 8pm on Wednesday 3 December 2025
Where: Night & Day Cafe, 26 Oldham St, Manchester, M1 1JN

We’re delighted to working with Will Varley once again!

Will Varley returns with his seventh album, Machines Will Never Learn To Make Mistakes Like Me, to be released 30 May 2025 on MNRK Music Group, home to the likes of The Lumineers, Gregory Alan Isakov and Shakey Graves.

To celebrate, Will has announced even more UK dates to add to his World Tour including shows at the UK’s very best independent venues.

Inspired by his natural habitats of the East Kent Coast and the US Midwest, these songs are rich, lyrical tales that speak of hard touring, relationships on the rocks and the rebuilding of minds. Featuring some very special guest appearances including Billy Bragg, Eleni Drake and Bastille’s Dan Smith, the album continues Varley’s decade long exploration of the human condition, this time focusing on society’s ever-present threat of impending apocalypse, how we marry this with the mundane and the minutiae of our everyday lives and how we can find hope.

Produced at his ramshackle studio deep in the Kent swamps, alongside long-time friend and collaborator Tom Farrer, the album’s pallet marks a significant change in musicality, bringing a rich and luscious production to many of the songs and bringing Varley’s lyrical landscapes to life in full colour.

‘I wrote these songs in empty dive bars and hospital waiting rooms,’ Varley says. ‘I wrote them while sitting in maternity wards, hotel lobbies, motorway service stations and broken down tour buses in the dead of night.

‘This is an album about trying to be a hundred different people at the same time. About the fires you remember when you are alone in the early hours. About the dreams you had once and never thought you’d forget. About trying to raise children while the world is ending outside. About end times and new beginnings.

‘This is an album about hope, desperation and survival. Love and dependency. The things we do not know, the lives we do not live, and trying to find peace in whatever is left.’

Special guest is Chloe Hawes. Chloe Hawes’ unique, transatlantic, sound combines modern British folk with the cinematic sentimentality of classic Americana and a punk rock outlook. Chloe’s triumphant tragedies tell tales of late-night misadventures, lost love and a yearning for both the past and the future with the singer/songwriter at the peak of their powers on debut album Remains/Reminders. 

Chloe’s smoky-voiced storytelling and down-to-earth nature have endeared them to audiences across the UK, Europe and the USA. In recent years, the Essex-born artist has also played sold out shows around the UK, performed at punk festivals in Manchester, Copenhagen, Montreal and Florida.

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When: 7.30pm on Friday 5 December 2025
Where: Manchester Academy 3, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PR

We’re delighted to be working with Ríoghnach Connolly & Honeyfeet once again!

Ríoghnach Connolly and Honeyfeet return in 2025 with Honeyfeet Presents: The Heads, Hearts and Hooves Tour, a bold and celebratory chapter in the journey of one of the most electrifying and genre-defying live acts performing today. Following a string of unforgettable performances, growing international recognition and a new body of work, the band sets out across Europe and North America, carrying their signature blend of protest soul, twisted folk, deep groove and joyful abandon.

At the heart of Honeyfeet is the indomitable Ríoghnach Connolly, winner of the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Award for Best Folk Singer and BBC Radio 2’s Folk Singer of the Year. Her voice, equal parts fierce, tender and fearless, connects ancestral song traditions with contemporary storytelling. In early 2025, she joined Annie Lennox on stage at the Royal Albert Hall for Sisters: Annie Lennox and Friends, a landmark concert that raised funds for The Circle, Lennox’s global feminist organisation. Sharing the bill with artists including Celeste and Nadine Shah, Connolly brought her singular presence to a night that celebrated the transformative power of music and collective voice.

The past eighteen months have seen Honeyfeet on a steady rise. Their They Want What You’ve Got Tour featured a string of acclaimed performances, including shows at The Glasshouse in Gateshead and a headline slot at the Albert Hall in Manchester as part of WOMEX 24. Another unforgettable moment came with their performance at the cliffside Minack Theatre in Cornwall, where the band held the audience in thrall beneath the open sky as the sun dropped into the sea.

Now, with The Heads, Hearts and Hooves Tour, Honeyfeet widen their reach again. Their summer travels include appearances at Gobefest in Manchester and Plein Publique Festival in Belgium, before they journey to Canada for performances at Hillside Festival in Ontario, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Calgary Folk Music Festival. They continue through autumn with appearances at Wilderness, Green Man and Found Festival, concluding the year with a headline show at Manchester Academy 3.

Honeyfeet’s line-up – Lorien Garth Edwards on bass, Ellis Davies on guitar, John Ellis on keyboards, Biff Roxby on brass, and Phill Howley on drums – form a fluid and fearless musical unit. Their live sets move seamlessly between swampy jazz, raucous brass, fractured funk, blues balladry, and folkloric textures, held together by a groove and a commitment to musical freedom. Connolly’s vocals lead the charge, blending mischief, protest and vulnerability into something fiercely human and utterly live.

Their most recent album, It’s Been a While, Buddy, is a rich and expansive record that captures the band at their most expressive. It builds on the legacy of Orange Whip, which was named BBC 6 Music’s Album of the Day, while offering new textures, deeper introspection and a wider dynamic range. The next chapter begins with Glue, the first single from their upcoming body of work, set for release in autumn 2025. Lyrical, rhythmic and emotionally charged, Glue offers a glimpse of where Honeyfeet are headed next. Forward, together, and entirely on their own terms.

A Honeyfeet show is never simply a performance. It is a gathering of stories, rhythms and people. It is movement, connection, and release. With The Heads, Hearts and Hooves Tour, the band invites audiences into a space where music is both a celebration and a reckoning, a place where we listen, dance, and remember what it means to be fully alive.

Special guest is Paddy Steer. ‘It’s a sometime cartoon-like music dense with events, new textures and the colours of children’s paintings, sounds like a Swiss cuckoo clock made of egg boxes and horsehair, glued together by an African Moog player in a Vietnamese iron monger’s shop. Over 10 years I have witnessed Paddy Steer develop his alien avatar in the most difficult of nightclub and festival circumstances. It’s a synthesiser show that is so far away from kling klang clinicalism and the haughty air of the modular meet. On the surface it is a pound shop space program.

‘A one man Mercury capsule born of and attempting escape velocity from the derelict high street of Cash Converters, Maplins, abandoned antiques, yam, export & sari shops. People are drawn in by Paddy’s glowing pantomime. He could be a time traveller from a Victorian night garden with his gas powered calliope or a future Arkestra Brundle Fly with ten Hindu arms. He’s out of time, out of place, quantum now and out of space! Freeze one stacked second and see how many sounds and spaces are being juggled from the bearded brain in the bone case in the cardboard box with the battery watery eyes. In performance after the false starts and furniture adjustments, without fail I‘ve seen the casual listener fall into Paddy’s magic tar pit.’

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

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When: 7pm on Saturday 6 December 2025
Where: Low Four Studio, Deansgate Mews, Great Northern, Manchester M3 4EN

We’re delighted to welcome Yoshika Colwell to Low Four!

On The Wing is the debut album from Yoshika Colwell, released in July by Blue Flowers (Rosie Lowe, Gotts Street Park, Puma Blue). A captivating and sophisticated collection of eleven songs that traverse the outer regions of folk, it is a record of acceptance and self-discovery, rooted in solitude and personal healing, from one of the UK’s most exciting new singer-songwriters.

Previous singles Last Night and Fighting On The Wing both feature on the album, as well as There’s Got To Be A Loser Babe, which features a perfect visual accompaniment from Tilly Wace, who has collaborated with Yoshika on all the album’s creative.

Life, for us all, comes in seasons: the bitter frosts and balmy awakenings that herald the literal passing of time, but also the periods of retreat and re-emergence that bookmark our own individual paths along this mortal coil. For Yoshika, the last decade has found her existing at both ends of the spectrum. Following a period of complete dislocation fuelled by a move to a new town, lockdown and a traumatic break-up all striking in quick succession, it would take a stretch of restorative isolation to bring her back to full creative and personal health. Now, however, all of that sadness and pain, acceptance and slow-dawning hope has been channeled into On The Wing.

Speaking about the album, she says:

‘This album is a bit of a shrine I suppose to all of the pivotal experiences that shaped me during my twenties and it’s also, I feel, a tentative lean towards hopefulness for the future.

‘It is, at its core, an album about acceptance and release, and freedom from old binds. It was an extremely emotional and cathartic record to make. It was a challenge to put all of the things I was scared to say into these songs, to finally let them out of my head without shying away from the ugly or unpalatable emotions, but it felt like the only thing to do.

‘The process felt quite ritualistic, akin to writing down the things you know you need to let go of on a piece of paper and burning it.”

Produced by Oli Bayston (Barry Can’t Swim, Rachel Chinouriri), the album was recorded at Studio Orbb, where Yoshika recorded her critically acclaimed debut EP There’s A Time. Since then, a string of releases have seen support from The New Cue, BBC 6 Music, Paste, The Line of Best Fit and Stereogum, to name a few, whilst Yoshika has played her first shows in the US at SxSW and a sold-out London headline at the Moth Club. This summer she played The Great Escape, Moseley Folk Festival and End of the Road.

Special guest is Caitlin Gilligan. Scottish folk musician Caitlin Gilligan hails from the rolling hills of rural Galloway. Though now based in Liverpool, her songs still echo the wildness of her youth. Weaving age-old folk songs into sets of bare-boned and poetically-crafted originals, she demonstrates refreshing insight whilst simultaneously summoning the voices of times gone by. She draws much inspiration from folk giants such as Anne Briggs, Nick Drake and Lankum as well as traditional vocal music of Scotland, Ireland and America.

This show takes place at Low Four – a recording studio situated on Deansgate Mews in the Great Northern warehouse. This intimate venue features a fully stocked Cloudwater bar.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Book tickets now.

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When: 7.30pm on Saturday 13 December 2025
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG

We’re excited to be working with Jesca Hoop again – this time, at St Michael’s!

Six critically acclaimed albums in, Jesca Hoop’s most recent offering Order of Romance is her most intricate and finely balanced album to date, one that draws on classic song writing, recalling anything from Gershwin to Paul Simon, but creating something that is unmistakably, indelibly Jesca Hoop.

Order of Romance is fruitful marriage of song craft and arrangement, brimming with a cinematic charm, vocal prowess and lyrical wit that signify a new chapter full of new life for an artist who knows her mind, her heart and voice well enough to trust them in uncharted territory. It is a complete work and effervescent culmination of Hoop’s life long practice of singing and the mastery of song.

Tour support is hot springs. Born out of a restless urge to disrupt the humdrum of everyday life — hot springs is a sonic antidote to the mundane. With a mischievous spirit and a love for the unexpected, Manchester-based band leader Rachel Rimmer crafts songs that twist and turn like a fever dream, blending groovy rhythms, off-kilter riffs, and lush, dreamy vocals into something equal parts playful and poignant. With alternative folk intimacy and art-rock spirit – hot springs invites listeners into a world where melodies captivate and structures misbehave. It’s music that dances between chaos and charm, with an instinct for surprising left turns. hot springs’ live shows feature an evolving lineup of musicians drawn from Manchester’s vibrant scene, where Rachel also collaborates with other artists as a band member and freelance producer.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Book tickets now.

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When: 7.30pm on Thursday 22 January 2026
Where: YES Basement, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re delighted to welcome Jeffrey Martin back!

As a babe Jeffrey Martin sought out solitude as often as he could find it. He’s always been that way, and he has never understood the whole phenomenon of smiling in pictures, although he is a very happy guy. One night in middle school he stayed up under the covers with a flashlight and a DiscMan, listening to Reba McEntire’s That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia on repeat until the DiscMan ran out of batteries. That night he became a songwriter, although he didn’t actually write a song until years later. After high school he spent a few years distracting himself from having to gather up the courage to do what he knew he had to do.

Eventually he found his way to a writing degree, and then a teaching degree. He wrote most days like his life depended on it, all sorts of things, not just songs, but songs too. He fell in love with teaching high school English, which was fantastic because he never thought he’d actually come to truly love it. His students were fierce and unstoppable forces of noise and curiosity, and for all that they took from him in sleep and sense, they gave him a hundred times back in sparks and humility.

All the while he was also playing truckloads of music. There was one weekend where he flew to LA while grading essays on the plane, played two shows, and then flew back home, still grading essays, and woke up to teach at 5am on Monday morning. It was around this time he started wondering if such a life was sustainable.

Alas, music, the tour life, was a constant raccoon scratching at the back door. Jeffrey spent nights on end sitting up in bed, and then sitting on the front porch, staring off into the dark, wondering if he could bear to leave teaching to go on tour full time. Eventually his brain caught up with what his guts had known for months. With tears in his eyes he announced to his students that he wouldn’t be back the following year, and that he didn’t feel right hollering at them to chase their dreams at all cost if he wasn’t going to do the same.

Jeffrey Martin tours full time now. He is always making music, and he is always coming through your town. He misses teaching like you might miss a good old friend who you know you’ll meet again.

‘[In Thank God We Left The Garden,] Martin has delivered one of the finest albums of recent times, which if there is any justice should elevate him to the very forefront of the current crop of confessional singer-songwriters and sit high in all the end of year top ten lists’ – Americana UK

‘Reminiscent of early Nathaniel Rateliff and John Moreland, and prime John Prine, there’s no reason here to doubt that Martin might one day eclipse them all’ – Mojo

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When: 7.30pm on Thursday 22 January 2026
Where: The Strines Nightingale, 105 Strines Rd, Strines, Marple, Stockport SK6 7GE

We’re excited to welcoming Jim Moray to the Strines Nightingale for an intimate show!

Jim Moray is an English folk musician, singer, and producer known for his innovative approach to traditional folk music. First gaining notice in the early 2000s for his startling reimagining of traditional songs, blending acoustic instrumentation with electronic production, he has established himself as one of the key figures in the English Folk Revival of the last 25 years.

A true polymath, he is known for playing nearly all the instruments on his recordings as well as producing, arranging and mixing. He is also in demand as a producer for both a new generation of forward-looking folk musicians and the older generation of musicians who came before him. Never satisfied with staying still, the artist is still moving after shaking the folk world to its foundations twenty years ago. And in a genre where musicians reach their peak the older they get, there’s a sense that he has only just begun.

Tour support comes from Maz O’Connor.  Described by the Observer as ‘a highly individual singer-songwriter’, Maz O’Connor is a truly unique artist. From Cumbria with Irish roots, Maz is known for her haunting, emotive vocals and her poetic lyricism. Her songs are most often short stories inspired by her love of literature, folklore and mythology. She wrote her first song aged four, whilst making a ‘radio show’ with a cassette player and her older brothers, and grew up singing folk songs in her local Cumbrian venues.

Winning a BBC Performing Arts Fund Fellowship in 2014 (once won by Adele) brought Maz to wider attention, and later that year she was nominated for a BBC Folk Award for her first album, This Willowed Light. Maz has since released three further albums, toured the UK, Europe and Canada, played live sessions on BBC Radio 2 and 3, and appeared at major UK festivals, including Glastonbury and WOMAD. Her upcoming album, Love it is a Killing Thing, is a collection of her favourite folk songs re-composed, recorded live to tape. It will be released in 2026.

‘Maz O’Connor’s ace, apart from her remarkable songwriting talent, is her captivating voice’ – Q

This show takes place at the Strines Nightingale – a lovely country pub, formerly called the Sportsman, which re-opened in autumn 2022. Strines is on the Piccadilly-Sheffield train line, and on the 358 bus route from Stockport to Hayfield. This show will run until 10.30pm at the latest.

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When: 7.30pm on Friday 23 January 2026
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Fust for the first time!

What does it mean to be from the South today? To try to reconcile the struggles and possibilities of Southern experience through songs, through words? Is it worth it? Are there secrets still worth revealing?

Fust – the lyrical powerhouse Southern rock band from Durham, North Carolina – have made these questions the heart of their work and, more than ever before, it is the drama at play on their new record Big Ugly. Fust joins a long tradition of artists that have tried to present life in the dirty South, from the lived-in short stories of Breece and Ann Pancake to the traditional record-keeping of John Jacob Niles to the southern rock historicism of Drive-By Truckers. For these artists and for Fust, making sense of the South is a necessity because history is what hurts and in the words of Hemingway, our call is to “write hard and clear, about what hurts.”

Big Ugly is an 11-song testament to doing just that, with band leader Aaron Dowdy pushing his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness in Southern life. The seeds for Big Ugly began when Dowdy – a distant relative of Maybelle Carter and the infamous Hatfields who grew up in southwest Virginia at the foothills of coal country – started taking trips with his grandmother to southern West Virginia over the past few years. Walking around the places she grew up, he was moved by how those melodramas of holler life from over half a century ago were afire in her still. Those trips came pouring over him when he was in Europe in 2023, longing for home and beginning to trace the outlines of a new record. There, he saw a millenia-old gutter on the ground, a shoddy yet time-honoured remnant memorialised with a placard off the streets of modern Athens. “I’ve spent countless hours hanging out by fallen gutters out back of rundown houses throughout the South” says Dowdy. “I never thought to think of them as monuments of the future.” These two interrelated themes were the first two entries in Dowdy’s miles-long notes app for what would become Big Ugly and illuminate its core themes: the blurrings of past and present, the once magnificent now in disrepair, and how a certain love and honour for the squalor of today can become the promise of a future.

Big Ugly is the third album by Fust on their longtime label home of Dear Life Records, who gained notoriety with MJ Lendermans’ Boat Songs, and have become a haven for contemporary songwriters. Their studio debut, 2023’s Genevieve, was recorded with producer Alex Farrar (Manning Fireworks, Rat Saw God, Tomorrow’s Fire) in Asheville, North Carolina, and received rave reviews from Pitchfork, Stereogum, Paste and more. Recorded with Farrar over ten days in June of 2024, Big Ugly is the explosive result of Fust uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, emboldened to deliver both their most intimate songwriting and biggest sound to date. The members – Aaron Dowdy, drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning – weave their voices alongside guests like Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes) across music that sounds like a conversation between old friends, and is exactly that.

The songs on Big Ugly are hearteningly varied, moving from beer-fisted radio country to elegiac drones and deconstructed ballads. Between big chords and Dowdy’s instantly recognisable voice, opener “Spangled” begins as any 21st century American ballad might: “they tore down the hospital/ Out on route eleven,” and snowballs into a drunk ghost’s reverie: “I’m feeling like heaven/ I’m feeling like a sparkler/ That’s been thrown off a roof/ And I’m left floating off VA-305.” Dowdy’s lyrics superimpose the obtuse and the palatable, kitchen-table images from a spotty memory, beater cars mystically lifted. Characters come and go like old friends as in “Bleached”: “The last I heard of Corey/ He was living on the national dirtway/ I’m thinking of his summer blonding / In those days I was barely happening.” The album’s themes culminate in the sing-along anthem “Mountain Language,” which laments the poverties of Southern life at the same time that it celebrates a higher poverty – a country utopia that’s just out of grasp, where we could live if we could only “make it up the mountain again.” This rural hermeticism and dime-store everyday are the two sides of every insignificant thing in the town of Big Ugly.

The record cross-stitches fact and fiction, following tough-skinned characters who inhabit its titular town. These stories are Dowdy spinning yarn from his unique trove of Southern experience, as both insider and outsider to its deeply contradictory charms: raised Jewish in an often antagonistically born-again region, encouraged to write early on despite ridicule, and inspired to leave for northern cities only to return with a newly realised and committed fury. But despite the fictions Dowdy personally winds his way through, “Big Ugly” is also a very real place: a small, unincorporated area in southern West Virginia around where Dowdy’s family has deep roots. The album cover—a mural from the Big Ugly Community Center depicting the area around Big Ugly Creek – was painted by locals for a 2004 play performed by the children that interpreted their elders’ stories. On Big Ugly, Fust reimagine the life depicted in the mural between its bars, gas stations, general stores, and double-wides, its inhabitants finding history and meaning in the banal theatre of their own private jerkwater. Like Dowdy’s grandmother watching the cinema of her childhood atop the now tumbledown river valleys of her youth, Big Ugly makes you feel like there are still memories worth making and stories worth telling in the most unlikely of places.

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When: 7pm on Saturday 24 January 2026
Where: YES Basement, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re delighted to be helping Juice Pops launch their debut album!

After four years of quietly crafting their sound, Manchester’s Juice Pops are ready to make some noise. With their debut album Living Books, the quartet step confidently into their hometown spotlight, launching the record with a special gig at YES Basement.

Since forming in 2018 and releasing their self-titled EP in 2021, Juice Pops have evolved from purveyors of bright, sunshine-pop to something altogether more richly textured. Their brand of upbeat indie rock now sprawls across genres – psychedelia, post-hardcore, garage rock, surf, and power pop all collide in an exuberant mix that feels both nostalgic and modern.

Recent singles have hinted at this broadening vision. The Death of Anne Boleyn drew praise from DJ Tom Robinson as a “lo-fi earworm” and picked up spins on BBC Radio 6, while their touring schedule has seen them fill storied venues like Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club and light up festival stages from coast to coast, including a memorable turn at 2024’s Truck Festival in Oxfordshire.

Living Books channels a restless energy into a set of songs that swing between mania and melancholy, packed with lyrical flights of imagination – cathedrals, time machines, stargazing, and haunted heroines straight from the pages of Tolstoy. Musically, it’s a fever dream of intertwining twin guitars, harmonies and vintage organ swells, balancing moments of lush introspection against sharp, tonally shifting bursts of chaos. BBC Introducing Manchester have already hailed lead single Heavyweight Champion as “that sweet intersection of noise and bliss that makes magic.”

With Living Books, Juice Pops make their most confident statement yet—channelling their creative chaos into a debut alive with imagination and a fearless sense of musical adventure.

Support comes from Precious Metals. Precious Metals formed in Sheffield in 2018. Their beachcombing post-punk riffs, psychedelic keys and earworming alternative pop harmonies have the band surfing somewhere on the Pacific Ocean between 90s Olympia and Connan Mockasin’s tripped-out New Zealand. Their lyrics are inspired by bottled messages found in post-industrial waterways, the social politics of Cold War Germany, Mongolian wildlife – or, in the case of ‘Portholes’, were written entirely by a pair of schoolgirls from Rotherham.

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