There’s nothing better at a show than when the support acts complement the headliners so well that the entire evening disappears in a high-octane flash. That was exactly the case last Thursday at Strange Brew, which hosted a triple-decker club sandwich of overdriven psych.
The venue sold out at 330 capacity and packed in so tightly that punters spilled into the road as cars tried to squeeze by. The crowd itself was a proper cross-section—all ages, everyone there for the same reason- riffs. Strange Brew’s already wacky interior felt even more elevated by a merch stand glowing under UV light, which is practically mandatory for this corner of the genre.
Longheads opened, and from the first chord it felt less like a support slot and more like a headline set. The South London-based five-piece unleashed dual-Gibson riffage that tangled itself into knots of stoner doom and krautrock. Guitarists Al Bishop and Benjamin Reeve traded fuzzed-out lines while Sam Mitchell prowled between bass and guitar duties.
At the edges, Lap steel crept in, adding a woozy, desert-adjacent texture to songs that lurched through shifting time signatures without ever losing the groove. Drummer Nick Oakes set the tone early: locked-in, relentless—the kind of player who holds a room together even when the guitars are trying to fall apart. The energy was huge from the off and never really dipped, which comes as no surprise from a band that’s already toured with Slift and King Buffalo.
Dreamwave followed, thickening the atmosphere both sonically and literally. I’ve never seen fog like it at Strange Brew. It drifted into the bathrooms until you genuinely couldn’t see what you were doing in there, which somehow became the funniest part of the night. IIt felt like stumbling into a low-budget horror film set. Less amusing for our photographer, who had to squint through a wall of white in search of a usable shot.
Where Longheads leaned doomy, this Bristol-via-Brighton four-piece went lighter and weirder, with 12-string shimmer, garage-psych hooks, and keys that cut through the haze far better than they had any right to. At times, particularly during an unhinged run through their more synth-heavy material, they sounded like the B-52s cranked to 11 and buried beneath a foot of fuzz pedals. The bass groove did a lot of the heavy lifting, while their drummer matched Oakes for stamina, if not quite for menace. Psychedelic at its core, the band still carried a pop sensibility that constantly fought to break through. You could hear Osees and King Gizzard in the DNA, but it all filtered through something weirder.
By the time Frankie and the Witch Fingers took the stage, the room was primed to explode, and explode it did. Pits opened the second the LA four-piece launched into their set. Sweat dripped from the ceiling—no small irony given Britain’s current drought. Bodies were crowd-surfing within minutes.
Dylan Sizemore and Josh Menashe traded vocals and searing lead lines. Meanwhile, Nikki Pickle’s bass and Nick Aguilar’s drums kept the whole thing groove-heavy rather than simply chaotic. If anything, the headliners were a touch less ferocious than the bands that preceded them. But they made up for it with a mix that gave every element room to breathe. The funk undertow, krautrock churn, and pure garage-rock filth all came through in a way the earlier, murkier sets couldn’t quite match.
What tied the whole night together wasn’t just the quality of the bands, though that was consistently high across all three, drums especially. It was the atmosphere: friendly, unpretentious, and full of people who were just there for the riffs. No scenesters, no attitude, just a room packed with fans happy as long as the guitars were sick and the drums were relentless.
It was a filthy rock and roll, wah-pedal worship, and garage-psych at its most unhinged. For anyone who lives for that sort of thing, it was about as good a night of that as you could hope for. Top stuff all round, and we’ll absolutely be back next time.