If you’ve so much as engaged with the UK Indie scene in the last year, the name Keo might have felt inescapable. Since forming in 2022, the London-based band have gained a reputation and popularity from pulling together the inventive edginess of US low rock bands such as Morphine and the vocal-focused balladry of UK band Wunderhorse. It’s a reputation earned partially through the alluring sincerity of frontman Finn Keogh, who makes the band’s music become an invitation to enter his personal life, and his guttural vocals which sound far more finely aged than his youth would suggest.
Despite a slot on the main stage at Reading and Leeds this year, Keogh is 22, and still growing up. His band’s debut album, Put A Smile On For Me, sees Keo navigating life’s new contours and fleshing out their grunge-inspired sound, all whilst remaining within the confines of a traditional rock group. They provide a paradoxically refreshing break from experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake, offering their relatively young fanbase a taste of what came before them without nostalgia being the point.
Keogh’s love of music is rooted in a childhood spent touring with his father’s traditional Irish folk project. Irish trad culture centres around liveliness, expression and community, valuing the people at its heart rather than musical precision. It’s also one of the many influences that converge within Keo to form their own musical identity, and Keogh notes that “it was more of a spirit and showmanship that I picked up from that, my dad really taught me what the phrase ‘the show must go on’ means”. He doesn’t think that the melodies characteristic of Irish trad music can be found in Keo songs, although “they’re probably engrained in me somewhere, I just can’t specify where that is”.
Keo’s identity as a band is founded on the identities of its members: after all, their name is a shortened version of Finn and his brother Conor’s surname. This identity is present in everything they do, and everything they release is thus entrenched in honesty and experience. The brothers grew up, for the most part, in Portugal, but it was a relocation to London that ushered in the start of Keo. After a period circulating the city’s open-mic circuit, the brothers expanded from their sibling bond by bringing guitarist Jimmy Lanwern and drummer Oli Spackman into the fold, finalising Keo’s line-up.
Major labels are knocking now, but Keo’s rise was about playing as many shows as possible. To celebrate the release of ‘That’s Me’, the lead single from Put A Smile On For Me, Keo played a free show at The Elephant’s Head in Camden. They performed eight songs, before returning for a single-song encore of ‘Thorns’ played acoustically from an upstairs window to the street below. “We were very aware that the centre of the universe isn’t London, and it isn’t the only place we should be letting fans experience these special shows”, Keogh notes, despite recognising its importance to his career.
“Manchester has always been a really special place for us to play, so it felt like the right thing to do to show up there for the second single. We’ve played YES Basement three times or something, sometimes to only fifty people. Some of the first ever people that bought a Keo t-shirt were in Manchester”. With just a few hours’ notice, over 400 people turned up to Projekts Skatepark to be involved in the making of the ‘Pistol’ video. “We were on the tour bus that weekend and it has these blackout windows, so you can look out and no one can look in”, Keogh recalls. “I remember going up to the top of the bus and looking out at this huge line of fans, it gave me such a feeling of adrenaline and excitement”.
Four months prior to their appearance at Projekts Skatepark, Keo performed a headline show at O2 Ritz, which Keogh notes as their “group favourite gig.” They played ‘Stolen Cars’: “in the last section the drums start building, and I remember the whole crowd singing lyrics back to me, and the venue itself being so beautiful”, Keogh says. They return to headline Neighbourhood Festival next month, and at that point they’ll have a debut album out, so plenty more standout moments can be expected.
The songs on Put A Smile On For Me are characterised by Keogh’s unflinching lyricism, which provides them with a perceptible sense of vulnerability. As Sonic Youth member Kim Gordon once said, recounting advice given to her by Neil Young, “it doesn’t matter how good your voice is… It’s about how authentic it sounds”. Whether he notices it himself or not, this is something mirrored in Keogh’s style of singing: its roughness couples with the band’s raw instrumentation to enunciate the raw vitality contained within their songs.
“I think there’s a sweet spot for mature songwriting which isn’t overly honest”, Keogh says. “It leaves something to be discovered, rather than spelling everything out for the listener. I will say that on this record, I did go quite far down the rabbit hole of honesty, particularly on ‘Loser’. I’ve noticed it makes people feel uncomfortable listening to it, and it can make me feel uncomfortable watching people listen to it. But I’m not scared of it”.
On ‘Loser’, Keogh scrutinises himself and the world around him (“there’s no one up above me that’s gonna show me what to do, I’m on my own”) and reflects on his profession by confessing “I’ve let all my made-up stories take a toll on everyone I know”. The introspection is heightened by the song’s muddy emotional core, its heaviness. ‘Loser’ is anchored by a grinding guitar line, which builds throughout alongside the themes of self-loathing and professional crisis, as if Keogh and his guitar are warring. As the track ends with droning feedback, it remains unclear who wins.
The vulnerability of ‘Loser’, and the record as a whole, was facilitated by Keogh’s decision to self-produce alongside guitarist Jimmy Lanwern. “The album couldn’t be more us if we tried”, he attests. “It’s full of our flaws, but it’s also full of our strongest moments as individuals. You are hearing a very honest representation of us as people and musicians. The reason we didn’t want to go with a separate producer is because then it naturally would become someone else’s vision as well, and we didn’t want to dilute the identity of our debut record”.
“one thing I realised in the process of making the record as a whole was that there is no perfect version, that doesn’t exist”
The band’s recording process was also, in Keogh’s words, more DIY than the approach they took for their debut EP. “It sounds like it should be the other way around, and we definitely learned some lessons because we hadn’t made a record together yet. The experience as a whole was less forgiving because there wasn’t anyone to fall on when things didn’t go right. It was a lot harder actually, more reliant on trial and error”.
This approach seems to have paid off, though, as Keogh notes the opportunity to re-record previous material they weren’t entirely happy with the first time around. ‘Thorn’ is included on their debut EP and on Put A Smile On For Me: Keogh has never really loved the EP version. “It never felt like we’d captured any sort of magic,” he says. “That’s one of my more honest songs in all senses, but I didn’t think the recorded version on the EP had the right emotion to it, it didn’t really match that honesty. We wanted to do it again because we think it’s a song that deserves the time taken to get it right. That being said, one thing I realised in the process of making the record as a whole was that there is no perfect version, that doesn’t exist”. The band have spoken in the past about avoiding perfection, and Put A Smile On For Me proves that they’d rather chase rawness, even if the result is unpolished.
