Searows @ KOKO, 10th April 2026
“We’re going to play a rocker,” he says, 5 songs in. “I don’t have many of those.”
The band then launches into Dearly Missed, and it’s the best bit of the night, six minutes of grinding guitars and shuddering basslines.
I hadn’t heard of Searows (is it meant to be a play on ‘zeroes’? Not sure, only thought of that last night) until recently, when Spotify suggested the new album Death In The Business Of Whaling, and shortly after that when I felt like I should have more gigs in my life I found the KOKO listing.
And so here I was, at a gig for an artist I didn’t really know much about, with a pint of Meantime and an open mind. There’s something fun about these nights, coming into a band with no favourites you’re hoping to hear and no expectations of how they’ll sound.
Dearly Missed is an outlier. Searows is mostly drone-folk, heavy with reverb and melancholy. There’s lyrics in there somewhere, but they’re fuzzy despite being at the front of the mix, like you’re listening to a depressed Cocteau Twin. Bass and drums give you a sense the muscle is there, it’s just not often used. Accents of banjo and harmonica keep things folk instead of shoegaze.
Live, the sound is more intense. The banjo and harmonica aren’t there, and the bass and drums pick up the slack. Between songs, Searows gives the impression between songs that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, having just suddenly found himself on stage holding a guitar and in front of a band and so he says “I guess I should… play a song then. Yeah.” And then he does, another wave of sound slowly rolling toward you.
It was the first time I’d been to KOKO, and the venue grew on me through the night. It’s an old theatre and starts frustrating, in a maze of balconies and corridors. But once you find the main floor the acoustics are good and there’s plenty of space around the bar, even on a sell-out night. It’s probably a good club venue, which I might care about if I ever went clubbing any more. Also only £8.20 for a pint of Meantime - a sentence which should have no place for the word ‘only’ and yet, for London gig prices, is pretty reasonable.
The lighting was also bang on, the stage intermittently cloaked in a dry-ice fog that left the band silhouettes, occasional sets of spotlights piercing and framing the stage, as if they were playing in the middle of a temple. It’s a good match for music that feels like it’s coming at you through fog.
The bass player, looking badass.
It felt almost weird coming out of the venue into a surprisingly-deserted Camden. There should have been an ocean and a lighthouse and a raven wheeling over a cliff. It was a gig where, Dearly Missed aside, I couldn’t remember much about individual songs, but it sure as hell had atmosphere.