Frankie and The Witch Fingers at The Garage, London 2025

It’s always a pleasure to return to The Garage, this bastion of the local rock scene and tonight’s moshing grounds.

Dreamwave

Has anyone ever described Bristol as UK’s West Coast? You know, cool, laid-back, seemingly better than anywhere else? Dreamwave embody that quite naturally, having delivered on their latest EP, Moon Dogs, a bit of Americana grooviness with all the power and intentionality of a band who knows exactly what their sound is.

In more ways than one, they feel like the Bristolian answer to Frankie and the Witch Fingers, capturing a similar hard-driven vibe, but softened by floating vocals and the dancing power of the tambourine. Theirs is a more dreamy sound, more beach than city streets, more waves-crashing than electricity-grid-crackling. I can tell their music will make for amazing summer listening, when nighttime never comes and there isn’t a jacket in sight.

With confidence and clarity, Dreamwave soar into their own landscape of the ephemeral and the untouchable. I’m excited for what’s next for them.

Frankie and The Witch Fingers

I didn’t really have “seeing Frankie and the Witch Fingers four times” on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are. After bringing down the tent at Wide Awake Festival, sweating off the ceiling of Daltons Brighton and building up a sauna at The Shacklewell Arms in London, here we were together again at the Garage, them as cool as ever on stage and I, smushed around as ever in the mosh pit.

They’ve been non-stop this year. With the release of their latest album, Trash Classic (out now on Greenway Records), they toured the States, Europe, back-to-back US again, back to Europe, back to the States and finished off in Haarlem, Netherlands just last week. It takes it out of ya, especially with a setlist as up-tempo and relentlessly fast as theirs (jumping from “TV Baby” to the dystopian “Dead Silence” to “Electricide” in one full-bodied slap), but then the crowds respond in their own turn, giving back as much as they receive, sweat and blood and energy.

It’s telling of the state of the world that even I, a self-proclaimed psychedelic / world music aficionado, have listened to a lot of punk rock this year. SPRINTS, Slope, everything the Shacklewell Arms stage at Wide Awake had to offer, and of course the psychy-er Frankie. Their whole credo, spoken or implied, is reclaiming personal power through motion. In our interview in May, they shared that Trash Classic was intentionally a “no-concept” album, but “because of the way things are right now“, it came out as a look at the devastating impact of technology on society. The catastrophes around the world and the governments letting them happen paralyse us in indecision, so the music has to step in to rattle us, shake it out of us, kick us into the moshpit where the rules are clear and the only prerogative is to move.

And so, to the eternally relevant “Empire”, the moshpit washing machine spun us around and around. Dylan jumped into the crowd with no warning and miraculously did not plummet to the ground. Somehow people caught him. Somehow people got him out in one piece. We don’t have a lot working as a society, but these pockets of community in the dark? Yeah, we still have those.