Flint Moore at Signature Brew Haggerston, London 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes bands successful. It’s rarely genius. It’s rarely just talent and/or hard work. Tonight’s lineup particularly made me think how hard it can be to find your audience, especially in the age of hyper-specific recommendations and playlist-making on taste-agnostic number-driven streaming platforms, where if you don’t fit into “workout hype” or “dancing with your royal enemy” vibes, you may not stand a chance.

It can be discouraging, but I always fall back to the reality that the music is already there. The bands are already there, doing what they do best. It just takes that Nat-20 roll, that bit of crazy luck, to break through to the right people and for them to carry on the good word onwards. Now as it’s always been, live music and the programming of a show remain the surest way to hook an audience in. So allow me to do just that.

The Great Moth

A remnant of my high-school math-loving self is the joy I experience when a band aggressively makes me count. “Come on guys, it’s in 15!” as we were encouraged to clap along by bassist Kilo, a moshpit regular in the London rock scene. It made for a fun incursion into their approach to progressive metal, with all the sudden stops and starts and time signature changes you’d expect. Part of that approach is collaborating with different vocalists for different tracks, inviting new styles and ways of expression, with the night hosting vocal performances from Alexandros Argyris and Darya Nadina (whose stage presence went beyond “London’s underground scene”, she was a delight to watch).

They cite Tool as one of their inspirations (and the heavy bass-drum combo was proof), but I couldn’t help hearing a whole lot of experimental Haken in there. While they are still at the start of their journey to define their sound, the song Tsunami stood out as the most tightly constructed of the bunch. Prog rock by its very nature often comes across as more technically impressive (and Mike on guitar was having a blast at that) than necessarily emotional, but with Tsunami, there was a clear journey we were being taken on. Looking forward to what they have in store next!

Erronaut

We love Erronaut here at MJB. After a busy year playing both DesertFest and Stoomfest, the Hertfordshire doom-grunge band set the stage for Flint Moore with their tight songwriting and made-for-moshpit breakdowns. Starting off with a heavy-on-the-bass jam, the Orange amps sounding just about ready to crackle, you’re immediately thrust deep down into the sub-sonic, that viscous realm of slow moving planets and crumbling thunder. Too visual? Well, you gotta hear them live.

The jam threw us right into the epic intro to Way Down Below, the kick-off song from their debut album, The Space Inbetween. It’s as compact a delivery of music as any top 10 band has ever done, each piece packing storytelling and mayhem with gusto, as vocalist/guitarist Mikey Ward’s performance attests to.

Compared to previous sets, there was more time for the band to jam, allowing lead guitarist Peter Hunt to display a wonderful assortment of solos, especially in closing. With a second album being written, they’re one of a number of young bands who could very well become fixtures of the UK rock scene, delivering both great creativity in their live shows and well-calibrated pieces in their recordings. Keep an eye out for them.

Flint Moore

The lights dimmed and turned deep green, wisps of atmosphere-setting strings and plucked bass flowed out the amps, and Francis let out four skin-crawling shouts. And I had a vision. It’s Hellfest on the Valley stage, there’s ten thousand people crammed around me looking up at them, waiting, waiting for the floodgates to open, for the voice to travel all the way to Clisson and back and rile them up, turn them inside out, crack them open. “The worst is yet to come” and Flint Moore builds up the first chorus of The Aches into a massive bellow of “Somewhere, outside my mind“. I can feel that future mob rising to meet and match it.

The music is already here.

Flint Moore have been on a journey of self-discovery through the pandemic and its aftermath, as we discussed in our interview this March, of finding their sound and more importantly the truth of what they want to say and explore in their music. Their album The Aches and the End (reviewed by Diana) is testament to a period of crisis, of having to make life-altering decisions, of experiencing something that completely breaks your worldview, your beliefs, your trust in yourself.

By the second song, Undermask, we’re on that train of emotions, watching it crash in real time, powerless to stop it. “And I say, wait, oh no / These thoughts I have won’t leave me” sung with the fear of feeling yourself slip off a cliff. Supported by a fittingly atmospheric light show, the band shone through the night, too big for the narrow stage, uncontainable.

There is a soft interlude with the duo Incomplete and Be Enough, with its admissions of guilt and despair, but the music is never depressing. Its very existence is evidence of a will stronger than life events and you can hear it in the urgency of the drums (Noah), the funky snippets on bass (Madeline), how Lawrence’s guitar lines ebb and flow and build into the choruses and solos.

It can be near impossible to recover from the complete collapse of your inner scaffolding. The setlist, like the album, moves through the cycle of shock and fear and negotiation and fury, before landing not exactly where it all started, but not too far either. “And it’s there that you have to make a choice. Either move forward, or go through the cycle and the lesson all over again”. The Greek word κρίσις (krisis) means “to decide”. With the album’s beautiful close, And the End, the physical agony of having to make that final decision is what propels guitar and drums from their gentle background to the swelling final chorus.

I’ve had this song play a lot in the last month. I moved house and for a short while, I felt haunted in it, like the previous occupiers hadn’t really left, like their habits and steps were still stuck to the carpet. The song’s own haunting strings seemed to meet me and my fears where we were at: burning incense, walking in circles anti-clockwise, believing in ritual as a way to cleanse a space, “hoping on a Hallelujah”. Belief. Faith. It’s why religion is still around. If you can believe in an invisible unprovable God, you may as well believe in an invisible unprovable tomorrow.

Many thanks to Sam J Lance for all photography!