Frankie and the Witch Fingers at Daltons, Brighton 2025

You don’t get much more punk rock than a dive bar on the beach on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, with seagulls trying to steal chips and the tide going out.

Kitchen Lover

Making me exclaim “where the hell have YOU been?”, Brighton’s own trio seem to have both come out of a different country and a different century. With all the laid-back cool of an Aussie surfer gang and the vocal tone of Elvis covering Nirvana, KL are loud, groovy and so much fun. With song names like Birthday Suit and Black Hole Heart and a glittery silver fabric draped over the floor, their songwriting playfulness made them a perfect opener at Daltons. If you see them on a lineup, expect irreverence, men in shorts and the relentlessness of punk with the sauciness of rock.

Frankie and the Witch Fingers

One week away from the release of their 8^th studio album, Trash Classic (out now!), the Frankie quintet throw the squished crowd into a melting pot and let us boil on high for the rest of the night. Starting off slow and deliberately, with their experimental Dracula Drug, the moshpit barely contained in the tiny space, we were unleashed upon each other with the electric Electricide, the vortex of T.V. Baby, the jump-roof-high energy of Futurephobic, driven by Nick on drums, as their set combusted like so many gas leaks.

While their latest singles cover the whole gamut from the dark side of partying and life choices (Gutter Priestess) to the robot apocalypse (Total Reset, with its terrifying lyrics It’s essential you must pay / It is optimal that way / You’re the ones that programmed us / Now we’re going to blow you up) to the state of the world under its capitalist overlords (Economy), the music never slows down and never gives in. Its obsessive drive is a pep talk, a battle cry, it’s the image of hope spitting a broken tooth out and getting back up to fight.

The band are as in top form as they’ve ever been, tight as nails and funky to match. We get a taste of their ability to jam and handle uncertainty when Josh breaks a guitar string halfway through the set. Imagine restringing a guitar while your bandmates are playing increasingly fast, increasingly loud music around you. It feels like a boss fight.

They fool us into calm with the exquisite Reaper, off their album Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters… – it’s one of my favourite songs they’ve ever written, with Pickle playing a bass groove that could go on and on and on and on. But we’re thrown into the final songs with a giant “HEY EVERYBODY, HANDS IN THE AIR”, a guitar gunshot and Cops and Robbers running at full speed.

Have you ever been to Daltons? It’s tucked under the promenade, the elevated Brighton streets running above it. So the ceiling is low, so low that when Dylan jumps to crowdsurf to the end of Bonehead, he essentially has to spider crawl over the shiny mirror ceiling to not get completely squished. When he gets off and everyone (himself included) crashes into a pile at the foot of the stage, it’s both oddly poetic and strongly historical – the chaos an homage to punk and hardcore bands who’ve been speaking up against authority and the status quo since the dawn of amps, but also the physical representation of the natural elation of being hot, sweaty and happy in a tiny room full of crazy people, who’ll hug you and pick you off the floor and jump into you in the same breath.

Frankie and the Witch Fingers is music for our times – fast, caffeinated, cynical about the world while remaining unshakeably hopeful for it. 

You can read and listen to our interview with them HERE, where we talk about their new album, GenAI and how they filmed the music video for Economy.