Finn and Conor Keogh grew up in their father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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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<\/a> on 5th July and at Newcastle\u2019s Exhibition Park on 12th July.<\/p>\n The influences Keogh cites are Nick Drake<\/a>, John Martyn, Pearl Jam<\/a>, and his father\u2019s Irish trad. The band describe themselves as folk songs with grungy guitars. ‘I Lied, Amber\u2019<\/a> is the place to start. \u2018Thorn\u2019 contains the lyric \u201cI felt alone this week\u201d, which Finn says reduced a man in the crowd to tears at an early show. Reading and Leeds confirmed for August.<\/p>\n Start with: <\/p>\n Cardinals | Cork<\/p>\n 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\u2019s cousin, who Euan has described as the glue that held the whole thing together. Euan\u2019s brother Finn plays accordion. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Masquerade, the debut album<\/a> 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\u2019s vocals for the closing track \u2018As I Breathe\u2019 were captured in the studio stairwell, with RAK office workers filing past him between takes.<\/p>\n The album has a deliberate A-side and B-side structure, a nod to the band\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. told BBC Radio 1 that Cardinals are \u201cone of my favourite new bands.\u201d They supported Fontaines at their Finsbury Park all-dayer in 2025<\/a>. \u2018The Burning of Cork\u2019, the album\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Start with: <\/p>\n Getdown Services | Bristol<\/p>\n 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 caf\u00e9s, 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Their debut album Crisps came out on Breakfast Records in November 2023. The Your Medal\u2019s In The Post EP followed in 2024, then Primordial Slot Machine in 2025. \u2018Dog Dribble\u2019, the track that broke them through to a wider audience and was playlisted by BBC Music, opens with the line \u201cI was in Manchester in the rain \/ Stood grinning at my phone looking fucking insane.\u201d <\/p>\n It references Ken Dodd\u2019s dad\u2019s 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. \u2018Both Our Dads Like James Brown\u2019, from the same EP, owes something to The Beta Band. \u2018I\u2019m Not Feelin\u2019 It\u2019 references Wreck It Ralph in its meditation on gratitude and mental health. The influences the duo cite are T-Rex, Daft Punk, AC\/DC<\/a> and Chic, which they describe as a wheel they spin depending on mood.<\/p>\n The new single \u2018The Radiator\u2019<\/a>, released 1st April 2026, arrived with an explanation from Josh Law: \u201cThis song is about only picking fights that you know you\u2019ll win. It came about because the heating wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t load quick enough.\u201d <\/p>\n 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 \u2018The Radiator\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Start with:<\/p>\n Man\/Woman\/Chainsaw | London<\/p>\n Billy Ward and Vera Lepp\u00e4nen 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\u2019s \u2018It Wasn\u2019t Me\u2019 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\u2019s 1992 academic study of gender in horror cinema. They thought it sounded cool.<\/p>\n 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 Lepp\u00e4nen, something clicked.<\/p>\n Two sold-out UK headline tours in 2025, a sold-out Scala show, sessions for KEXP and Steve Lamacq\u2019s BBC 6 Music programme, and a debut at SXSW in Austin where Rolling Stone described them as<\/a> \u201ca young band in the process of inventing something ecstatically new.\u201d Lamacq\u2019s assessment was more direct: \u201cI fucking love this band.\u201d <\/p>\n In November 2025 they signed to Fiction Records, home of The Cure<\/a> and St. Vincent, and released ‘Only Girl\u2019<\/a> 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 Lepp\u00e4nen, who takes lead vocals on the track, described it as \u201cour 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.\u201d Billy Ward described the song, and the debut album it heralds, as \u201cpulling back the catapult.\u201d The album is confirmed for 2026.<\/p>\n Start with: <\/p>\n Bleech 9:3 | Dublin\/London<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s sponsor. <\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe want the music to be useful,\u201d Barry has said, \u201cbecause that\u2019s what all of our heroes did.\u201d<\/p>\n The four-piece is completed by Barry\u2019s brother James on bass and Sam\u2019s longtime bandmate Luke O\u2019Neill on drums. They moved from Dublin to London together in 2024. Their debut single \u2018Ceiling\u2019, released in October 2025, was produced by Ken Scott at Abbey Road<\/a>. Scott\u2019s previous credits include David Bowie<\/a>, The Beatles<\/a> and Supertramp. The song is about a friend of Barry\u2019s named Ryan who he met at a recovery meeting in Dublin and who died before getting sober. \u2018Jacky\u2019 followed, then \u2018Cannonball\u2019 in January 2026, written down the back of Sam\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n They supported Keo on an extensive run of dates, then Shame. A three-night residency at London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Start with: <\/p>\n Westside Cowboy | Manchester<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and Noel Gallagher<\/a>, when he turned to Reuben Haycocks and Paddy Murphy and asked if they wanted to start a band called Westside Cowboy. They said yes. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Before their debut single had even been recorded, Black Country, New Road drummer Charlie Wayne tweeted that \u2018I\u2019ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)\u2019 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. <\/p>\n 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 \u2018Till We Get There<\/a>, 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<\/a> at Alexandra Palace in London both fall in July.<\/p>\n Start with: <\/p>\n Editors\u2019 Picks<\/p>\n![\"1.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1.-CARDINALS-BY-EMILYN-CARDONA-1-1024x683.jpg\")
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