Blood Red Shoes: Gorilla, Manchester – Live Review

Blood Red Shoes | Alice Costelloe
Gorilla, Manchester
28th October 2026

The Brighton punk stalwarts launch a new era in typically deafening fashion.

Two years ago, Blood Red Shoes played a handful of special shows to celebrate twenty years together as a band, allowing dedicated audiences in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin to choose the setlists themselves. In the current climate, it represented a genuine triumph for those most DIY of bands, who have spent two decades marching to the beat of their own drum, forging their own path and resolutely rejecting trends as their hook-driven, noisy sound has shapeshifted through expansive records (In Time to Voices, Get Tragic), laser-focused punk blasts (their 2014 self-titled LP) and experiments with electronics (their last album, 2022’s Ghosts on Tape).

After those shows in 2024, the question was what was next, particularly with Laura-Mary Carter fostering a burgeoning solo career with a much more countrified sound, and with Steven Ansell becoming increasingly prolific as a producer. Perhaps the twenty year mark would have been a good place to stop, except that Blood Red Shoes have only ever really had one setting: forwards. Their seventh album, Stay Lonely, was released in September and is a triumph, sometimes stripping things back to their melodic bare bones (lead single Screams is a case in point) and sometimes developing the brooding atmosphere that defined the previous album; Get Back Into Myself and Useless Sentiment are good examples that make the setlist tonight, after a superb opening set by former Big Deal member Alice Costelloe, who plays the kind of evocative, experimental indie pop that you’d expect to hear from the stage at Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse.

Blood Red Shoes, meanwhile, have always been upstarts, always railed against convention. You wonder whether the title of the album is a reference to the fact that they’ve never quite fit into any scene; too poppy for the punks in their native Brighton, too punky for the indie rock establishment. This epic European tour that they’ve been on for over a month, though, suggests that they have carved out devoted audiences everywhere they go, and the career-spanning nature of tonight’s set gives you a sense of why. All the bases are covered here; raucous, party-starting riffery (An Animal, Je me perds), moody, atmospheric electronic inflexions (Morbid Fascination, Eye to Eye), and huge, anthemic roar-alongs that the crowd are only too happy to get involved with (Light It Up, I Wish I Was Someone Better).

In recent years, the band have often toured as a four-piece live although have largely eschewed that this time around, with their backliner, Dan Rumsey of fellow Brighton rockers The Wytches, occasionally joining them on bass. There is a magic to how much sound that Carter and Ansell are capable of generating between them with just a guitar and drums, particularly on the outstanding likes of This Is Not for You and God Complex, two of their best and most dramatic songs that conjure up a whole world of atmosphere in the vocal interplay between the pair. There’s a particular achievement from their first twenty years together that is on full display tonight, and that they can take pride in; they make rock music for people to dance to, as evidenced by the response to the likes of Red River and their signature song, It’s Getting Boring by the Sea. On tonight’s basis, they have another twenty years left in them.

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Blood Red Shoes can be found at theirFacebook|Instagram|website

Words byJoe Goggins: find him on Xhere

Photos by Kristy Eighteen –Instagram