A new series of DiY gigs upstairs at BottleCraft bar in Hanley

In September we bring you a sharp Sheffield package as the 'Mandemic' national tour comes to cause trouble in Stoke-On-Trent.

Dearthworms (Sheffield)

Dearthworms bring together Nick Potter (vocals/keyboards), Juni Rothwell (bass/vocals), Andy Ball (guitar/vocals), Finn (guitar) and Andy Sissons (drums), with the band growing out of the city’s fertile DIY scene and the creative hub Hatch. Members have been involved in a host of other Sheffield bands, including Blood Sport, Traint, Dead Badgers and Great Shame, and that collective experience feeds into Dearthworms’ wonderfully unpredictable sound: angular, experimental post-punk, jagged noise, off-kilter pop and psychedelic rock, with touchstones ranging from The Fall and Wire to This Heat, The Birthday Party and Cardiacs, while still sounding entirely their own. Their 2024 debut album Sapsucker was described by Louder Than War as “33 minutes of beautifully formed and immaculately destabilised sonic chaos”

Knorke (Sheffield)

Purveyors of gloriously wonky psychedelic post-punk, combining krautrock-inspired repetition with angular guitars, shifting time signatures, strange rhythms and a healthy disregard for conventional song structures. Formed around the creative community at Hatch, the band features Luke, Jack, Ben and Andy, with members also connected to other Sheffield outfits including Dearthworms and Turbo Diesel, and their sound occupies a wonderfully skewed space somewhere between the motorik experimentation of Can and Neu!, the twitchy art-rock of Devo, the psychedelic weirdness of The Soft Machine and the wonky post-punk tradition of The Fall — though they sound very much like Knorke rather than any of their influences. Their live sets have been described as “spiralling psychedelic post-punk”, with “twists and turns” and rhythms that seem to pull in every direction at once. In short: strange, funny, hypnotic and gloriously unpredictable — Sheffield DIY at its most inventive.

More tbc

£7.50 adv or £10 on the door.