Guest In The Car – Herne Hill, Off The Cuff – 30/08/25

Beneath the damp arches of Herne Hill, tucked in a tat-littered room that smelled of old leather and incense, a crowd gathered. A friend of a friend tipped me off about Guest In The Car’s performance at Off The Cuff, and as I dodged the puddles and the blots of rain, I prepared myself by listening to their top song, ‘You Are What You Own’. Their released catalogue sounds like a revival of that early-2000s, emotion-driven rock, somewhere between the whimpers of Thom Yorke and the reverb of Snow Patrol. In a fit of arrogance, Alan McGee disparagingly labelled that genre as ‘bedwetter’s music’, as though some of Oasis’ best songs couldn’t be classified as for ‘blokey bedwetters’; Guest In The Car is the ultimate challenge to that conceit, proof that a band who are willing to be vulnerable through their music far outstrip whatever slander an attention-driven label head may sling their way.

Guest In The Car’s ethos is ‘intimacy with anthemic intensity’, and the band’s songwriting has a clear emotional intelligence weaved throughout their songs. Their performances of ‘Stick Around’ and ‘Paper Bag’ were energetic bouts of empathy, slices of life draped in thick chords and angst that endeared the audience and kept them moving. Lead singer Rob Vel’s vocal delivery is one of desperate honesty, an appeal for connection that drives the lyrical content far beyond contemplations and into reality. Just like Vel said about ‘You Are What You Own’, though the song may centre on an ‘ugly feeling’, he finds the ‘honesty of it all’ to be his favourite element of the track.

In the year since their first single, ‘Music For The Kids’, Guest In The Car’s sound seems to have evolved rapidly. The shoegazey Win Butlerisms of that first single have matured into a range of well-developed songs, the highlight being ‘Nicole’. With the band’s lead guitarist, Louis Pither, too ill for the gig, Vel played the song’s centrepiece riff on a keyboard, a motif that haunted the fuzz of the guitar like a distant alarm. Placed atop Harry Pemberton’s restless basslines and Claudine Schutte’s thumping drumbeats, it became a vision of what the band could be. That is the most exciting part about Guest In The Car: with evident passion and nous about what music should be, the band’s next few releases have every chance of being part of London’s most promising, most exciting output.

Pop your email below and never miss an article again!