A triumph of adaptability and authenticity: an emotive acoustic showcasing of Keo’s ‘brilliantly brutal’**debut album
Finn Keogh. image credit: @alisonjmcintosh
A gloomy Friday, 11.17am. Half an eye on work, “Thorn” playing melancholically comfortingly in the background…..when, suddenly, an adrenalin-boosting alert from @assai records had me bagging “pre-show show” tickets for the burniest-hot indie-rock act in the current UK music scene, Keo. On 4th October, I’d be at an acoustic, unplugged 600-ish capacity debut album set at Edinburgh’s beloved Liquid rooms (@liquidroom_official). I could not wait to hear their “brilliantly brutal”** “Put A Smile On For Me”, up close and personal. ‘A defining moment for guitar music’*, it sizzled itself skyward to number 1 in the midweek UK Albums Chart and number 1 in the Official Scottish Albums chart, a mere days after its release on 25 September.
Why the intensifying El Niño-style heat around this London-based alt-indie rock 4 piece? (Finn Keogh (vocals, guitar, chief songwriter), Conor Keogh (bass), Oli Spackman (drums) and Jimmy Lanwern (guitar)). Why the algorithmic emergency level of last-minute ticket grabbing? Why did their entire autumn headline tour sell out in under 24 hours?
Truth be told (AKA Finn Keogh’s main lyrical aim), they are, in a perfectly imperfect way, brilliant. Their success pivots on being emotively exhilarating live coupled with honestly expressing what it means to be authentically and humanly, alive.
Having been consistently “cutting their teeth” live (for the brothers, since infancy with their folk singing dad and as a four piece relentlessly, in their pre-label signing beginnings, from grassroots and up) since 2023; they have been steadily building an all-powerful energetic Pearl Jam/Nirvana-esque word of mouth reputation, culminating in a well-earned Main Stage triumph this year at Reading and Leeds. The live sound they’ve captured in their records top-marks them as cutting edge in an increasingly AI fake world. Unusually, the first they recorded (Siren) was all-live (bar one track “Thorn”), beautifully and unusually raw EP, with one (pre-label/no money/no time) shot at choosing the best all-playing, all-together take for each track. The result? A rough-around-the-edges sound which elicited magical reactions in listeners. Its production had the added effect of challenging Keo to face up to the demons of technical perfectionism and redefine their musical perfection as “The sweet spot between sounding like a record and sounding spontaneous” ***. This USP became the flavour they decided to aim for in the intensely written “Put a Smile on For Me,” and it was this hope that “you get something out of it” that motivated them away from the big-names, to deliberately self-produce the record.
Having only seen footage of Keo in full-swing festival and big venue live-electric mode, being understandably compared to indie alt-rock Wunderhorse and Fontaines D.C., I was absolutely hyped to find out if this album had the potential to musically flex enough to bring the big live magic to this pared back acoustic set in this wee liquid-gem of a venue.
Arriving, I thought, obnoxiously early (by an hour) to Victoria Street, I was taken aback to find that the queue I thought was the queue, was in fact a tributary queue to the long snaking meandering 400-people river of a queue bubbling politely in the sub-street level lane. Handily, there was a cold stone railings wall to plonk myself down on, and an hour’s wait to take in the surroundings: namely, excitement, back-to-front Kangal hats and Reading and Leeds merch Ts.
Keo’s Acoustic set-list image credit: @alisonjmcintosh
The wait (ironically, upon arrival, we found there was plenty of settling-in room, ample time to buy drinks and merch, and we even managed a fantastic side view right at the front at the barrier) was absolutely worth every single cold-bottomed second.
This set proved that Keo can shift gears effortlessly; musically and technically, holding the optimal level of performance tension so that two seemingly contradictory concepts can come alive and be true at once. Professionalism and musical power can sit alongside an acoustically soft expression of emotional vulnerability. Before kicking off with ‘Blue Song’ as Finn and Jimmy sat atop their folk-singer stools, surrounded by soft lighting from actual lamps and their airways scented with actual lilies stuck to the mic stands and as they raised a glass (of actual Scottish whisky?) to each other, we were all ‘in’. We sensed another couple of tricky-to-hold-together truths: one…..there before us sat a hugely experienced band with many-times-lived live performances under their caps, but two….they are humble enough to be perilously aware of being perched on the cusp of domination of their performance art.
Jimmy Lanwern (l) and Finn Keogh (r). Image credit @alisonjmcintosh
Starting with a perfectly haunting singular note, the crowd were held on a knife-edge of potential unravel, but then were succinctly sliced into the post-healing invitational energy of ‘Be Happy’, an ode to what it might feel like to let go of perfectionism. What came next was what, I suspect, we were buzzing for….the absolutely gigantic anthems of ‘That’s Me’ (getting rid of relationship shame with the truth) and ‘Pistol’ (when grief causes memories to shine infinitely brightly). Whether each person in the crowd related to the lyrics (“Sometimes you see the light but it’s been gone for years” and “There’s a reason that I’m built this way, But I’m just scared to see it through“) in the same way, nobody will ever know, but what was truly felt was the unifying of everyone there: our expression of emotion was energetically contagious.
But it was ‘Loser’ (can I hear Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls”?) and “Black Dress” that held the audience in the darkest of grips as Finn let us bear witness to his deepest wounds of grief and abandonment.
The hooks followed by the gently careful layering of the guitars, bass and vocals, building through big ranges into crescendos were absolutely mesmerising. Having musically teenaged through the 90s, the mix of influences was excitingly familiar (Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley, Nirvana). But what makes Keo refreshingly brand new is the role modelling of healing through expressing an inner emotional landscape: unafraid of raw truths and actively leaning into grief, heartbreak and forgiveness, performing it as if experiencing it in real-time, offering a simultaneous therapeutic opportunity for the listener. And this is exactly what is needed to build resilience and be a real survivor in today’s manicured and edited “perfectly” curated world.
*2120magazine and 21henry20
** Reilly, N 1/7/2025 “Meet Keo, the rising rockers with a refreshingly raw sound” in Rollingstone.co.uk
***Bassett, Jordan “ Keo opens up about debut album “Put A Smile On For Me” at Reading 2026. In NME music interviews. Nme.com