When: 7pm on Friday 7 February 2025
Where: Low Four Studio, Deansgate Mews, Great Northern, Manchester M3 4EN

Gratis – our series of free entry shows – returns, with Sophie Jamieson, celebrating the release of her second album!

Sophie Jamieson is a London-based singer-songwriter, known for delivering uncomfortably honest songs direct to the heart. Her career began on the 2012 London new-folk scene and spans initial early success, a breakdown, a withdrawal from music for many years followed by a comeback which culminated with her debut album, Choosing, being released on Bella Union Records, 10 years after she first emerged.

Sophie’s experience of these ups and downs can be heard in her deep, raw voice which pivots from wobbling vulnerability to soaring, pent-up longing unleashed. Committed to releasing the deepest corners of her humanity on the stage in the most uncompromising way, this has not gone unnoticed over the years while she has opened for the likes of Father John Misty, Ezra Furman and Marika Hackman to name a few. Choosing received widespread critical acclaim for its candid examination of the self-destructive urge, with high praise from the likes of Uncut, Mojo and The Financial Times.

Her second LP, I still want to share, will be released on Bella Union in January 2025. A record of flourished ambition, intricate song-writing, expanded heart and deepened voice, Sophie is not slowing down in her commitment to hold nothing back, to face the ugly longings of the human race with love, curiosity and acceptance.

Special guest is Rosie Miles. Alt-folk singer-songwriter Rosie Miles is a storyteller whose soaring melodies and poetic lyrics serve as her ink and pen. ‘A gifted and charismatic songwriter’ (Tom Robinson, BBC Radio 6), inspired by Joni Mitchell, Madison Cunningham and Laura Marling, her music dances effortlessly between the worlds of indie, folk and jazz, evoking a welcome nostalgia of the 70s songwriter movement. Rosie’s deeply personal and peculiar style guarantees a night of tears, laughter and classic songwriting.

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

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

This is a free entry show! Click here to reserve your place

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When: 8pm on Thursday 13 February 2025
Where: Night & Day Cafe, 26 Oldham St, Manchester, M1 1JN

We’re delighted to be welcome Anna B Savage back to Manchester!

A sense of rootedness is at the heart of Anna B Savage’s third record You and i are Earth, a record that is as much about healing as it is an unbowed sense of curiosity, and, more simply, ‘a love letter to a man and to Ireland’.

Following on from her critically acclaimed records A Common Turn and in|FLUX, You and i are Earth manages to convey a sense of intimacy, while also being open-ended. Sounds of the sea and bright-eyed strings coax us on opening song Talk to Me, a study in tenderness, which brings us to a place of the elemental. It is a charged signifier that sets the tone, ‘I don’t think I feel nervous because of the intimacy of it,’ says Savage, ‘the thing I feel nervous about is that it is so delicate and subtle, and the attention economy has made us desire big shiny things that will whisk us away.’

Yet You and i are Earth transports differently, swept along by an abiding sense of calm, a major progression from Savage’s earlier work, ‘when I was writing the first record, it felt difficult. I wanted to make sense of something I didn’t really understand. Then with the second record I had done some therapy, and was getting to grips with myself, but my old self was still pulling me back a bit, but with this one it was quite different.’

Gentleness is as radiant a touchstone on the record as earthiness, something that Savage attributes to the place she finds herself at present, both geographically and emotionally. And quite literally the record bears witness to a particular piece of earth – Ireland, and Savage’s relationship to it as her new home.

Savage’s connection to Ireland goes back over a decade to when she studied a poetry Masters in Manchester, where both her teachers were Irish, ‘and I totally fell in love with Seamus Heaney,’ she recalls. ‘Then in 2020 I did a Masters in Music (in Dublin) and was reading essays about sean-nós singing, watching Cartoon Saloon stuff, reading about Irish mythology – I wanted to educate myself’. Since then Anna has spent much of her time on the west coast of Ireland, dipping back to her home in County Donegal between bouts of touring (this year supporting The Staves and St Vincent – having previously toured with Father John Misty and Son Lux amongst others) and trips to London for work (this year alone she has soundtracked a new Alex Lawther-directed short film Rhoda, which premieres at London Film Festival – and was part of Mike Lindsay’s Supershapes – a collaborative album and super-group led by the Tunng and LUMP producer and multi-instrumentalist).

This delicate, yet blossoming, relationship with her new home is all laid bare in her pact with the sea on Donegal, where amid skittering percussion, she asks it to ‘please look after me’, and then Mo Cheol Thú which morphs into an almost-lullaby for a person, a place, and perhaps, a hope. ‘One of the things that I was reading while I was making this record was Manchán Magan’s book 32 words for Field, and the idea that language can have an explicit connection to the land. When I am in Ireland, that sense of grounding is vast but also intimate, and sometimes it’s a bit magical and sometimes a bit scary.’

It’s fitting then, that You & i are Earth folds in some of Ireland’s brightest contemporary musicians, with Kate Ellis and Caimin Gilmore from Crash Ensemble, Cormac Dermody from Lankum and Anna Mieke contributing vocals, strings, harmonium, bouzouki, taishogoto and clarinets to the album, all tied together by producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, Black Midi).

A sense of reckoning underpins a compassionate piece of work, with a conflation of many strands; histories and people, and nature and human nature, with the title song You and i are Earth taking inspiration from a 17th century plate that was found in a London sewer that has inscribed that unifying sentiment. And yet the song, while epic, is also pared back and graceful, warming to something that sounds like a swirling storm of strings. The record is not trying to hide anything, but instead unfurls a vulnerability that binds, such as on the delicate I Reach for You in My Sleep with its dreamy marriage of guitar and choral flecks, and the sweetly aching The Rest of Our Lives, which really serve Savage’s magnetic, elegant voice.

That process is brilliantly rendered on Agnes, a complicated piece of work featuring Anna Mieke that turns on tropes of duality and transformation. It mirrors an unsettling experience that Savage had through meditation, which ultimately ended in an immersive, beautiful feeling, ‘I felt like I was part of the earth, completely connected to the mycelium network, I felt like I was where I was meant to be.’

In many ways, that experience framed the album’s artwork, a photograph taken in some woodlands in Co. Sligo, with Savage looking up at the trees, their fractals reflected in her eyes, mirroring something she had felt in her meditation, bringing us back full circle, and to that sense that we are essentially in unison, or at least striving to be, that ‘you and I are earth’.

Tour support comes from Cub Zoa. Cub Zoa is the solo project of Brighton-based musician and producer Jack Wolter. Originally from the Isle of Man, Jack left the island and spent his early twenties in Cornwall where he studied fine art. Wolter makes music born from the lo-fi bedroom producer era, soaked in handmade textures and melodies inspired by experimental indie, post and alt-rock music. With three self-produced/released EPs uploaded to Bandcamp over the last few years, Wolter is currently working on recording new music whilst carrying out his residency at Bella Union Studios. Jack and his sister Lily are also the core of the band Penelope Isles.

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When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 19 February 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with C Duncan once again!

Born and raised in Glasgow by two classical musicians, Chris Duncan – aka C Duncan – studied piano and viola before taking up guitar, bass, and drums in his teens, eventually studying music composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

After graduating he began work on his first album, writing and recording everything from home. His Mercury Prize-nominated debut Architect was released in 2015 and after a spell of touring the UK and Europe he returned to his home studio and began work on his Twilight Zone-inspired second album The Midnight Sun, which was released in 2016 and shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year.

He supported Elbow on their UK and North American tour, which led him to record his third album Health at their studio in Salford with Craig Potter, which was released in 2019 and also shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year.

Chris signed to Bella Union and released his fourth album Alluvium in 2022. Following this he produced records for Scottish harpist Gillian Fleetwood, and Downton Abbey actor Michael C. Fox, as well as writing music for documentaries and orchestral commissions.

Chris’s new album It’s Only A Love Song was recorded in his ‘new and improved’ home studio and will be released in January 2025. He is also a keen artist and paints all his album artwork.

Tour support comes from Flora Hibberd. Flora Hibberd was born in London, and lives in Paris. In 2019 she released her debut EP, The Absentee, through London-based indie Clearlight Records. Critics described being ‘swept away by her deeply moving emotional presence’ (Folk Radio UK) and called Flora ‘a marvellous newcomer to the realm of indie folk’ (PopMatters).

In September 2020 she started working with Paris-based producer Victor Claass, putting out a second EP, Archipelago, followed in 2021 by the short album Hold. In January 2025 Flora released her latest album Swirl via US label 22 Twenty.

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When: 7.30pm on Friday 21 February 2025
Where: Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6BF 

We’re delighted to welcome Dustin O’Halloran back to Manchester!

Dustin O’Halloran is an American pianist and composer with six acclaimed solo albums under his own name, and is a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen, which has released five albums, some based on scores and soundtracks.

He previously released music with dreampop band Devics – which he co-founded with Sara Lov in his late teens before embarking on a solo career. Tracks from his debut solo album Piano Solos (2004) caught the attention of music supervisor Brian Reitzell, who shared them with Sofia Coppola to help inspire her script for Marie Antoinette. Coppola invited him to contribute music to the film, which marked his breakthrough as a film composer. These tracks were subsequently included in his second solo album Piano Solos Vol 2 (2006).

O’Halloran’s third and fourth solo albums Vorleben (2010) and Lumiere (2011) followed, with the latter being mixed by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. In 2011, he also co-founded the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, while continuing his work scoring films.

As part of A Winged Victory For The Sullen, he worked on Jalil Lespert’s film In the Shadow of Iris in 2016. This music was released as the album Iris the same year. The band’s catalogue also includes Atomos (2014), based on music composed for a dance piece by Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer for The Royal Ballet in London; The Undivided Five (2019), which was released by Ninja Tune; and their last album Invisible Cities (2021), released as a side project under their own label Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing. It contains music from the Manchester International Festival-produced live performance Invisible Cities, which the band scored in 2019.

O’Halloran signed with renowned classical music label Deutsche Grammophon in early 2019, releasing the EP Sundoor (2019), which offers a 20-minute piece entitled ‘196 Hz’, adapted from a 2017 site-specific composition for cross-disciplinary American artist Slater Bradley’s ‘Sundoor At World’s End’. His next album released by the label, Silfur (2021), revisits select songs from his catalogue, exploring time and place. In 2021, he contributed What Gently Flutters to the Deutsche Grammophon Christmas album Winter Tales, featuring Bryan Senti.

O’Halloran also produced Katy Perry’s Into Me You See on her 2017 album Witness, collaborated with Gyda Valty?sdóttir for the EP 3 Movements in 2017, and appears on Leonard Cohen’s 2019 posthumous album Thanks For The Dance.

In 2019 he premiered the electronic composition 1 0 0 1 at Minneapolis’s Liquid Music Series with choreographer Fukiko Takase. It was well-received, but subsequent productions were halted by the pandemic. O’Halloran’s latest record 1 0 0 1, released on Deutsche Grammophon in March 2024, is an expansion of that composition, marking a departure from the introspective solo piano music with which he first made his name. Recorded at RRO Studios in Reykjavík, it features his collaborator Bryan Senti on violin, an eight-voice choir, Paul Corley on electronic production, and the Budapest Art Orchestra orchestrated by Roman Vinuesa, mixed by Francesco Donadello.

Tour support comes from Margaret Hermant. Margaret Hermant is a violinist, harpist and composer based in Brussels, who graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. She is a founding member of several music groups, including Echo Collective, Quatuor MP4 and BOW quintet. Her collaborations with these ensembles have involved working with a variety of renowned artists, such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Adam Wiltzie, Dustin O’Halloran, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Stars of the Lid, Joep Beving, Christina Vantzou and Rutger Hoedemaekers. These collaborations have helped bring to life works in the Post Classical Music genre.

Age restriction: 14+. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

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When: 7pm on Friday 21 February 2025
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

PLEASE NOTE: This show has sold out! Watch this space for details of future Chuck Prophet shows.

We’re excited to working with Chuck Prophet for the first time – touring with his band, Chuck Prophet & His Cumbia Shoes!

California singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer Chuck Prophet has released a new collaborative album with Cumbia group ¿Qiensave? called Wake The Dead through Yep Roc Records. An extraordinary and unlikely pairing, Prophet and ¿Qiensave? blend seamlessly together as the collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music, which consumed and comforted Prophet during a recent bout with stage four lymphoma and subsequent recovery.

Chuck has also announced a run of fifteen UK shows, marking his biggest tour in several years, for early 2025, with Chuck joined by both members of ¿Qiensave? and James DePrato and Vicente Rodriguez from his band the Mission Express. In support, they shared the album’s lead single and title track Wake The Dead, an anthem that reckons with forces beyond our control while learning to let go, a recurring theme at the core of the album.

‘I never want to be a downer,’ stated Prophet. ‘This record doesn’t shy away from darkness, but it always feels hopeful. When I was growing up listening to The Clash and their flirtations with reggae, the thing I remember most is how the music hit me, how it made me feel. The more you listened, the more was revealed, but on the most fundamental level, those records just felt good, and that was really important to me with this album.’

Prophet’s fascination with Cumbia music began after experiencing a weekly Cumbia night at a local haunt of his in San Francisco’s Mission district. He quickly became obsessed: collecting old vinyl from Latin America, studying its origins, DJing, and loading his friends up with new mixes every time they came to visit. After he was diagnosed, he had a lot of time to just sit and listen as he went through treatments. ‘I was going through a tunnel,’ he recalls. ‘It was dark. But I had music: music to play, music to listen to, music to get me out of my head. Music was my saviour.’ More than any other genre, Cumbia served as a faithful musical companion and reprieve during his immunotherapy and chemotherapy.

Once he was finally feeling better, Prophet started driving out to Salinas on a regular basis to jam with a group he’d fallen in love with called ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community. The sessions came together on a whim, for the sheer fun of it at first, but Prophet soon invited the band to back him up at a couple of live shows, and the immediate reaction from audiences made it clear they were on to something special. Prophet and ¿Qiensave? hit the studio soon afterwards, where they blended with his longtime backing band, The Mission Express, to track the heart of Wake The Dead live on the floor. It was chaotic at times, cramming as many as eight musicians into the same studio space, but they prioritised gut feeling over sonic perfection and allowed the undeniable energy of the performances to guide them.

The result is a profoundly adventurous celebration of life that balances hope and fear in equal measure, a rich and exultant meditation on what really matters from an artist who always manages to find the light, even in the face of the most oppressing darkness. Prophet approaches the style not as an academic or historian, but as a fan with a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiosity. The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, all but demanding you move your body while you listen, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.

Tour support comes from Our Man In The Field. ‘I think of Our Man In The Field as kind of a character and not really even me,’ says Alex Ellis. ‘Something like a Jack Kerouac or an Albert Camus. A writer and a correspondent, a roving reporter but more like a TV version in the ‘70s; Hunter S Thompson but less guns and LSD. Mostly, I don’t want the listener to think about the songs as being mine or about me, it’s more about the story and the characters in there. They’re always about real people and hopefully that makes them relatable.’

Last Dance, the first single to be released from Gold On the Horizon, harkens to the sonic aesthetic of early Johnny Flynn and Ondara while Ellis sings of friends who went through a traumatic breakup. In the song, one romantic partner asks for a quiet departure from the relationship (‘If you’re leaving in the morning / Go before the sun comes up’) while the other requests another chance at redemption (‘If you’re leaving in the morning / Can I have one last dance’). The emotional push and pull is offset by the band’s bright, upbeat, sophisticated indie-folk feel, crafted by a country fiddle melody, groovy backbeat, oscillating synth line, and Ellis’s warm and comforting vocal timbre.

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When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 5 March 2025
Where: The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LE

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

The Ocelots are twin brothers Ashley and Brandon Watson from Wexford, Ireland.

Building on the folk-rock essence of their debut, the duo are excited to announce the release of their second album, Everything, When Said Slowly, on 7 February 2025. This album unveils a richer, more expansive sound, produced by long-time collaborators Cillian and Lorcan Byrne (Ailbhe Reddy, Susan O’Neill).

The narrative woven throughout the album explores themes of Irish migration, the perception of time, love, and the simple joys of cycling.

To support the album, the band are delighted to take the road in the UK for a string of dates around its release.

Main support comes from The Memory Club. The Memory Club are a young indie-folk group based in Manchester. Utilising gorgeous harmony and brutally honest lyricism, the small collective relay a great deal of sentiment with a unique and playful charm.

Opening the show is Sinead Una. Sinead Una is a folk-pop songwriter known for a distinctive voice and evocative lyrics. Her work is driven by intimate storytelling, as shown through her debut single Wild Side.

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When: 7.30pm on Thursday 6 March 2025
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

When: 7.30pm on Saturday 8 March 2025
Where: The Lending Room, 229 Woodhouse Ln, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 3AP

We’re excited to welcome Sean Rowe back – this time, to Manchester and Leeds!

Though he grew up in the generally frozen landscape of Troy, New York, Sean Rowe spent many of his formative summers in DeLand, Florida where his father was a residential caretaker at a home for troubled youths. It was there, in a mercifully air-conditioned, mostly unused building filled with donated musical instruments, where he taught himself to play drums and then bass. Sean credits those early experiences for what has evolved into his distinctly low and percussive approach to guitar playing.

During those same years, when he wasn’t listening to heavy metal or building his early musical chops, Sean was in the woods exploring, foraging, and obsessively learning all that he could about the natural world around him. Since then, his fascination with the subject has only grown and through his web-series, Can I Eat This?, he’s found a means of indulging two of his great passions: music and nature. In each of the forthcoming episodes, Sean will guide a fellow musician on a foraging mission for all manner of wild foods. The two will use their harvest to prepare some tasty creations and end their adventure by performing a cover song together.

Over the course of his career, Sean Rowe has recorded five full-length albums and several EPs. His music has been used widely throughout film and television, with notable examples including NBC’s hit dramas The Blacklist and Parenthood. Rowe’s song To Leave Something Behind was one of two non-score tracks to be featured in Ben Affleck’s hit 2016 feature film, The Accountant. The song accompanied the film’s final scene and has since received nearly 14 million streams on Spotify alone.

MANCHESTER:

Support comes from Granfalloon. Richard Lomax (AKA Granfalloon) first embarked on writing songs for a proposed year-long journal in 2014 – a maddening yet rewarding journey that documented the fever dream of a chaotic year in the form of 52 pieces of music. This sonic journal rested until 2022 when 12 songs were reawakened, re-recorded under studio conditions, and released as Calendar – Volume I. It was to be the first instalment of a triptych; it focussed on traditional songwriting, and not quite traditional storytelling, to chisel out small, beautiful moments.

This was followed by 2023’s Calendar – Chapter II, a collaboration with fellow songwriter Lobelia Lawson. Chapter II took the ideas, concepts and rough sketches of 2014 and rewrote them entirely, making new songs and fresh pieces of music with Lobelia. Now, a decade after its initial conception, Calendar – Phase III completes the journey, taking those 52 ramblings, ideas, half-baked thoughts and overcooked dreams and turning them into a trio of albums.

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LEEDS:

Support comes from Lewis Pugh. Lewis Pugh is a prolific songwriter influenced by everything from bluegrass, country, folk through to skiffle and punk. Brought up going to bluegrass and folk festivals with his family who were often performing, such as Cambridge Folk Festival and Edale Bluegrass Festival, Lewis’ appreciation of roots music came at a young age.

After playing in countless punk and metal bands from age of 12 until 26, Lewis gradually shifted back to the music of his upbringing. Self-releasing his first solo album in 2017, he has since released Dark Wheels turn Above Our Heads in 2020 and Bullets for Bread in 2024, finding a sound between country, folk and bluegrass with a distinct political slant. In between albums there have been countless singles and EPs, often raising money for homeless outreaches or food banks.

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The Leeds show is a co-promotion with the Brudenell.

When: 7.30pm on Friday 7 March 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Jim Ghedi once again – this time, with his band!

On his new album Wasteland, Jim Ghedi has created something huge. Intense, brooding, bold, at times apocalyptic, and remarkably vast. A profoundly bold sonic statement that is some of the most rich, far-reaching and ambitious work that Ghedi has created to date – pushing the boundaries of what what folk music can be in 2025.

Wasteland is a record that is unafraid to plunge into the darkness of the modern world and embrace the weirder, edgier and more unnerving moments that come from doing so. It is an album that captures all the enormity of life from the micro to the macro, zooming in on the personal as well reflecting on broader societal issues.

‘Wasteland is about the idea of a place once known or familiar that is now broken down and unrecognisable,’ says Ghedi. ‘It’s about exploring the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment collapse.’ And within that you have a lot going on. ‘It also explores death, personal loss, grief, mental health and how the natural world provides solace and meaning for that loss and how these worlds blur into one another.’

Lead single Wasteland sets the tone for the album, a remarkable and one of Ghedi’s entirely original composition. A stunning piece of work that while rooted in an environment being corrupted and broken – ‘there’s violence on these hills,’ Ghedi sorrowfully sings, before claiming this is no longer somewhere that can be called home – it is also a stirringly beautiful composition that soars and glides as it opens up, as sweeping strings swoop and in and out of Ghedi’s twangy electric guitar.

The accompanying video for Wasteland was shot and directed by Jordan Carroll in various parts of the Peaks District. ‘The idea was initially inspired by the album artwork featuring Jim sitting in a quarry, dressed in a 17th-century gentry outfit. We asked ourselves: why is this character there, asleep on a stool? There was something fantastical about it, so we filled in the blanks and built a story around it.’

The decision to incorporate more fuller sounds, such as electric guitar and huge drums, results in a notable shift and evolution in tone for Ghedi. ‘The lyrical content needed something more band-driven and loud to deliver them,’ he explains. ‘Incorporating the electric guitar in my songwriting was also a big part of opening the sound up, using drop tunings pushed me to use my voice in a wider range, which forced me to use falsetto a lot which I haven’t previously done before. That then opened the sound up and gave me creative ideas for bigger arrangements and to sonically really push things.’

Recorded over two years at Tesla Studios in Sheffield, with David Glover engineering and producing, the album features a wide cast of musicians such as David Grubb (fiddle), Daniel Bridgwood-Hill (fiddle), Neal Heppleston (bass), Joe Danks (drums), Dean Honer from I Monster (synths), Cormac MacDiarmada from Lankum (vocals), Ruth Clinton from Landless (vocals) and Amelia Baker from Cinder Well (vocals).

When Ghedi began working on this album he felt a little lost, unmoored, and unstable. Unsure of himself and the world around him. ‘I felt very frustrated with the state of England after moving back home to Sheffield from living in Ireland for a couple of years,’ he recalls. Yet while this album is one that has unquestionably come from a tricky place for Ghedi on a personal level, it’s also a record that contains flashes of hope and beauty amidst agonising demise and loss. ‘It was definitely quite a dark time writing the album and working on it,’ he says. ‘But it was also a joyous and uplifting experience. There was a real positive force around it and it felt quite cathartic and so much energy and enthusiasm was getting put into it. Also, I think this album is the closest I’ve got to the sound I’ve been working towards over the years. It feels like it’s at a place which most represents me.’

Despite all the turbulence that underpins this record, in the process of creating his masterpiece Ghedi has musically found a place he can now call home.

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When: 7.30pm on Saturday 8 March 2025
Where: Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6BF

PLEASE NOTE: Due to exceptional demand, this show has been upgraded to Hallé St Peter’s. All other details are the same and original tickets remain valid.

The upgraded show has now sold out.

We’re excited to be working with Fionn Regan for the first time.

With November’s tour having long-since sold out, and his new album O Avalanche out 1 November via Nettwerk Music Group, Fionn Regan announces news of an epic UK and Ireland tour for February and March 2025.

Fionn Regan has shared the singles Islands, Headphones, Blood is Thicker Than Wine and Farewell from O Avalanche.

‘I float sometimes when you’re around,’ sings Regan on Islands, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Mallorca, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion. Between its sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it’s a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting.

His first since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Regan’s words, ‘very much on a level’ – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan explains, ‘I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.’

Rippling like the sea, Islands sets that magic-hour mood, using images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. That flow leads to Valencia for the luminous Teix Mountain, which evokes the off-piste mountain spirit of its title and the album as a whole. Its rarefied sense of romanticism also extends to the title track, where Regan’s long-standing friendAnna Friel provides beautifully delivered vocals for an almost hallucinatory hymn to companionship. Braided with haunting references to storms and ‘summer ghosts’, it’s a song lit with inner faith, breaking out in the declaration, ‘I believe there’s a light that brings good souls together’.

From here, O Avalanche moves from a sense of loved-up drift to a state of serene, unforced resolve. ‘Written in a dream,’ says Regan, Farewell is a tenderly up-tempo take on partings, sorrowed yet beautifully becalmed in its looping arrangement. Into the Light of the Sun has a feeling of resolution about it, unfurling ‘like a burst of energy,’ says Regan, while album closer Deià Song/Llucalcari resembles a soft, supple awakening from a dream of summer, eyes wide open in readiness for new horizons.

‘I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,’ says Regan. It took him two or three albums’ worth of material to find the songs that felt simpatico – the ones that ‘started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album’. Capturing the mood, Regan wrote the record while staying in Mallorca, a place he describes as his ‘true north’: ‘There’s a sense of an artistic energy there, where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You’re sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There’s a kind of focus, a feeling that you’re tuned in to something.’

Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty Dogwood Blossom drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s The Meeting Of The Waters while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. ‘I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,’ says Regan.

Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. ‘It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,’ he says of the album. ‘The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.’ With the gentlest of touches, O Avalanche will sweep you off your feet.

Tour support comes from Lemoncello. Laura Quirke and Claire Kinsella’s collaboration charms audiences into a world of intimate observations and uncomfortable questions with irresistible chemistry, charisma, and humour. ‘Why are all the good men, too old, taken or dead?’

The rare alchemy of the duo’s voices together cuts through a minimal and dramatic soundscape; coloured by the warmth and grit of Kinsella’s cello, and distinctly underpinned by Quirke’s cyclical, trance-like guitar playing. While embedded in Irish and folk roots, Lemoncello’s sound embraces the freedom of carving out its own song structures, entwined with a love of off-kilter indie-pop, jazz extemporisation and romantic and contemporary classical music.

‘They write like Wet Leg and sing like Laura Marling’ – Joshua Burnside

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

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 11 March 2025
Where: Band on the Wall, 26 Swan Street, Manchester M4 5JZ

We’re excited to be welcoming The Weather Station back – this time, to Band on the Wall.

The Weather Station – the project of Toronto-based Tamara Lindeman – announces her return with Humanhood, out 17 January via Fat Possum, and releases lead single/video, Neon Signs. Humanhood, the most arresting album Lindeman has ever made as The Weather Station, follows 2021’s Ignorance, ‘an invigorating and poignant chapter in an already impressive career’ (Stereogum). It was written during one of the most difficult periods of Lindeman’s life and rendered with a rock band with improvisational chops just as she began to recover by reckoning with a complicated truth: sometimes, life simply tries to dismantle us, no matter how good everything may seem, and we must accept that in order to survive.

From the outside, 2022 likely appeared a year of glory for Lindeman. Ignorance, in which her ‘shape-shifting avant-folk [reached] a kind of apex, as she sings coolly about climate grief, love, lust, healing, and the upheaval of self-discovery’ (New Yorker), was one of that year’s highest praised records. It was a time of touring, travel, and activism alongside Ignorance’s more austere companion, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. But at an ostensible new professional peak, she was also struggling with a mental health crisis. Working through a crisis of meaning, she wrote from within the confusion of the experience to create the songs that would ultimately become Humanhood, a narrative album that, listened to front to back, transcribes the journey from dissociation back towards connection.

It takes only 10 seconds for Lindeman to pull us to the floor on Neon Signs, the opening song on Humanhood. ‘I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy – or just lazy,’ she sings, her voice at once a soft whisper to a confidant and a full-throated confession to a crowd. ‘Why can’t I get off this floor? Think straight anymore?’ she sings of our true modern malaise, that unbound sense of not knowing how or what it is we’re supposed to contribute to this fractious world, or if we even have the energy or will to try.

‘I wrote Neon Signs at a moment of feeling confused, upside down, at that moment when even desire falls away, and dissociation cuts you loose from a story that while wrong, still held things together,’ Lindeman explains. ‘The song came with multiple strands entwined; the way that something that is not true seems to have more energetic intensity than something that is, the confusion of being bombarded with advertising at a moment of climate emergency, the confusion of relationships where coercion is wrapped in the language of love. Ultimately though, isn’t it all the same feeling?’ The Neon Signs video, co-directed by Lindeman and Jared Raab, is a journey through different sets of eyes, perpetually shifting perspectives between people and objects.

Humanhood was recorded over two sessions in fall of 2023 at Canterbury Music Company with drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Philippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley. The songs were left open; Lindeman and co-producer Marcus Paquin wanted to hear the sudden sparks made by these new encounters, to witness everyone react in real-time to the songs and sketches she supplied. They all dropped into the fugue, shaping the hazy unease that is so endemic these days into tangible sound. Other friends eventually added their own pieces, like old-time updater Sam Amidon, ace guitarist James Elkington, and textural magus Joseph Shabason. In the final stage, mixer Joseph Lorge helped make sense of these musical webs, and the album was crafted into a near continuous piece of music, with interstitial instrumentals fading into and out of songs. Textures repeatedly shift between organic and synthetic; synths merging with sax, electronic drums shifting into banjo, as songs coalesce and then disintegrate in a direct echo of the emotional experiences that inspired them.

Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end. As with Ignorance, the first person lyrics point to a wider resonance; we’re all dealing with ourselves through climate disaster, as the world totters near a breaking point, and none of it is easy or precedented. On previous albums, Lindeman mostly wrote about her past, turning backwards to gain perspective. But for Humanhood, she wrote from the present as she tried to work through it. Humanhood, then, radiates with new urgency – and emerges as a sort of tether, offered up here for anyone else feeling disconnected from the vertiginous reality of right now.

Tour support comes from Georgia Harmer. Known for her dulcet voice and sincere lyricism, Georgia Harmer is a bright star of an artist, rising from the core of Toronto’s tight-knit music scene. Her songs guide listeners through a wide landscape of emotions, gliding seamlessly between triumphant anthems and bucolic ballads. Following the success of her debut album, Stereogum noted that she has ‘established herself as a noteworthy talent’, and SPIN Magazine named her a 2022 artist-to-watch, exclaiming that ‘for Georgia Harmer, it’s a matter of when, not if”.

Harmer’s sophomore record, Eye of the Storm, is set for release in summer 2025. This offering features esteemed collaborators such as mixing engineer Tucker Martine (R.E.M., Neko Case, Modest Mouse), and musical contributions from Matt Kelly (City & Colour) and Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station). Harmer has also partnered with acclaimed artist and photographer, Norman Wong, to create music videos and album artwork.

This is a 10+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

This show is a co-promotion with Now Wave.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook