Eel Men

The Social

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

Sweat, Smog and Sharp Hooks: Eel Men Electrify The Social 

It’s the first properly sleeveless evening of the year — aided, in part, by the thick fug of central London hanging over Little Portland Street like a nicotine-stained duvet. Outside The Social, clusters of smokers and lager-sweating punters blur together in the heat, tongues wagging as loudly as the traffic. Before long, drinks are downed, cigarettes stubbed, and the crowd is funneled downstairs into the venue’s low-ceilinged concrete bunker to witness Eel Men launch their latest release.

We snag a booth right at the lip of the stage — where sticky wood meets chipped concrete — and clock a crescent-shaped chunk missing from the corner of the table. Less wear-and-tear, more bite mark. You wonder what kind of night caused that. Perched awkwardly sideways and narrowly avoiding the swinging headstock of Snub’s bassist every few minutes, it already feels less like a gig and more like surviving inside one.

On what was then the hottest day of the year, Eel Men emerge dressed like office workers caught in the wrong dimension: shirts, ties, jumpers, jackets — everyone wilting except the drummer, the only member with the common sense to wear a T-shirt. The music, though, is gloriously unbothered by climate or comfort. Gritty, stripped-back and claustrophobically textured, the band tear into ‘Bad Eggs’ from 2025 EP, Stop It! Do Something, with enough twitchy energy to knock the room sideways.

Then comes ‘Archetype’ — track three and already the point where the oxygen fully disappears. Ghostly psychedelic riffs slink down the fretboard like a stray pressed against a darkened alley wall while the crowd relentlessly surges forward. Bodies compress. Pints spill. Suddenly the venue’s single entrance/exit feels like deeply irresponsible architecture. Nobody cares. If the place catches fire from the smouldering tunes, so be it, at least the soundtrack will be phenomenal.

What’s remarkable is just how clean everything sounds despite the room feeling vacuum-sealed. Every bassline lands with a satisfying thud, every jagged guitar line cuts through the sweat haze. On ‘Motives’, frontman Jimmy Elliot delivers the line “would you kiss your mother with that mouth?” before smooching the hot mic with even hotter results.

Special guest Steph Anderson — multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire whose CV already reads like a mini-festival lineup (Yassassin, Findlay and countless others) — joins the band for ‘Glass Hammers’, adding shimmering synth textures via a tiny Korg perched stage-right. From there on, the set barely pauses for breath. Songs collapse seamlessly into one another with almost no between-track chatter; just relentless momentum and heads whipping from stage-left to stage-right trying not to miss a second.

New track ‘Autobahn Eyes’ lands like it’s already a fan favourite, signalling the final act of the set as the room descends into full-body heatstroke delirium. By now jackets and ties have been discarded onto the stage floor, the band visibly pushing themselves to the limit while never losing control of the set’s razor-wire precision. Steph Anderson, meanwhile, remains somehow immaculate throughout — silver trousers gleaming under the lights while delivering a standout performance on ‘Sore Eyes’, where even the tambourine parts demand your full attention. Not many people can make a tambourine feel like a headline instrument. She manages it effortlessly.

‘Pink Ones’ arrives with a bassline filthy enough to rattle fillings loose, while ‘Beschemel’ proves the night’s most unhinged moment: frantic, fast and impossible not to move to. An absolute slammer.

The set closes with a razor-tight double encore and the kind of applause that feels less polite than necessary. Looking around the room afterwards, there are familiar faces everywhere — Voices Radio’s Babe El Oued, Billy and Jackson formerly of Loose Tongues now dipping in and out of various projects, plus other musicians and scene regulars all exchanging the same knowing nods. The sort of crowd that tells you this band’s reputation has already spread long before the algorithms catch up.

Those in the know clearly already know.

Now you do too.

Eel Men are touring across Europe through the end of June following their album release. Miss them at your own peril.

Monday Night Meltdown

The Grace

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

Dork Magazine x Footsteps x M for Montreal x Mothland bring the heat

There are countless theories about spontaneous combustion and, as a child, I was deeply invested in every single one. Scientifically speaking, it’s what happens when heat can’t escape anymore; pressure builds, matter ruptures, something ignites. Oily rags. Friction. Damp organic material packed too tightly together. A room with no ventilation and too many bodies moving at once.

Sounds a bit like any gig worth its salt, really.

Monday night at The Grace had all the right conditions. M for Montreal x Footsteps x Mothland x Dork Magazine — essentially the cultural equivalent of throwing aerosol cans into a microwave — somehow still had enough fuel left after The Great Escape for one last detonation.

And ignite they absolutely did.

Mothland once again left the back door open for us and we slunk our way inside just as Boutique Feelings had started spilling onto the stage. A six-piece from Montreal crammed onto a platform built for maybe four people maximum, already threatening structural integrity before the first chorus properly landed.

We’d caught them the day before at The Old Blue Last, so we knew broadly what was coming. That still didn’t prepare us.

Karim Lakhdar moves with the same twitchy conviction as a young Zack de la Rocha — all kinetic urgency and barely-contained fury — but without feeling derivative for a second. Between cuts like ‘Long Sure’ and ‘If You Were Me’, the band swing violently between wiry post-punk, freeform jazz eruptions and politically-charged art rock. Before the second track properly kicks in, Lakhdar deadpans: “We don’t think it’s normal to scroll past a kitten, a war and a plate of pasta in less than a minute,” which earns the kind of uncomfortable laugh that only lands because everyone knows he’s right.

Lines like, “It’s when they start to take it all that you begin to fucking care,” hit especially hard against the backdrop of the current global mess. You don’t really watch Boutique Feelings so much as get swept into their frequency whether you intended to or not.

Flautist Vanessa Ascher, shoulder-to-shoulder with Lakhdar throughout, weaponises her instrument entirely. At points it sounds less like a flute and more like suppressive fire aimed directly at the patriarchy.

Then, suddenly, it’s over. The set closes with a surprisingly gentle, “Come chat with us by the merch table,” as though the previous forty minutes hadn’t felt like being trapped inside a politically conscious pressure cooker. We lean against the wall trying to catch our breath.

Needing a moment to cool off, we find a nook near the decks where a familiar face is soundtracking the downtime with Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’. Track after track, banger after banger, the room somehow keeps moving between sets instead of collapsing in on itself.

Only later, while scrolling through tagged photos after the gig, do we realise the DJ was none other than Nuha Ruby Ra, who we’d caught tearing apart The MOTH not too long ago. Had we clocked it at the time we probably would’ve gone completely tongue-tied, but instead she was warm, approachable and effortlessly cool in the way genuinely talented people often are. Given the moves she’s making over the next few months, it’s safe to say she’s one to keep both eyes on.

Then came Annie-Claude Deschênes.

Helping launch Quebec Spring’s M for Montreal clearly wasn’t enough excitement for one lifetime because she emerged onto stage like Leatherface armed not with a chainsaw but a microphone, immediately holding the entire room hostage. Backed by Boutique Feelings drummer Anthony Piazza — operating a cycloptic wrist-mounted spotlight camera that projected warped live footage behind them like some cursed voyeuristic surveillance reel — the whole set felt genuinely nightmarish in the best possible way.

Tracks like ‘Menace Minimale’ and ‘Les Manières De Table’ slithered around the venue with this grotesque electro-punk swagger; all chrome, sweat and predatory tension. It dripped from the ceiling like condensation in a slaughterhouse.

Another absurdly strong set.

Later in the evening we caught Annie outside the venue and, much like earlier encounters throughout the night, she was disarmingly easy to talk to. In the space of five minutes we somehow ended up discussing everything from being managed by Desire, to getting approached by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for touring — influences you can absolutely trace through both her sound and stage presence. We passed along a cryptic message to a mutual acquaintance back in Montreal, both immediately cackling like cartoon villains before disappearing back into the night.

Tiny world.

Time folds strangely at gigs like this, but somewhere in the blur we spot the long, slender silhouette of Ellis-D standing beneath the glow of a running-man exit sign. We gush a bit about the set we’d caught at 100 Club and the mythical aura surrounding it. Demure as ever, he brushes it off with a shy, “Oh gosh, that feels so long ago.”

Naturally, all that humility evaporates the second he hits the stage.

Ellis-D spends most of the set climbing over PAs, launching himself into the crowd and generally treating personal safety as an optional extra. By the time closer ‘Drifter’ stretches into its sprawling finale, the room feels one bassline away from total collapse.

And then Lemonsuckr arrive to finish the job.

A completely new band to us, though judging by the amount of merch already in the crowd, absolutely not to anyone else there.

Dressed like sleazy sixth-formers from some lost 1982 public access broadcast — leather jackets, shirts, ties, already drenched in sweat before the first song properly lands — they treat the stage less like a performance space and more like a vague suggestion. Cables whip through the audience. Microphones migrate into impossible places. People get tangled together like human extension leads.

It’s total chaos.

An intensely British, deeply unwell version of Kraftwerk.

By the time they tear through ‘Dead Disco’, ‘Instant Kinks’, ‘H.E.A.T.’ and new single ‘Stain’, it feels like they’ve absorbed residual energy from every set before them and completely overloaded. There’s something impossible to pin down about Lemonsuckr; grimy but magnetic, detached but euphoric, like finding a rave flyer in a puddle and deciding to follow it anyway.

After the set we end up outside with the Mothland crew and the band themselves, attempting to convince them that Montreal needs to import whatever the hell this is immediately. Negotiations continue over post-loadout kebabs before the reality of it being a Monday night finally catches up with everyone.

Somehow, after an entire festival weekend, every band still turned up ready to empty the tank completely. By the end of the night, The Grace didn’t feel like a venue anymore so much as the smouldering remains of a very controlled accident.

Days later, the smoke still hasn’t cleared but we’re happy to report that we’ve not gone up in flame, yet.

The Hoosiers

Rough Trade East

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

Big choruses, bigger merch pitches

There’s a very specific kind of London in-store crowd: diehards pressed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath low lighting, clutching fresh vinyl copies like sacred texts, already mouthing every lyric before the first chord lands. Some bloke next to us spent the opening minutes humming what few lyrics he could remember to Phil Collins’ ‘Easy Lover’ louder than the venue playlist itself while his son complained his free pint was “too cold” before abandoning it on the floor. Secretly, we wanted to volley it clear across Rough Trade East. By the time Irwin Sparkes shuffled onstage at Rough Trade East for their album release show on Friday night, the room was already won over. The queue had wrapped itself into absurdity long before doors and inside was a strangely wholesome cross-section of people — older couples, indie kids, thirty-something nostalgics, first-timers dragged along by friends. Packed out, but notably free of the usual aggro. No shoving, no beer-launching alpha behaviour. Just a room full of people ready to sing every word back at the band.

Which they did. Loudly. Constantly. Sometimes louder than the PA itself.

That enthusiasm carried the night further than the performance did.

Support arrived in the form of one lone guitar-wielding wanderer, Irwin Sparkes, pacing the perimeter before eventually taking to the stage like a busker who’d accidentally stumbled into a label showcase. Technically, he was solid: sharp guitar work, clean sound, all nervy energy and falsetto elasticity. The crowd bought in quickly. Even sceptics had to admit the musicianship throughout the evening was mostly tight.

Mostly.

Because, for a band launching a new record, the actual music often felt secondary to everything orbiting around it. A glance at the setlist suggested at least 11 tracks planned, yet barely half seemed to materialise in full. Songs were repeatedly interrupted by sprawling bits of banter, self-congratulation and increasingly relentless merch pushing. Vinyl. Cassettes. Downloads. Tour plugs. More plugs. Another reminder to buy the album — an album most people in the room had already purchased in order to attend. The irony hung thick in the air.

And while frontman charisma can usually paper over pacing issues, the pauses here became terminal. After just two songs came a drinks break. Between tracks, momentum leaked out of the room in real time. Audience participation was encouraged so often it started feeling less like connection and more like stalling for time.

At one point the duo asked the crowd what they wanted to hear, only for the illusion of spontaneity to collapse almost immediately: “Oh yes, that’s the one I wanted to play.” It summed up the evening’s biggest issue. Nothing felt particularly malicious — just oddly manufactured. Every gesture of inclusivity or compassion came with an undertow of calculation.

That tonal whiplash became increasingly difficult to ignore. One minute: earnest speeches about the state of the world and the importance of kindness. The next: sarcastic cracks about firing crew members or exhausted-tour-life moaning after less than a week on the road. The messaging zig-zagged wildly between heartfelt and hollow. Even songs framed as emotional revelations about finding their “voice” sat awkwardly beside lyrics about Hollywood excess and big-booty girls in LA.

Still, when the band actually played, glimpses of why people connected with them in the first place came flooding back. The crowd knew every line by heart. Choruses detonated around the room with genuine warmth. There’s clearly affection for this band that time hasn’t eroded. And instrumentally, things were competent enough, even if the Alan Sharland’s drumming occasionally stumbled over fills and missed cues that threatened to derail otherwise polished arrangements.

The audience were already there with them, invested. Every chorus came back twice as loud from the crowd, every pause filled with cheers and applause. They didn’t need selling to. But between the endless plugs for vinyl, cassettes, downloads and the upcoming autumn tour, the night slowly stopped feeling like a celebration and started resembling a particularly upbeat shareholders meeting. Had the band leaned into the music instead of trying to constantly manage the atmosphere around it, this could’ve been something genuinely moving. They didn’t need to be sold to every three minutes.

Instead, the night landed in a frustrating middle ground: a technically decent performance undermined by bloated pacing and strangely disingenuous crowd work. The fans supplied the heart; the band kept interrupting it.

Maybe that’s the danger of nostalgia gigs in intimate spaces. Sometimes proximity reveals too much. Sometimes “never meet your heroes” isn’t cynicism — it’s quality control.

Stick with the album.

Ry Guy

Koko

Words & Pics by Captain Stavros

At KOKO, Ry Guy Teases Something Brilliant Beneath The Noise

London’s permanently under construction now. Streets kink off into dead ends, stations disappear behind scaffolding overnight, and every route south of Camden feels like it’s been designed by an especially vindictive SimCity player. Even cycling to KOKO — a journey usually etched into muscle memory — turns into a stop-start crawl through diversions and exhaust fumes. Dice says one thing, KOKO says another, and before you’ve even locked the bike up, there’s already the creeping suspicion you’ve missed something important.

Then suddenly: clear roads past St Pancras, parking directly outside, and an eerily empty queue.

Not ideal.

At the guestlist entrance, two hopefuls are swerved while another frantically digs through emails trying to prove they “know someone”. Eventually we’re waved through with a smile and emerge at the top of the stairs just as Ry Guy is introducing himself over a haze of warm stage lights and half-audible chatter.

The West London artist cuts a striking figure centre-stage: oversized cream tailoring, dark sunglasses, Höfner bass slung low like a lost artefact from a forgotten psych-soul movement. Behind him, the band stretch across the stage in a neat horizontal line — part indie jam collective, part art-school house band.

On record, Ry Guy’s music feels gorgeously waterlogged: psychedelic soul soaked in dub, art-pop and lo-fi funk, with echoes of TV On The Radio, Khruangbin and early Blood Orange flickering beneath the surface. Recent single ‘Push Me In The Water/Dirty Like A River’, in particular, is all murky low-end, elastic grooves and vocals that drift in and out of focus like pirate radio signals after midnight. Tonight though, much of that subtlety gets swallowed whole by the room.

Even standing near the sound desk, the mix comes through blurred and strangely flat — bass frequencies ballooning into mush while guitars and vocal textures dissolve into the ether. Songs arrive one after another with almost mechanical efficiency, little space left for momentum or release. Ry himself remains coolly detached throughout, relaxed to the point of near weightlessness, while the band lock into grooves that feel technically tight but emotionally restrained.

There are flashes where the whole thing suddenly threatens to ignite.

‘Push Me In The Water’ appears midway through the set, though in this form it’s barely recognisable — its humid groove scrubbed clean by the acoustics. But then ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ lands and, finally, everything clicks into focus. Suddenly the haze works in the music’s favour. Ry’s voice takes on a bruised, yearning quality somewhere between Robert Smith melancholy and soul-searching late-night psychedelia, while the band drift behind him in slow-motion waves. For a few minutes, the room genuinely lifts.

Closer ‘My Own Brother’ pushes furthest into chaos: tense, noisy and gloriously unsteady, with the band finally sounding like they’re willing to let the songs rupture at the seams rather than politely preserve them.

The frustrating thing about Ry Guy live isn’t a lack of ideas — it’s the opposite. The bones of something brilliant are all there: the aesthetic, the songwriting, the strange genre collisions, the sense of someone building their own musical universe slightly outside the current UK indie template. Right now though, the live show still feels caught between rehearsal room looseness and genuine transcendence.

But if he can eventually get the stage show to hit with the same clarity and depth as the records, Ry Guy won’t stay a cult name for very long.