When: 7pm on Friday 5 September 2025
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re excited to be welcoming The Burning Hell back – to YES this time, with special guest Jon McKiel!

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt, often including additional comrades and collaborators. Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks. They move with heavy rhyme and a light step, incorporating a frequent fixation on apocalypse and ruin into work that celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever surprising, and even occasionally beautiful world. Which is to say they’re good dance partners and they want to dance with you.

Now based in the woods of rural Prince Edward Island, The Burning Hell has famously ventured to every out-of-the-way island and inland neglected by the less adventurous, emphasising presence and connection across latitudes, longitudes, and time, affirming a commitment to the political power of sharing music. It is a profoundly optimistic gesture delivered by way of killer tunes and joyful live performances.

When Mathias and Ariel aren’t on the road or in the studio with the band, they pursue art projects at the intersection of ecology and sound with their collective Idlefield Art Lab. Recent ventures have included mobile, solar-powered recording studios in Scotland and Canada, and off-grid recording projects in abandoned farms and lighthouses.

Ghost Palace, The Burning Hell’s newest album, was released in March 2025 on You’ve Changed Records in North America and BB*Island everywhere else.

‘Funny, sardonic, and literate. Add in a new-wavey, Loaded-era VU sensibility, and it’s impossible not to be swayed by these acerbically funny story songs’ – Mojo

‘Super literate and fantastically droll, over backings that range from bubbling synth pop and acoustic folk to rattly punk and even a spot of semi-calypso. Silver Jews and Jeffrey Lewis spring to mind on the terrific Birdwatching; Bird Queen of Garbage Island sounds like a glorious revival of Tom Tom Club‘ – Uncut

Tour support comes from Jon McKiel. The songs of Jon McKiel are born of the bruised marshlands of remote New Brunswick, from the craggy shores of the Atlantic coast; places where nature is a powerful wonder and the made-world is in slow decay. His new album, Hex, is a bloodshot pop record steeped in our dystopian present, tempered, across its ten tracks, by an existential umami. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s cult favorite Bobby Joe Hope, which Aquarium Drunkard called ‘an unlikely masterpiece’ and Gorilla vs. Bear listed as one of their favourites of that god-forsaken year.

Book tickets now.

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