PARCS are best defined by the title of their last EP, Dawnsio Trist, which translates to Sad Dancing. Dreamy vocals and cutting lyrics are contrasted by disco driven synth and four to the floor beats to leave you dancing and crying at the same time. Aforementioned EP, released through Rose Parade Recording Co, was cited by Circuit Sweet as “One of the most gripping releases of 2022”. The Newport based band have recently evolved from a two piece to four, incorporating more live elements to compliment the bedroom synth pop and drum machines that lie at the core. Keeping their process as local as possible, they are currently in the middle of recording their next release in a Newport Studio as well as in their spare room. As regulars on the South Wales gigging circuit, they are most proud of headlining a show as part of the BBC Radio 6 Music festival when it came to Cardiff in 2022.

Featured on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio Wales.
FFO – Japanese Breakfast, Jay Som, Porches

Gallops DJs see out an epic night at The Rockin’ Chair!

The Accident Group are a band based in Manchester playing no-win-no-fee rock & roll. The band have spent the last year trawling through the landscape of abandoned indie landfill, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and transporting only the finest elements to a post-punk recycling plant. They also offer sound legal advice for small fees.

The band have started with a bang, already selling out shows across the country, supporting bands such as LIFE, The Blinders and The Lovely Eggs, and causing a stir in the city with their raucous practise room gigs.

For the uninitiated, Maines excel at creating sumptuous and incredibly layered instrumental soundscapes, punctuated with well deployed introspective and incendiary political vocals.

Maines oscillate between melodic moments of shoegaze and heavier hardcore bursts of immolation. This blurring of the lines creates a memorable live show, allowing the four piece to seamlessly share bills with folk and indie artists as well as hardcore and punk line ups consecutively. One to watch.

Mechanical Owl are a melodic indie alt-pop band from North Wales.

Ailsa Tully returns with the captivating new single “Mothering”, exploring miscommunication, unfulfilled expectations and family ties, accompanied by a bewitching music video. The rising Welsh singer-songwriter has a well-packed bag of UK headline dates as well as a string of festival appearances, including Green Man, BBC 6Music Fringe Festival and Liverpool Sound City. With “Mothering” Tully has expanded into new sonic territory through her love of field recordings; making use of objects found in an outbuilding.

Mellt are a four piece band originally from Aberystwyth, but now based in Cardiff. Their debut album ‘Mae’n Hawdd Pan Ti’n Ifanc’ (It’s Easy When You’re Young) won the coveted Welsh Language Album of the Year in 2018, and was nominated for the Welsh Music Prize the same year. It received rave reviews – “All the tracks feel so self-contained, so tastefully cut off, and in a world of long, static space-pop interludes, Mellt’s snappy college-boy snarls takes indie rock back to its roots.”

The band are now working on their second album, set for release in 2023 by Clwb Music (Clwb Ifor Bach’s music label). Their recent single ‘Marconi’ has received plays from BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio Cymru and BBC Radio Wales and the band have received high praise for their brand new single.

With numerous live shows under their belt, this energetic four piece manages to captivate an audience wherever they go. With their catchy guitar riffs and a perfect blend of slacker rock and post punk sounds — Mellt’s clever and intricate lyrics take them to the next level.

‘Glass is a truly astounding, powerful and highly pertinent piece of work… The outfit fuses electronica and drone with industrial flourishes and beautifully dark songwriting… If it doesn’t get your blood pumping then you may as well check yourself into the crematorium… Over throbbing electronica and a relentless four-to-the-floor beat, tAngerinecAt delivers one of the most exciting pieces of music I’ve heard this year. It is, to use a technical term, an absolute banger.’ Louder Than War
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“tAngerinecAt is breaking down barriers and the time-space continuum” Post-Punk.com
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tAngerinecAt is Wales based queer duo: Zhenia Purpurovsky (from Kyiv, Ukraine) and Paul Chilton – songwriters, producers, composers, and multi-instrumentalists who create a spellbinding sonic cocktail using electronic production, hurdy-gurdy, voice, whistles and an array of other sounds. Their new album Glass which hit the top of the charts on Bandcamp and was voted one of Louder Than War’s top 100 albums of 2022 tells Zhenia’s personal story as a multi-ethnic queer refugee and complex trauma survivor from a working-class background.

Their influences range from artists like Son Lux, Gesaffelstein, Fever Ray, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, My Dying Bride, to the ethnic music of the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains and the films of Sergey Parajanov.

Originally formed in Kyiv, Ukraine, where both members resided they have been based in the UK since 2015. They have released five albums and have toured extensively all over Ukraine and UK. Their music has been played on BBC2, BBC3 and BBC6. Some significant performances include their two headline shows in Kyiv House of Artists in 2012 and 2013 to crowds of roughly 500 and a recent show at SWX (1100 capacity) in Bristol as the first support for DakhaBrakha on 11th September 2022.

The duo’s festival performances include Knockengorroch Festival, Eden Festival, Equinox Festival, Willowman Festival, Sesiwn Fawr, Festival8, Leigh Folk Festival, Cardiff Psych & Noise Festival, Festival x-24, Fire In the Mountain, Llangollen Fringe Festival, Blue Lagoon Festival, Tanner Fest, Radnor Fringe Festival, Manchester Ladyfest, Alice’s Wicked Tea Party, Wrex Fest, Hidden Hill Festival, JudeAnt Festival, Krayina Mriy, Trypilske Kolo, and many more.

Working with the electronic producer Paulie Jan for their first LP, Bracco came up with the sound that faithfully portrays their music. A logic and sensitive mix between dark club-music, and deep post-punk. “Grave”, their first album, referring to the multiple dramas that have stroke the group’s life, forms a skillful deconstruction of references.

In 2022, the duo, based in the venue “La Station Gare des Mines”, in Paris, France, are preparing a new album, signed on Born Bad Records (FR), even more rallying than the previous. It will be released beginning of 2023, on the french music label – Born Bad (Frustration, Villejuif Underground, J.C. Satan, etc.)

Like a song through an open window, it feels like we’ve been waiting a long time for Le soleil et la mer. The debut release by Bibi Club, aka real-life lovers Adèle Trottier-Rivard and Nicolas Basque, is sun-kissed and wave-washed, shimmering and chic, a bilingual party overdue after two years that have felt (to everyone!) like winter.

“Il est tôt, il est tard / Le vent est doux,” Adèle sings over a shining, opalescent beat (It is early, it is late / The wind is soft): a sound like a heart coming back to life, two feet skipping into shoes and out the door, toward the future. She’s been singing for years, including with Nico’s band Plants & Animals, but Le soleil et la mer is her radiant coming-out: the announcement of a project that steps from the home and onto a stage, where Adèle can fully be herself.

The pair named themselves “Bibi Club” for the discothèque in their living-room, where the couple’s bibis—their loved-ones—come and dance. With kids at home, Nico and Adèle had to sneak away to make music: five minutes here, two hours there. Accordingly, their songs imagine that a family’s everyday enchantments might be loaned to the dancefloor, to the nighttime, to a place that’s still thumping as the day breaks.

Throughout Le soleil et la mer, Adèle and Nico set out to create music that is intimate, honest, sparkling with an energy that animates even its quiet moments—and inspired by artists as diverse as Stereolab, Suicide, Alice Coltrane, and Tirzah. It’s a sound as ready for revels as it is for rainy days. Bibi Club will remind you: if it’s not sunny here, it’s sunny somewhere.

From her first album Première apparition, Laurence-Anne has established herself on the alternative music scene by reaching the long list of the prestigious Polaris Prize and the top of the list of Francophone albums of the year at CISM. The new darling of critics and college radios performed at all of Quebec’s big festivals and even tested the waters in France (MaMA, Avec le Temps, Aurores Montréal) before returning home to record Accident, an EP with a touch of punk, indie-pop and tropical vibes. This astonishing, fertile sound exploration has led her to her second full-length album Musivision, released on April 23rd via Bonsound. Back on the road in Quebec and France, she also went to the US where she played at SXSW before going on tour as the first act of the Korean band Se So Neon (Brooklyn, Washington, Boston, New-York, etc). Her next album, to be released under Bonsound, is expected in the fall of 2023 and will highlight the nocturnal and hushed sweetness of her musical universe.

HALF/TIME is a Māori centred post-punk band from Aotearoa (New Zealand) featuring Wairehu Grant on guitar and vocals, Cee on bass and Ciara Bernstein on drums. Together they perform emotionally charged songs addressing decolonisation, structural racism and cultural resilience. Their music intertwines lyrics in English and te reo Māori (the Māori language) with heavy riffs and driving rhythms. Following on from their self-titled EP in 2021, their upcoming EP, ‘Scary Stories to Tell When You’re Dark’ is set for release in March 2023. Just in time to share their latest body of work while on tour in the United Kingdom.

As a lyricist, singer-songwriter Cassidy Mann often reshapes a small moment into a powerful and poetic song that feels both personal and relatable.

“My favorite thing is to write about tiny things that make the bigger picture more important somehow,” she says. “It’s interesting to me how memories are interpretable.”

Mann’s latest EP “If It’s Not Forever” served as a catalogue of how her early relationships ended and why – and she hopes that other people feel seen and comforted by her stories.

Certain moments in a relationship are almost always at the core of her songs, whether it’s the potential start of something special (“Since I Met You”) or the inevitable end (“Stop a Heart”).

Her latest offering is the new single “Along For the Ride” – a song she wrote alone in her bedroom and then co-produced with Kris Ulrich and long time collaborator Roman Clarke. The track features back up vocals and harmonies by Georgia Harmer, a choice Mann says is “a musical symbol of the people in your life who support you.”

“This song is about getting caught up in someone else’s life and losing your agency for a while, which is always destabilizing. I hope it can be a reminder that our own goals are worthy of pursuing and the right people will encourage them, not try to bury them.”

Based in Wrexham and Cardiff, PAPERHOUSE is an evolving collaboration project led by musician Andy Hickie.

‘Sonic storytelling coloured with splurges of fuzzy garage rock, all bubbled up in North Wales.’ Bido Lito

Eitha Da is Ben Dempsey Sawin, a multi-instrumentalist and North Wales native concocting viscous globules of garage-fuzz since 2016. Propelled by a live band featuring former and current members of Mowbird, Gintis and Baby Brave, Eitha Da have brought to life a unique strain of lo-fi sci-fi fuzzy punk with performances at Green Man Festival and Focus Wales, as well a sharing a stage with the likes of Gwenno, Adwaith and The Beths.

Wrexham’s psych blues band Delta Radio are setting the standard in this genre, and are a must see at the festival this year.

Minas is the project from Cardiff producer James Minas alongside drummer Greg Davies and bassist Bob Williams. The songs tell stories of a chequered past over a mix of deep melodic soundscapes and loud, aggressive stanzas. Covering subjects from personal struggles with mental health to finding a place in the society we have. As a producer James is working to build a new sound for the South Wales scene with a number of artists and genres (such as Luke RV, Dead Method, Dan Bettridge, Razkid and more) but as an artist he presents brutal honesty going against his natural defenses to present the most open and vulnerable self for anyone who wishes to listen.

Minas grew up in the circus with parents who were heavily involved in the 1980’s Punk scene and then moved to secondary school in the Welsh Valleys, with the boredom and misbehaviour that came with it. Minas aims to create music that discusses these things and ends with an empowering feeling of hope, something we all need in right now.

Walt Disco are a band who defy all convention to create a world of their own, truly like no other. Their fearless, unique pop songs are created without constraint, with a message of self expression at the very core of everything they do.

Supported Interpol, Sports Team, HMLTD, The Joy Formidable and Bodega.

They have played The Great Escape as a First Fifty act, with four packed out shows over the weekend. UK-wide the band played Live at Leeds, Hit The North, Bestival and Isle of Wight amongst others.

Internationally, they have played SXSW, Dutch Design Week, and Paris Fashion Week CELINE afterparty and supporting The Garden in France.

BBC Radio 1 have supported with spins from Jack Saunders, Phil Taggart and Huw Stephens. BBC 6 Music too, with spins from Amy Lamé and Shaun Keaveny. The band have been featured as Jack Saunders’ Next Wave and are in discussion to play a live session at Maida Vale.

Walt have had 3 singles in New Music Friday UK and songs featured in All New Indie, The Indie List, The Rock List, The Punk List, Fresh Finds and The Other List on Spotify. On Apple Music, they have been featured in New Music Daily, Breaking Alternative, Antidote, Best of Scottish Indie, New in Alternative and GAY TIMES Queer & Now. On Deezer, they have been playlisted in Brand New UK and Hot New Rock.

If you look at some of the most exciting, innovative & critically acclaimed electronic music that has come out of the beautiful North of England over the past years; from the psychedelic electronic rock of ‘The Moonlandingz’, to the folkloric radiophonic avantgarde Of ‘Eccentronic Research Council ft Maxine Peake’, to the party electro of International Teachers of Pop; at the forefront of all these projects (and many more) is a man in a hat and shades called Adrian Flanagan.

Adrian has spent two decades working on the fringes of alternative music as a songwriter, wordsmith, musician, producer, remixer, DJ and cultural agitator – working with artists as diverse as Maxine Peake, Yoko Ono, The Human League’s Philip Oakey, Fat White Family, Sean Lennon and many more. Adrian returns this year with his debut album under the Acid Klaus moniker, ‘Step On My Travelator: The Imagined Career Trajectory of Superstar DJ & Dance-Pop Producer, Melvin Harris’.

The album features contributions from Adrian’s long-time collaborators and friends including actress Maxine Peake, US musician and video director Charlotte Kemp Muhl (Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger), Maria Uzor from Sink Ya Teeth and Bradford born pop-noir singer Hannah Hu who is joined on a track by Mr Richard Hawley who performs lapsteel guitar. The album is completed by a whole host of fresh and exciting artists including Lieselot Elzinga of the Amsterdam-based now-wave electro group, Baby’s Berserk. There’s also the enigmatic Queen Bee of the Calder Valley, solo artist Bianca Eddleston who goes under the name Soft Focus and finally, from South Wales the incredible Welsh language singer songwriter, Cat Rin.

In his own words, Adrian says of the album, “I hereby herald in a masterclass of conceptual brilliance and sonic floor shaking heroism – a record that is both mocking and hugging in its stance. A solid and weighty brick in the face to the horrid and cod sincere, brat histrionics, of the easy on-the-eye, careerist minstrel.” He continues, “conceptually and with great style and panache, there is a sub-narrative that plays out via the imagined career trajectory of fictional musician and DJ, Melvin Harris. It’s a dream cum-nightmare that is perpetuated and encouraged by an industry that reaps the benefits and feasts on the clotted blood of its fallen and broken troubadours.”

There’s nothing quite like the explosive Tokyo based duo MOJA, and all those lucky enough to have seen them live before will agree. One not to be missed!

Afro Cluster are a Cardiff based afro funk, hip hop group, not to be missed at FOCUS Wales 2023. Following a big 2022 festival season for the band that saw them grace festival stages across the UK, they skip into 2023 with a new momentum and an exciting new album in the works.

Laura Leigh (Too Many JDs & All the best house house parties!) will keep the party going on Saturday night at The Rockin’ Chair!