There’s gigs you walk out of thinking damn, that was a good one.
And then there’s the other ones. The ones that were especially good, and that you don’t fully understand until three days later when you’re doing something unrelated and your brain goes DAMN. That was really a good one. They stick. You put the album back on and suddenly you’re in the room again, and it almost feels like you didn’t enjoy it enough at the time.
That’s the curse and the blessing of being a live music fan. You will always crave more.
That was Yonaka at Kentish Town.
A bucket list band and a happy accident
I’d wanted to see this band live for a long while and had never managed it. Then the stars did that thing they occasionally do. I was planning a trip to London for entirely different musical reasons with a bunch of friends, and one of them checked the listings the way you do, and there it was. Saturday night. The Forum.
Happy coincidence, cherry on top of a perfect weekend in good company and music high.
Except here’s the thing nobody tells you about stacking your musical highs: you can run out of emotional space for it.
Earlier that same day I’d watched Unshatter, which I’ll get to properly in its own piece because it deserves one. I came out of that cinema completely wrung out. Music does that weird thing where it takes every feeling out of you and then shoves them all back in, enhanced, full force — and I’d already been through the whole cycle once before the sun went down. By the time I was walking towards the venue, I was genuinely wondering whether I had any space left in me to truly feel a gig.
Never underestimate the power of music, good people. There’s always more room for its magic.
I just needed somebody to prove it to me.
SNAYX, and an apology
Because I’d come in later in the evening, I missed KNIFE BRIDE entirely, and I’m sorry about that — they opened the whole night and I wasn’t there for it. Go and find them, don’t be me.
I did catch most of SNAYX though, and seriously, shoutout to these guys, because they are everything you want from an opener and the bar for that is higher than people think.
Insane energy. A direct slap in the face and no time left over for questioning anything — which is exactly the job. An opener isn’t there to be politely enjoyed. An opener is there to take a room full of people who are still thinking about their day and delete whatever is happening outside of those four walls.
They grabbed me instantly and grounded me in the moment. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been wondering if I had anything left. Well, didn’t take long to stop wondering.
A room that used to be a cinema
Once SNAYX had finished doing their thing, I stopped being a person who’d had a day, looked up, and actually took in where I was standing.
It had been a long time since I’d done a properly mid-size room. Not a sweaty little box, not an arena with a screen doing the work. That one that is something in between. And standing in the middle of it I remembered that this is my favourite configuration for a gig, full stop. Two thousand three hundred people. Big enough that the crowd becomes one single thing that picks you up and carries you, small enough that it’s still happening to you and not to a postcode.
Beyond that, as I looked up, waiting for the next best thing, I’d clocked on the way in that the building was beautiful without knowing exactly why. So I looked it up when I got home, and here’s a funny thing about stars aligning. They rarely stop when they start their shit.
The Forum opened in December 1934, and it opened as a cinema. It showed films for thirty-six years, closed in 1970, did time as a bingo hall and then as a dance hall, and didn’t become a music venue until the eighties. It’s Grade II listed. Björk played her first-ever solo show in that room. The Cure once played it in secret under a fake name.
And I had spent that same afternoon sitting in a cinema watching Unshatter.
Same kind of room. Ninety years apart. Doing the exact same job on me twice in one day.
I didn’t plan that. Hell, how could I even plan that? I’ll take the smile universe.
Free advice, take it or leave it
Back to the grounds, I turned up late — or maybe I was really right on time? — and I wasn’t chasing a barrier. But here’s something years of doing this have taught me: the sides of a room are almost always emptier than they look. A venue can read completely rammed from the back and still have space down the flanks, because everybody funnels straight up the middle like water.
So I tried it. And it paid off more than it had any right to.
I ended up at the very end of the front barrier. Clean view of the stage for the entire set — and directly under the speaker stack, which for the record, is exactly as loud as that sounds.
Wear your earplugs, good people. I’m serious. They don’t ruin anything, they save the night, and they are the only reason standing under a PA for eighty minutes is a decision rather than a mistake.
And then Yonaka delivered
I can’t begin to explain how happy I was to finally make it to this show. Well worth the wait, and then some.
What’s for certain is that music is never a bad thing and cures everything, even emotional hangovers.
Especially those. And they proved it once more.
This band is the perfect recipe for a great gig, and I mean that almost technically. They’ve got the energy. They’ve got everything to give, and they sure give all of it. Big guitars, heavy beats, and then that frontwoman stealing your heart clean out of your chest with slapping verses and soaring choruses. God is a woman or something.
Theresa Jarvis leads a set half headbanging, half vibing, and the combination is pretty much irresistible. There is no version of standing still through that. I tried for about four and a half seconds somewhere in the first song to take a nice little vid and then gave up like everybody else.
They opened on Problems, went into PREDATOR and Punch Bag, and by the end of those three, the question of what kind of night this was going to be had been answered and filed big time.
They played three quarters of the new record and it never once felt like a promo
Here’s something I noticed in the room and only confirmed afterwards, and it’s the thing I keep coming back to.
Until You’re Satisfied came out in March. Nine of the twenty songs they played that night came off it — Problems, Cruel, Eat You Alive, Miss Millennial, Hit Me When I’m Sore, At the Beach, Trouble Follows, Stay a Little While Longer and Bite The Bullet.
The album has twelve songs on it. They played nine of them.
Three quarters of a record, in one set. That should feel like homework. You know the gig, I mean — the one where the band is clearly contractually obliged to walk you through the new one and you find yourself checking how far down the setlist you are.
It did not feel like that for a single second, and the reason is not just arithmetic: nine out of twenty still leaves eleven. The back catalogue is deep enough to carry the other half without breaking a sweat. The album got promoted properly, hard, generously — and fans like me, who’ve been following this band from a distance for years, still didn’t come away short-changed. Not just I said, because those songs have been out for a bit now and sound so much like them that it feels like home. Like a new pair of shoes from that brand you always get, sure they feel new but also you find that comfort you love so much.
The new songs sound amazing on record. They sound better live. These guys have genuinely mastered the craft of moving a crowd, and it shows most on the songs that are six months old.
Special mention for Trouble Follows, which I’d been waiting on since March and which has grooves for days. It did not fail to make me shake around like an idiot. A well happy idiot.
The acoustic detour, and where it actually goes
Then the whole thing drops down into three acoustic songs, and the acoustic set was just the right length — long enough to tap into all the feels, not so long that it killed the pace.
It was sublime. It was also, I realised later, doing something sneakier than I gave it credit for at the time.
Those three songs were Don’t Wait ’Til Tomorrow, Rockstar and Lose Our Heads. Not one of them is from the new album. Not one.
And the first of the three is the title track of their debut, the one from 2019 — seven years and one entire lifetime ago, before the mixtape, before the EP, before the label changes, before the comeback. So the moment the gig sits down and gets quiet is also the moment the band goes all the way back to where they started. For those who know what else I did that day, I hope you never ever laugh at me when I start talking about signs and stars because honestly, what the fuck.
Back to our night. That’s why it doesn’t break the rhythm. It isn’t a pause in the set. It’s a breath taken inside their own story, placed exactly where you need one, right before everything climbs again.
Rockstar was the one that got me. No complicated reason, nothing dramatic happened, I didn’t cry (insane win for my dehydration). It was just properly, quietly lovely — and three days later it’s still the one I keep going back to, which is usually how you find out how hard it actually hit.
Back up, and into the pit
Then came Bite The Bullet, one of these songs on the album I just knew would slap hard live. Again, I’m always right. Such a great delivery, too. If you’re not bouncing around by the second chorus then do you even know how to pit?
Funny thing about that one. Of all the songs on the new album, it’s one of the ones listeners rate the lowest. Get a ticket dickheads because give it a room, and it turns into a weapon.
Which is more or less the whole argument for leaving the house, isn’t it. Some songs are built for headphones and some songs are built for two thousand people deciding simultaneously to lose it, and you cannot always tell which is which until you’re standing in it.
Then it was time for Teach Me to Fight, then Clique, and out. Like my lower back. But thankfully I still had some energy left…
Seize the Power. Literally.
The highlight was obviously Seize the Power, and it was never going to be anything else (for me and my first Yonaka gig).
One of my favourite songs of theirs, one I’d been waiting to hear live for years, and they saved it for last — the final song of the encore, the last thing that happens all night. Oh hell yes.
I didn’t know yet how good I’d get it.
And then Theresa jumped into the pit, and I lost sight of her completely.
Funny how I’d been waiting to see that song live and eventually kinda didn’t see it, but experienced it instead, and it was seriously the best thing ever. Such a power surge. Such a primal call, somehow — and maybe that’s a song that’s meant to be felt vibrating in your bones and resonating in your gut, rather than performed nicely and cleanly from a stage.
Seize the power, they said. And they did. She did, big time.
A part of my brain will never not think of Patti Smith when I hear this song, it’s just a word, an idea 38 years apart and still. Music wired brain, don’t judge me.
Funny though that People Have The Power is that song that turned over the years into something chanted by crowds rather than at them. It doesn’t really belong on stage anymore.
Which is precisely what I’d just watched happen to a different song, by a different band, in a very different room. Music wired brains are dope people.
Anyways, that’s just post gig realizations really. In the moment all I knew was that I was stupidly happy and the floor had stopped being a floor and turned into a collective freaking party.
Also, and I’m not over this: the band posted afterwards that the standout moment of the night, for them, was Seize the Power.
Same moment. Same song. From both sides of a barrier. HA. You can be a seasoned concert goer or a one sunday a year gig person you’ll know that one thing to be true — when audience and band are in synch, that’s when the best magic happens.
They also said London had never felt so much like home. That they were emotional about it. That it was a night they wouldn’t forget.
And they called it one for the books.
Their words, not mine — and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been walking around repeating that sentence for three days like I came up with it.
And then the stars did it one more time
Here’s the part I’m still not over.
Once it was all finished, Theresa came down and walked the full length of the barrier, high-fiving everybody on her way. Which would have been plenty on its own.
Except she went too far. She sailed straight past her exit, kept going, and ran out of barrier.
At the end. Where I was.
So she grabbed hold of my arm to steady herself while she worked it out with security — realised she’d have to walk the whole thing back the other way — and off she went.
I’d spent the entire encore unable to see her, because she was somewhere out in the middle of all of us.
The night ended with her holding on to my arm.
A gig that I wasn’t supposed to make it to, a placement I never should have had, my favourite song of all. And then that sweet little moment with an artist I love. Ha.
Stars align, I said at the start. And not just a little bit.
The thing I came out wanting
All the new songs sounded so good that I genuinely can’t tell you which one I’d single out. All of it? All of it.
Yeah. That kind of shows. Fuck me.
The only thing I walked out still hungry for was Eat You Alive stripped right down.
I already have a version of it, to be fair. There’s a live acoustic take on the deluxe edition, recorded at the Distillery, and I’d played it long before I ever got to London. It’s a beautiful tune and it’s lovely to have something to go back to.
It’s still not the same thing and we all know it’s not the same thing.
You always end up with one white whale per album. One song you need to hear in a room, with the band a few metres away and two thousand people breathing at the same time, before you’ll call the job done.
That one’s mine.
Curse and blessing. Right on cue.
Go and see them
So.
Bucket list band, ticked, finally, and immediately replaced on the list by the same band.
That’s the curse and the blessing of the music fan I started with, and I did warn you. You always need more. But that’s probably a good sign of how good it can get.
Go and see them. Take the trip if you have to. Twenty songs, eighty minutes, no filler, a band that plays three quarters of a new record without ever making you feel like you’re being sold something, and a frontwoman who will come and find you. Literally.
Try the sides. Bring the earplugs.
There’s always more room for its magic.
Definitely still room left for more of this one.
Ugh. I need to go back.
See you in the pit.
