Last updated: April 2026. Updated quarterly as new music, tour dates and album announcements are confirmed. Next update: August 2026.
The ones-to-watch lists arrived in January, named the same thirty acts across every publication, and have mostly been forgotten by March. This piece is something different: a critical guide to the new British and Irish acts who have actually made good on the moment, chosen not for their potential but for what they have already done. It will be updated as the year develops, acts added or dropped depending on whether they are still delivering.
What connects the best of them is not a genre or a scene. There is no coherent movement to describe, and the absence of one is a relief. What they share is a seriousness about the work and an understanding, sometimes stated, sometimes just audible in the music, that a room full of people is the only real test worth passing. Most of them did significant time on the grassroots circuit before the coverage arrived. The devotion their audiences show reflects that: tours selling out in minutes, people getting tattoos, grown men crying at shows. That kind of thing does not come from a playlist placement.
Keo | London
Finn and Conor Keogh grew up in their father’s Irish folk band, playing gigs with him across the UK, Ireland and the United States from early childhood, Finn on guitar, Conor on bass. Their father still plays the circuit. When the brothers eventually moved to London, recruited drummer Oli Spackman and guitarist Jimmy Lanwern, and started working the grassroots venues as Keo, they were not learning how to perform so much as continuing something they had been doing since they were children. That context matters before you see them live, because it explains why the shows feel less like a young band finding its footing and more like one that has been doing this for twenty years.
The debut EP Siren, five tracks recorded in a garage over five days, was released in 2025. The first UK and Ireland headline tour sold out across the country within hours, over 5,000 tickets gone before most people had heard the record. Reading and Leeds that summer brought the biggest crowd the BBC Introducing Stage had ever seen. In the preceding months the band had been sitting in label offices overlooking London while executives sold them dreams and waited for someone else to move first. The first offer came from Relentless Records. They signed to Island. A concert film, shot at a sold-out Village Underground in September 2025 and directed by Hermione Sylvester, was screened in independent cinemas across the UK in February 2026. A live album is reportedly in the pipeline. They are supporting Wolf Alice at Finsbury Park on 5th July and at Newcastle’s Exhibition Park on 12th July.
The influences Keogh cites are Nick Drake, John Martyn, Pearl Jam, and his father’s Irish trad. The band describe themselves as folk songs with grungy guitars. ‘I Lied, Amber’ is the place to start. ‘Thorn’ contains the lyric “I felt alone this week”, which Finn says reduced a man in the crowd to tears at an early show. Reading and Leeds confirmed for August.
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Cardinals | Cork
Cardinals started as a joke between two sixteen-year-olds in Kinsale, a small fishing town on the southern coast of Cork. Euan Manning and Oskar Gudinovic had been playing together since school, but the band only properly came together when they moved to Cork city for college, recruited bassist Aaron Hurley and then met drummer Darragh Manning, Euan’s cousin, who Euan has described as the glue that held the whole thing together. Euan’s brother Finn plays accordion.
The accordion is the most immediately distinctive thing about Cardinals, and the thing that separates them most clearly from the wave of Dublin post-punk bands they are frequently grouped with. They were aware of that scene when they started writing and deliberately went in another direction.
Masquerade, the debut album released on 13th February 2026 on So Young Records, was recorded over nine days at RAK Studios in London during a summer heatwave. The band stayed sober throughout. When it was finished, drummer Darragh cycled halfway across London to find an off-licence that was still open. Producer Shrink, roughly the same age as the band, was at the helm. The album was recorded without a click track. Euan’s vocals for the closing track ‘As I Breathe’ were captured in the studio stairwell, with RAK office workers filing past him between takes.
The album has a deliberate A-side and B-side structure, a nod to the band’s collective love of vinyl. The first half is patient and melodic. The second grows colder and more confrontational. The Irish Times found the record too indebted to its influences, the debts to The Pogues and Van Morrison showing too clearly. It is a fair observation, but it misses what Cardinals have actually done with those materials, which is what the music makes clear.
Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. told BBC Radio 1 that Cardinals are “one of my favourite new bands.” They supported Fontaines at their Finsbury Park all-dayer in 2025. ‘The Burning of Cork’, the album’s penultimate track, takes its name from the December 1920 campaign in which British Black and Tan forces burned hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses across Cork city, including City Hall and Carnegie Library. Euan Manning has described it as the heaviest and most menacing thing on the record. It draws a direct parallel with Gaza. Reading and Leeds confirmed for August 2026.
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Getdown Services | Bristol
Josh Law and Ben Sadler met at school in Minehead, Somerset, played in a two-piece garage rock band as teenagers, moved to Bristol, and spent their early adult years working in cafés, selling ice cream, and doing gardening jobs together. They started Getdown Services in 2021 as a way to escape the drudgery of their circumstances, and described it at the time as just a project.
They accidentally fell into music, as Ben has put it. That backstory matters because it is audible in everything they make: this is a band rooted in ordinary working life, and the frustrations and absurdities that accumulate there.
Their debut album Crisps came out on Breakfast Records in November 2023. The Your Medal’s In The Post EP followed in 2024, then Primordial Slot Machine in 2025. ‘Dog Dribble’, the track that broke them through to a wider audience and was playlisted by BBC Music, opens with the line “I was in Manchester in the rain / Stood grinning at my phone looking fucking insane.”
It references Ken Dodd’s dad’s dog, Korn, Limp Bizkit and half a jar of brine. It is also, structurally, a brilliantly constructed piece of music. The two things are not in contradiction. ‘Both Our Dads Like James Brown’, from the same EP, owes something to The Beta Band. ‘I’m Not Feelin’ It’ references Wreck It Ralph in its meditation on gratitude and mental health. The influences the duo cite are T-Rex, Daft Punk, AC/DC and Chic, which they describe as a wheel they spin depending on mood.
The new single ‘The Radiator’, released 1st April 2026, arrived with an explanation from Josh Law: “This song is about only picking fights that you know you’ll win. It came about because the heating wouldn’t come on once and I thought about when we bang things to make them work. Ben once told me that he used to threaten his PlayStation 1 when games wouldn’t load quick enough.”
The song is, accordingly, about the bizarre triumph of physically intimidating an inanimate object. It is also, as with everything Getdown Services make, formally precise and harder to pull off than it sounds. Josh has described ‘The Radiator’ as the first step in what their second album will encompass. LIDO Festival London in June and Latitude in July are among the summer highlights. BBC 6 Music support has come from Craig Charles, Huw Stephens and Cerys Matthews.
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Man/Woman/Chainsaw | London
Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen started playing music together at 14. At 16 they were covering Nirvana and Lana Del Rey in a bedroom, and had also produced a noise-rock version of Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ that has not been made available to the public. The band name came from a book Ward spotted on the shelf in their school film club: Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover’s 1992 academic study of gender in horror cinema. They thought it sounded cool.
Once Covid restrictions lifted and they could play gigs, they played over a hundred shows in London in less than two years. The lineup changed frequently. When it settled into the current six-piece, with Emmie-Mae Avery on vocals and synths, Clio Harwood on violin, Lola Cherry on drums, and Billy Doyle on guitar alongside Ward and Leppänen, something clicked.
Two sold-out UK headline tours in 2025, a sold-out Scala show, sessions for KEXP and Steve Lamacq’s BBC 6 Music programme, and a debut at SXSW in Austin where Rolling Stone described them as “a young band in the process of inventing something ecstatically new.” Lamacq’s assessment was more direct: “I fucking love this band.”
In November 2025 they signed to Fiction Records, home of The Cure and St. Vincent, and released ‘Only Girl’ as their debut single for the label, recorded at RAK Studios with Seth Evans, a producer who has collaborated with Geordie Greep, and Margo Broom. Vera Leppänen, who takes lead vocals on the track, described it as “our playful love song. Built around a ripping violin top-line and birthed from a grungy guitar jam, it gradually became something more boisterous and altogether more joyful.” Billy Ward described the song, and the debut album it heralds, as “pulling back the catapult.” The album is confirmed for 2026.
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Bleech 9:3 | Dublin/London
Barry Quinlan and Sam Duffy had been playing in separate bands around Dublin throughout their teenage years without ever crossing paths, living what the band’s own press describes as near-parallel lives shaped by addiction. When they were introduced to each other in their early twenties at a 12-step recovery programme, Barry became Sam’s sponsor.
Sam was two years clean at the time. Barry was five. They started writing music together in between recovery sessions, at first in secret, building what would become Bleech 9:3. “We want the music to be useful,” Barry has said, “because that’s what all of our heroes did.”
The four-piece is completed by Barry’s brother James on bass and Sam’s longtime bandmate Luke O’Neill on drums. They moved from Dublin to London together in 2024. Their debut single ‘Ceiling’, released in October 2025, was produced by Ken Scott at Abbey Road. Scott’s previous credits include David Bowie, The Beatles and Supertramp. The song is about a friend of Barry’s named Ryan who he met at a recovery meeting in Dublin and who died before getting sober. ‘Jacky’ followed, then ‘Cannonball’ in January 2026, written down the back of Sam’s house one afternoon after a few hours of recovery work. An EP is expected in May. Barry has said the debut album will be the broader statement about those years in Dublin, with the EP acting as bullet points.
They supported Keo on an extensive run of dates, then Shame. A three-night residency at London’s Blue Basement in late 2025 confirmed what the word of mouth had been suggesting for months. Reading and Leeds confirmed for August. This is a band to follow from now, not from whenever the wider conversation catches up.
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Westside Cowboy | Manchester
Jimmy Bradbury was working a shift at Johnny Roadhouse, a music shop in Manchester that has been serving local musicians since 1955 and whose past customers include Paul McCartney and Noel Gallagher, when he turned to Reuben Haycocks and Paddy Murphy and asked if they wanted to start a band called Westside Cowboy. They said yes.
The name comes from the real West Side Cowboys of 19th century New York, city-appointed men on horseback who rode ahead of freight trains along Tenth Avenue waving red flags to warn pedestrians. The avenue was known locally as Death Avenue. The band thought it sounded interesting. Their first gig was a 20-minute slot at a coffee shop run by a friend, and the first few weeks of rehearsal were nothing but Hank Williams and Lonnie Donegan covers. Then the originals started arriving.
Before their debut single had even been recorded, Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne tweeted that ‘I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’ was his favourite song of 2024 and urged the band to release it. They recorded it and put it out a week later. Five months after that they were on the European tour supporting Black Country, New Road.
They describe their sound as Britainicana: American heartland rock and country filtered through a British sensibility, with four voices finding each other in harmony over wide-screen guitars. The second EP So Much Country ‘Till We Get There, released on Island imprint Adventure Recordings in January 2026 and recorded in New York with producer Loren Humphrey, is the clearest picture of that sound so far, more spacious and more confident than the debut. A debut album is in progress. Rock Werchter in Belgium and a support slot for The Maccabees at Alexandra Palace in London both fall in July.
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