Between the Buried and Me, IHLO and You Win Again Gravity live at Islington Assembly Hall

My 2026 live music calendar has gotten off to a slow start, not really helped by the damp prelude to societal breakdown that is happening outside. So far, this hasn’t felt like a new year so much as a slow descent into madness with soggy oversized socks on. Still, when prog calls, you answer, regardless of precipitation levels or the precise millimetres of rain attempting to drown what is left of your optimism. Umbrella-less and companion-free, I trudge towards Islington Assembly Hall on a Thursday evening powered by pure stubbornness and caffeine. “You will have fun” I tell myself as I arrive respectably on time only to discover there is a full hour between doors and first band. This elastic gap seems to stretch further with every gig I attend, a bit like an uncalled for encore, but this is a grievance for another time.

You Win Again Gravity

Truth be told, I am partly here for the opening band, You Win Again Gravity. I have been keeping tabs on them for a few years now and, in typical fashion, I seem to know far more about the music than the humans responsible for it, hence why I am mildly alarmed to discover just how young they are. “Young but capable”, someone says behind me, helpfully stealing the thought straight out of my head.

What they deliver is a crisp, muscular hybrid of prog and post-hardcore, played with the sort of assurance that makes me wonder whether they were born straight into a rehearsal room, swaddled in instrument cables. It is either that or they’ve been grinding since primary school. Live, they move like a unit. There are no egos on this stage, no wandering stares, just a group of lads that just looks like a bunch of friends having the audacity to be very good at something. As I briefly wonder whether they should be worrying about homework instead of shifts in time signatures, I am also delighted that perhaps the future of noodling is in very capable hands indeed.

IHLO

Next up are IHLO, who describe themselves as “just f*cking nerds here to sell you t-shirts”, which is either wonderful branding or a very honest mission statement. I sincerely hope the merch table took a hammering. Backed by a huge, enveloping sound, IHLO balanced delicacy and force with ease, delivering something far more substantial than cotton.

I need to confess that I arrived with mild prejudice. In my head, I had filed them as devotees chanting at the altar of TesseracT. I am pleased to report that this was lazy, unwarranted thinking, and IHLO were far more vibrant and cinematic than I had anticipated. Their melodies linger in my head, vocals soar without turning syrupy, and the songs swell and recede with genuine emotional ambition. At one point the atmosphere tips fully into romcom territory when someone in the crowd proposes. A whole detour that nobody saw coming, and perhaps the ultimate endorsement. If your set can soundtrack an engagement, you are clearly doing something right.  

Between the Buried and Me

I knew BTBAM were good. So good, that after catching them at ArcTanGent last year I went back the following day for seconds, which stands for either a lack of self-control, devotion, or a combination of the two. At this stage in their career, they seem to function like a highly specialised organism, snapping from labyrinthine complexity into chest-thumping groove with the ease of people who have long since stopped finding this difficult. There’s no between songs chatter, and no attempt to charm the room, which only makes the performance feel more focused. When they finally speak near the end and admit to being nervous, it lands like a small crack in an otherwise impenetrable guide. I thought I detected a tremor in the clean vocals at one point, a thread of vulnerability stitched through the rigor, and hearing that confirmed made the precision feel harder won.

The set itself is well paced and curated. It opens with ‘Selkies: The Endless Obsession’ which seems to function as a statement of intent, because from there the performance rarely relents. Songs pivot unexpectedly, swell into near-theatrical grandeur then lock into rhythms so insistent you find your body moving before your brain has decided that’s okay. By the time ‘Sun of Nothing’ surfaces, the entire crowd is belting the chorus with full commitment while I attempt to make notes but instead find myself joining them because multitasking at that level feels unrealistic. They are undeniably, almost offensively groovy. It is impossible not to clock the audience, a sea of suspiciously similar looking middle-aged men swaying in synchronised bliss, which gives the whole affair the energy of a prog metal support group. On stage, Tommy Rogers roams whenever he is freed from behind the keyboard, while the rest of the band execute their parts with the kind of cohesion and prowess that makes me stop thinking and just stare. The music carries faint Fallout vibes in places, the sense of something striking but broken playing over a wasteland, and it dawns on me somewhere in the middle of it all that this is not a band on autopilot, but one that is still pushing, still refusing to sand off their edges for comfort. The encore seals it, ‘Silent Flight Parliament’ stretching out into ‘Goodbye to Everything Reprise’, a gift to anyone who never quite got over The Parallax II: Future Sequence.

I told myself earlier, somewhere between the inclement weather and the overpriced drink that I would have fun. What I failed to account for was the scale of it. I had an absolute blast, and no amount of biblical rainfall in the coming days was going to wash away that feeling.