In My Ears #8 – Ethel Cain, For Those I Love & Dirty Three

Plus: Show Me The Body? A bandstand? In the middle of London?

Heading down to Southwark Park after work yesterday, I was greeted by classic London scenes: families playing rounders, tennis courts packed to capacity, couples cycling in tandem along winding paths.

But further in, the park’s distant bandstand stood out – draped in flags, flanked by guitar cabs, and encircled by a crowd exhaling plumes of weed smoke and vape aerosol. I’d come to see NYC hardcore trio Show Me The Body play a fairly impromptu set, organised by grassroots war-reporting outfit Popular Front.

Meeting deep cuts reader Sean in the crowd, we both chuckled at the spontaneity of the situation. For all London’s cultural richness, many gigs happen at venues plastered in corporate advertising, where tickets are a minimum of £30 and a pint costs £8. The idea of bringing a community together in a public space – for free – felt genuinely novel, and more than a little punk.

Frontman and banjoist Julian Cashwan Pratt jumped on stage to open with a ripping cover of the Beastie Boys hit ‘Sabotage’, a smart choice that instantly whipped the crowd into a frenzy. It landed so well, they played it again before the set was over.

The rest of the performance was just as fierce. Pratt’s banjo – ran through a respectable slab of distortion – sounded nothing like a banjo should, while Harlan Steed’s Rickenbacker churned out a nasty, rumbling bass tone on tracks like ‘Food from Plate’.

Watching from the grass, I was reminded of Fugazi’s outdoor shows in the ’90s. Ian MacKaye and co. made their music as accessible as possible, playing wherever they could set up a temporary stage and plug in. There was a trace of that same spirit here.

Or at least there would have been, if not for one small thing.

For the entire set, Pratt was surrounded by several camera operators darting around to capture crowd surfers and bodies colliding in the pit. At one point, Pratt even asked one to move, the lens practically blocking his view of the audience.

I get it. In today’s creative economy, you need ‘content’ to have a presence online. I’m sure the cameras belonged the media-savvy team of Popular Front (and potentially Kerrang! magazine, unsure), documenting this countercultural punk moment for their hundreds of thousands of followers.

But the constant filming added a layer of contrivance to the night, as if the gig itself was just raw footage for the real event, the video that will be watched on phone screens after the fact. I guess in 2025, nothing truly happens unless it’s on social media.

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For Those I Love – Carving The Stone (2025)

I mentioned in ‘In My Ears #3’ that David Balfe’s follow-up to his incredible 2022 record For Those I Love was my most anticipated of the year. It’s difficult approaching the successor to something you love so completely, because I’m not sure it can ever fully live up to the anticipation you’ve built. So it gives me great pleasure to write that while Carving the Stone might not be the out-and-out future classic of its predecessor, it is a rich and complex piece of work that continues to display Balfe’s exceptional talents. Moving on from the eulogy for his late best friend, he turns instead to exploring the push and pull of Dublin, the city where he grew up. What happens when halcyon memory faces the reality of the present? How has time twisted the street corners of your youth? Beyond that, he bemoans the insidious creep of nationalism, the boredom and frustration of modern living that has so many of us struggling from one pay cheque to the next. Balfe leads the listener through these thoughts and narratives with instrumentals that echo the focus of his debut, making full use of pounding drums and rave-y synth melodies.

Taste test:

🟢 ‘No Quiet’ – Balfe constructs a heartbreaking narrative of a woman struggling through a life defined by family tragedy and drama.

🟢 ‘This Is Not The Place I Belong’ – There aren’t many artists that could successfully pull off the lines “in bed with technofedualism / long past the dead old heads of brutalism”.

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Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (2025)