London Zine of Music, Arts and Miscellaneous Happenings. Monthly updates & seasonal physicals.
/ˈpɪnˌdrɒp/
1) adjective describing the silence produced when a performance leaves the audience speechless (ie: one could hear a pin drop)
2) verb to indicate the location of a particular happening
03
___Anastasia Coope @ Windmill Brixton £8.5 - Burning freak folk for fans of the weird, echoing vocals of Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs: the songwriting of new New York songstress Anastasia Coope often repeats simple hushed phrases as canvases for multi-layered experimentation. Although her debut record, 2024’s Darning Woman, focused nearly entirely on accapella instrumentation, her recent EPs’ sound has expanded, pushing her songs to more frantic heights with help of a drum machine. tickets
04
___Compost Compost Compost @ Dream Bags Jaguars Shoes £7 Too Bright to See - Sweltering synths, acoustic instruments and intricate drumming, the trio Compost Compost Compost are hard to pin down sonically. This is the 1st of 4 residency nights at the East London basement venue. tickets
___Tooth @ Windmill Brixton £8 - London quartet Tooth have been building a dedicated following for some time, teasing tracks and selling out shows, but they've only now released their debut single. Firmly indie rock but reminiscent of a mix of 90s grunge and emo, their sets race at full throttle, with lyrics entailing stories of teenage angst and love. Pindrop also tip our hats to their noble conquest for zine-making. tickets
05
___The Cindys @ Windmill Brixton £11 Breakfast Records - Jangling guitars and quips in a soft baritone register – with their eponymous 2025 debut Bristol’s Jack Ogborne reinvents some of the songs of his retired no-wave-Sinatra group Bingo Fury (a Pindrop favourite…we’re still in mourning). With satisfying crunch and harmonies aided by songwriter Naima Bock, The Cindys are catchy yet always tasteful. Perfectly curated supports from Exeter’s Pushbike and Leed’s Vehicle, two groups who have been at the forefront of this melody revolution. tickets
06
___Osibisa: Celebrate Ghanian Independence @ Fox and Firkin £24.57 - Formed in 1969 in London from a group of Ghananian and Caribbean expatriates, Osibisa spearheaded ‘afro rock’, a style sweetly marrying American psychedelic rock, jazz, and West African afrobeat and highlife (in fact the name Osibisa comes from the Fante word for highlife). Always exciting, their tunes are heavy on the horns, woodwind, and percussion, and generous with organ and spitty guitar solos. tickets
___The 2nd Annual Ween Night @ George Tavern £7.5 allspells - Geners and Deaners, our now annual pilgrimage to the George Tavern’s Ween Night approaches! Three bands will grace the stage: All Girls Arson Club, Doom Club and the return of perhaps the UK’s only Ween tribute band, Big Jilm. Pindrop guarantees that Ween night will leave you with elevated endorphin levels linked with “brown music”. tickets
07
___Divine Noise All-Dayer @ New River Studios £10 Big Richard Records - Bring a family pack of cotton buds because your ears will be bleeding by the end of the night. Headlined by Sly & The Family Drone who have been laying down glitchy, spasming no-jazz in the capital since 2010. Sax squeals, rupturing bass and blistering drums galore. The entire lineup is stacked nonetheless, with Rampressure’s droning noise, jawharp’s dense, unrelenting emoviolence, Omertà’s brash garage punk, the free-jazz cabaret of Liverpool’s Domestic Partners, giddy mathrock from Van Quan and (last but not least) Komo’s lofi slacker rock. tickets
___Graham Dunning’s Mechanical Techno @ IKLECTIK £10 Baba Yaga’s Hut - Since 2009, Graham Dunning has attempted to sculpt the rigid grooves of dance music from the clumsy world of machinery: often combining contact microphones, stacking records on modified turntables, and found objects. More of a modern take on aleatoric ‘chance’ music than hard techno pugnaciousness. tickets
11
___3D Jesus @ George Tavern £5 Buzzzcut - An unorthodox quartet of tenor saxophone, violin, guitar and drums, 3D Jesus don’t play often, but when they take the stage, they stir the cosmic pot with swelling, sonorous dynamics that twist you into spiritual ecstasies. We’re eagerly waiting a release. A must-see support comes from Kissing Gate, who blew our minds with their 2025 record Funny Dream – sweet chiming chamber-rock songs with cascading instrumental sections between their smart, touching lyrics. tickets
___Elias Rønnenfelt @ The Dome £23.85 FORM - The frontman of the Danish group Iceage has been having a strong stint on his own as of late, becoming one of the key figures of the blossoming Copenhagen scene. Having recently released a record with London musician/ producer Dean Blunt, there's both a touch of edge and endearment to Ronnenfelt’s work. tickets
12
___plantoid @ MOTH Club £13.6 Bad Vibrations - Grimsby-born, Brighton-bred – the members of art-punk band plantoid have known each other since they were young. Ultra slick, they seamlessly string together delicate jazz chord instrumentals with technical odd time-signatures and pounding prog bravado. Everything is held together and directed by the powerful vocals of frontwoman Chloe Spence, who, with occasional digital harmony freakery, propels every song. tickets
13
___Mitsubishi Suicide @ The Crypt, St Martin-in-the-Fields £30 Atomiser - Although there were fears that London’s dearest screamo band might be gone for good, with members focusing on side projects xmal, Most Things and 300SkullsAndCounting, the release of the 22-minute, 2-song EP For The Last Toll late in 2025 allowed fans to sleep easy. Clear from the runtime alone, Mitsubishi Suicide are moving in a darker direction, liberating their genius guitar work with expansive song structures. The second track, ‘Iris’ Darkened Garnet’ – Pindrop’s 4th favourite song of the year – is potentially their best yet. Of course, in classic Atomiser style, opening is the London Bulgarian Choir (because why not?), whose dissonant close harmonies will greatly complement Mitsubishi’s. tickets
14
___Silkarmour (in-the-round) @ Venue MOT £5 - Off the back of his new single ‘Bumper’, experimental musician Silkarmour brings his immersive performance of mixed electronic textures and neoclassical chords to an in-the-round setup with a three-piece band. His live shows are a unique setup of physical and digital instruments, reconstructing his songs from their first principles. Support comes from unconventional and expressive electronic musician Nik Colk Void and the exciting and dancy electropop artist MM99. tickets
___A Fundraiser For Project Seagrass @ Sebright Arms £11.33 SEXMAGIC - Raise money for seagrass, yes – seagrass – you heard us correctly. Even if you don’t take kindly to marine flora, this is a seriously heavy lineup, with some of Pindrop’s favourite groups playing: Shoplifting 1080p, Stef Kett, Sevy Verna, Lifeloose, My Theatre Friend, Doom Club and more. Core blimey. tickets
18
___Cities Aviv @ ICA £24.21 - Tennessee alternative rapper and producer Cities Aviv started out as a hardcore punk vocalist, but became a cult figure in the 2010’s cloud rap era with his washed-out, noisy, and sample-heavy hip-hop. Seriously slow and lysergic, bass always blown all the way out. tickets
19
___RIP Magic @ Ormside Projects £20.3 FORM - Developing out of the London duo Glows (Marco Pini – aka ggskips of Sorry and visual artist Felix Bayley-Higgins) with the addition of musicians (and photographers) Beth Boswell-Knight and Pedro Takahashi, RIP Magic have been making a racket as of late. Rich in texture, synth stabs, and punching bass, the group give fresh inflections to electronica. With their recent single '5words being produced by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame, they don’t seem to show any signs of slowing down. tickets
21
___ladylike @ George Tavern £11.33 DHP - Brighton outfit ladylike are characterised by a warm blend of postr-ock and folk. Intricate guitar lines scattered over soft vocals. Joining them are one of Pindrop’s favourite instrumental band Long Distance Runner, with their take on ambient post-rock that's filled with tension and release. tickets
23
___Tony Bontana @ Windmill Brixton £7 - With the UK music scene becoming more decentralised from London, illustrated by the serious buzz surrounding Manchester and Leeds right now, it’s surprising that so few musicians are coming up through the country's 'second city' – Birmingham. Tony Bontana is the outlier, a rapper proud to represent Brum with his hazy productions reminiscent of glittering vaporwave, blending messages both personal and political. tickets
26
___Bludud @ The Ivy House £13.39 Bozoreductions - Bristol newcomers Bludud have only played a handful of gigs, yet they’ve already been picked to support Naima Bock and Copenhagen’s Fine. Although their pace is slow and methodical, leaving you listen to every dying sustain, there are moments of fast brilliance that climb into crisp, beautiful chords. Although ‘slowcore’ as a tag is peaking at most buzzwordy right now, Bludud's delicate but intentional take on the genre will see them outlive its inevitable fall from the musical trend cycle. tickets
28
___Earth to Earth: Artists supporting Gaza and Sudan @ EartH Theatre £25.75 Warchild & Bathtime Sounds - An all-star lineup of the London scene in a great venue, for a great cause! The vocal harmony-dense art rock of Ugly, sweet grungy pop from Mary in the Junkyard, thoughtful songwriting from Skydaddy, and the internet-irony post-punk of Blue Bendy. With Black Country, New Road DJing too, this is possibly many a Londoner’s wet dream. tickets
by JR
It’s a tradition for London dance venue Sadler’s Wells to put on a Pina Bausch production on Valentine’s Day, and for good reason: Bausch is preoccupied with the meaty, difficult parts of love, those terrible subconscious fixations and traumas that provide plenty of fertile ground for examination. For the uninitiated, Pina Bausch was a major forerunner of the neoexpressionist dance movement, ultimately founding a dance company in Wuppertal, Germany. Bausch is particularly known for deeply emotional and raw performances, integrating dance and theatre into often surreal and striking compositions. Sweet Mambo was one of Bausch’s last works before her death in 2009, yet it retains the same thematic preoccupations as the rest of her work, deeply interrogating the connection between gender, intimacy, power, and violence in a way that is still fresh and fascinating.
While this is a ballet clearly concerned with wider abstract ideas of form and extension–the sort of stuff beginners and reactionaries tend to hate while aficionados obsess–there is something deeply captivating about the spectacle of it all. Being a novice doesn’t hinder the experience at all: if nothing else, it allows the entire performance to wash over the self in a solid, spectacular block of sensation. Curtains billow and fold; dresses are pulled, teased, and tangled. The dancers themselves ebb and flow together, dynamically traversing the stage to an eclectic soundscape of jazz, ambient, and folk music. In a simulated party scene, glamorous women swirl around the stage with ballgowns and champagne flutes. Yet even within the spectacle, there is a place for smaller-scale humour borne of everyday social preoccupations. Breaking through the soiree, a woman in a black ballgown struts forward, asking the audience if they’ve ever felt confused or out of place at a party. She dispenses the advice to mutter the word “brush” as it will “lift the corners of your mouth ever so slightly” before blending backwards into the wider spectacle of the party. The advice is absurd, and yet the absurdity of it does make your mouth curl up into a smile. It’s this situational humour that Bausch excels at producing: a sort of Looney Tunes of the adult social world.
Sweet Mambo effectively digs into the core of female objectification, excavating the often paradoxical nature of these experiences. The women in the production are gifted beautiful dresses and are named characters, while the three men in the cast are nameless and clad in all black. And yet, this beauty and spectacle come at a cost: the male characters constantly pester, impede, subvert, and even violate these beautiful women as they move across the stage. At the beginning of the second act, the three men sit behind white curtains, enabling the women to use them as chairs. Despite this chivalry, it’s the men who hold all the cards, orchestrating and shuffling around the furniture as they please. There’s an implicit link produced in the relationship between beauty and attention, one conversely associated with agency. While this chivalry obviously comes at some cost to the male characters (surely being sat or having to lift heavy items is somewhat difficult), it ultimately renders the power available to the women within this world into a slippery thing–women become dependent on their ability to pin together a spectacle which ultimately unfolds beyond their control. At the risk of imposing contemporary internet politics onto such an impactful piece of art, it raises the question of how increased objectification of all genders in the digital age might impact our own agency as we might try to adjust the furniture behind the scenes.
Bausch operates in an alien sort of dreamscape, one which captivates as much through a sense of mystery as through a sense of oddball glamour. ‘Dreamlike’ is certainly a dominant descriptor of the performance, both for its absurdist quality and in the openness the whole thing holds to being mined for symbolic interpretation. In one striking scene, someone screams the name “Julie” from beyond the edge of the stage. A woman in a long green ballgown (presumably Julie) continually sprints toward the corner, only to be pushed backwards by two men. This is repeated several times; over the course of these repetitions, a casual visual gag metamorphoses into something terrible and Sisyphean as Julie’s agony reaches a fever pitch. Finally, she breaks free, but at a moment too late to finally catch up to that disembodied voice. The question of meaning is a difficult one: are these nameless men symbolic of a wider patriarchal power structure? Is Julie a representative of the elusive nature of our own desires in a contemporary world of false capitalist desire? Regardless of the myriad interpretations attributable to the performance, it’s a striking and almost horrifying watch, even though there’s no explicit reference to any kind of violence or oppression at all.
The relationship between gender and power often occupies a symbolic stalemate, but deep in the second act, implied violence becomes overtly stated. Two women discuss being catcalled by a man in a hotel, asking one of them, “Why don’t you want to talk to me?” The recounting of this trauma will be familiar to virtually every woman reading this review, and yet seeing it played back in pantomime is simultaneously cathartic and horrifying. This catharsis is inverted as one of the dancers sees a man walking across the stage: she hands him her hair and demands he drag her along, screaming, “Why don’t you want to talk to me!” The mirror here is an obvious reenactment of oppressive trauma, a symbolic statement about the way violence tends to percolate into later intimacy in terrible and often inexplicable ways: we want things we paradoxically don’t really desire because experiences out of our structural control have warped the grooves of our minds in ways we cannot articulate. This is what Bausch excels at, untangling these deeply subconscious afterimages of violence into something so emotionally potent it can’t be encoded in language at all.
by MGB
Before the release of 2025's caroline 2, the idea of London slowcore folk band caroline playing the iconic Camden venue KOKO would have seemed unusual. Even on the evening of the gig, it felt unclear how their iconoclastic music would translate to a sold-out room more accustomed to movement and DJ sets. Still, when the band walks on stage, and the packed audience erupts into applause, it’s immediately clear they’ve reached a milestone: this will be their biggest show yet.
The set opens in darkness with the booming sound of a bass clarinet. The sound system is instantly pushed to its limit, saturated with an extremely subby distortion as lead singer Jasper Llewellyn approaches an amp at centre stage with a mic’d-up snare drum, feeding back on its own sympathetic resonance. The wall of noise slowly collapses into silence. From there begins the sparse but intricate ‘Song two’, and the stage darkness breaks into blinding light.
The gap between this performance and their already stunning headline show at Islington Assembly Hall, shortly after caroline 2’s release, is quickly noticeable. It was inevitable that the band’s dynamic improvisation would evolve over time, especially as these live sets now exist far from the environment in which the album was created. The songs feel more seamless and confident, no longer attempting to recreate studio moments but performances with their own identities. Structural and sonic crescendos are cleanly realised by all eight members, while still reinforcing the idea that caroline is more than the sum of its parts.
‘U R UR ONLY ACHING’ ends with an instantly iconic image: bassist Freddy Wordsworth and guitarist Mike O’Malley resting their heads on each other’s shoulders while playing a touching, extended outro. Violinists Magdalena McLean and Oliver Hamilton add a slowly intensifying drone before the song cuts abruptly into ‘Dark blue’, a fan favourite from their self-titled debut. Despite the stark sonic differences between the two albums, the older material fits effortlessly into the set. ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ is transformed into a loud, almost post-hardcore track, a striking reinvention of its original sombre delivery.
Although their music often feels cryptic, as if there’s an underlying narrative just out of reach, Llewellyn occasionally offers brief prefaces to songs. Across different performances, he seems to share different fragments of the band’s history, particularly stories from recording sessions. These moments feel like pieces of a larger saga, deepening the audience’s connection and highlighting how some of the most original music to emerge from London this century came into being. The band’s intrinsically creative compositions give way to an experimental setup on stage. In ‘Coldplay cover’, which on record consists of two songs played simultaneously in different rooms with a roaming microphone, the band splits across both sides of the stage while one member walks between them with a mic. These moments capture what makes caroline so compelling live: a constant urge to push the boundaries of performance.
By the end of the set, the crowd is visibly giddy. It’s clear the band have saved their most grand statement for last: ‘Total euphoria’. They stretch the build-up to the iconic bass drop, before the bass clarinet unleashes one of the loudest sounds ever heard in the venue. As the band crashes back in, the lights flash like a disco, and both band and crowd erupt in celebration. What follows truly feels like the song’s title made real, as if the clock has just struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. When the final notes fade, the audience gives caroline a roaring applause, recognising what is unmistakably their most successful show to date.
SE
___The Fall by Beat Happening (US, 1985)
___Numerology by My New Band Believe (UK, 2026)
___Dress Rehearsal Rag by Leonard Cohen (Canada, 1971)
JK
___Dream Baby Dream by Suicide (US, 1979)
___Preto Velho by Bebeto (Brazil, 1981)
___Ride by Turnspit (UK, 2025)
JR
___MacArthur Park Suite by Donna Summer (US, 1979)
___Ballet Flat$ On The Ga$ Pedal by Cowgirl Clue (US, 2025)
___Arrows by Vampire Weekend (US, 2008)
MGB
___You Were Right by Built To Spill (US, 1999)
___Thousand Cuts by gegenpress (UK, 2026)
___The Open Sea by by Lowercase (US, 1999)
Pindrop is JR, SE, GKA, EM, JK, MGB, MLT, & PM
Contact us at @pindropzine (instagram) and pindropzine@gmail.com (email)