KAWALA – Leeds, Project House – 12/02/25

Leeds is a city at war with itself, its cultural underbelly being buried by a skyline of LED-lit spires and unfurnished office blocks. This became apparent on the long walk along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to reach Project House, the upgraded venue for KAWALA’s penultimate show of their UK tour. Students were hanging out of quayside windows to smoke, vacuum cleaners were being dragged up the stairs of newbuild behemoths, and fresh spray paint stung the underside of a canal bridge. The venue itself is a product of this tension, a collaboration between four of Leeds’ cultural institutions (Belgrave Music Hall, Brudenell Social Club, Super Friendz and Welcome Skate Store). Sat next to a British Premium Meats warehouse, it is everything one would expect from a trendy new venue: former industrial building; unpleasant logo; overpriced beers; minimalist interior that errs on blandness. It will take some time to properly blood it in, I thought, to bring some vitality and atmosphere to what felt like a patio extension.

Thankfully, the layout of Project House was such that I could happily stay at the back of the crowd, watching the show unfold with easy access to the lavs. The support act, Teenage Dads, tussled with the chunter of the crowd, injecting a necessary energy into the room. They appeared as silhouettes, backlit by blue, and rattled out an introductory double bill of ‘Weaponz’ and ‘Hey, Diego!’. After these pounding tracks, driven by snares and cowbells alike, the band soon came to their cover of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’; the crowd snapped out of their daze and belted out the Buggles classic. Finishing on ‘Speedracer’, reminiscent of an Angles-era Strokes track, the band provided a calmer, more melodic offering, making smoother the transition from Teenage Dad’s synthesizing fuzz to KAWALA’s saccharine harmonies.

Now, I have never been particularly well-acquainted with KAWALA’s discography. Other than ‘Ticket To Ride’, which I heard most days after school on the FIFA 21 soundtrack, I had only gotten to grips with their discography in the few weeks preceding this show. I’m not a massive fan of this style of music, with its melodramatic fingerpicking, over-clean production and strange vocal intonations, like a warbling Sea Girls or an analogue Glass Animals. However (and I cannot put enough emphasis on that word), I was ready to go into this gig with an open mind and willing ears: bands tend to sound more nuanced and spontaneous in a live setting; while this tends to leave me disappointed when I listen to a support act after a show, I was hoping it would have the opposite effect with KAWALA.

The band opened immediately with the optimistic ‘Never Really Here For Long’, before picking up the tempo with ‘Time Slipping Away’, a driven and danceable track from their final release, KAWALA Collection. They rattled through their catalogue of three-minute ditties, bouncing from slower tracks, like the ruminative ‘Animals’ and the laidback ‘Old Me’, to a more energetic selection, such as the impassioned ‘Searching’ and the party-starting ‘Make A Difference’, the live version of which felt like a sonic amalgamation of their usual style with a more frenetic 2000s indie sound, as though they were covering a song from Costello Music.

The snappy length of these tracks afforded the band more time between songs to become familiar with the audience. Guitarist Daniel McCarthy took charge of audience interaction, inciting a chant of ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds’ after explaining how KAWALA first came together at the local university. Later, he explained that something bizarre always happened when the band played ‘Mighty River’, an intimate performance between himself and lead singer Jim Higson. Some audiences clapped a slow clap; some, in a spurt of mass ingenuity, clapped at double time to put them off; other times, it involved a baby crying throughout the song or a fan bleating in the silent aftermath of the performance. In the true spirit of the imaginative North, the Leeds crowd decided to ululate ‘Yorkshire, Yorkshire, Yorkshire’ like a chorus of primitive frogs. Someone also threw a packet of nondescript biscuits mid-chant; that was far more interesting than one particular woman, who kept shouting ‘Ticket To Ride!’ between every song, her obnoxious and childish insistence thankfully ignored by the band.

Ultimately, it was hard not to enjoy the show. Sometimes, the vocals seemed to be obfuscated by the rest of the mix, but the instrumentals were tight and expressive enough to make up for this shortcoming, helped by none other than Bombay Bicycle Club’s drummer, Suren de Saram. The band gave the event a heavy emotional weight, intermittently reminding the crowd of their imminent end as a band to a volley of what they called ‘positive booing’. It gave every song, regardless of if they were to one’s taste, a poignancy that was apparent in the fervour of the crowd – this would likely be the last time that they would hear their favourite songs live. In tears, the band and crew were introduced before exiting the stage.

As an encore, KAWALA played their two biggest songs: ‘Do It Like You Do’ and ‘Ticket To Ride’. Every word was echoed by the madding crowd, a loyal fanbase that has followed them to the end. Whatever these musicians decide to do next, once the burnout and disillusionment have passed, it is hard to argue against this homecoming show as a fitting culmination to their decade as a band.

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