WYSE: Eagle Inn, Salford – Live Review

Wyse
Eagle Inn, Salford
7th June, 2026

WYSE brings their ‘dream clash alternative rock’ to Salford’s Eagle Inn for the launch of new EP Revelations, drawing devoted fans from as far as Norway and Portsmouth for an intimate night of emotionally raw, melodically precise songwriting. With the Salford pub’s converted live room packed with loyalists who know every word, Thomas Sidwell heads along to find out whether this Manchester-via-Portsmouth multi-instrumentalist can translate years of building something into a record that breaks through.

Outside, Manchester was doing what Manchester does (early summer tropical thunderstorm). Inside the Eagle Inn, tucked behind Trinity Way like a secret the new-build apartment blocks haven’t managed to smother yet, something more intimate was happening. One of the city’s best-kept secrets for a decent gig, tucked behind Trinity Way and somehow still standing amid the surrounding monoliths of new development – WYSE were launching their new EP, Revelations.

The Eagle has been a home for this kind of night since Esther Maylor took it over back in 2012: the attached live room converted from a terraced house, craft ales at the central bar, a crowd that finds it because they were pointed in the right direction. Tonight that crowd included loyalists who’d travelled from Portsmouth, and fans who’d made the trip all the way from Norway. When an artist draws that kind of devotion to a pub in Salford on a Sunday night, you pay attention.

WYSE, Manchester-via-Portsmouth songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and self-described lovechild of Radiohead, Björk and the Cranberries, opened with Run Away, a song about chasing the wrong people to avoid yourself, and the tone was set immediately: literate, melodic, emotionally precise. A word for the band, too. Bjorn on bass and Kurt on drums were immaculate throughout, locked in tight, providing the kind of foundation that makes everything else feel inevitable. Dom on guitar, meanwhile, added texture and colour across the set with the easy confidence of someone who was clearly having the time of their life up there, at one point leading the room through what can only be described as the world’s most complex clapping participation exercise, to the crowd’s equal parts confusion and delight.

The full band gave the material a fullness it needed, the dream clash alternative-rock tag WYSE has coined for their sound earning its keep throughout, soft and atmospheric one moment, enormous the next, the transitions arriving without much warning and hitting harder for it. Forget You bristled with the energy of a confrontation you’ve been rehearsing for years. Holding On, about the grief of a family that won’t meet you where you are, landed with the kind of quiet devastation that doesn’t need volume to make itself felt.

Drown, written in lockdown, and Hologram, WYSE’s origin song, written at 17, the one that they say kicked off their whole sound, both suggested an artist who has been building toward something for a long time. Steady Like The Sun, the EP’s orchestral centrepiece, arrived as a reminder of just how high the ceiling is. The track explores the early terror of love, the exhilarating, frightening possibility of something lasting, and it builds accordingly, arriving at a climax that earned every second of its scope. WYSE played every guitar solo on this EP themselves, having spent years handing that duty to a bandmate after someone told them early on that people who look like them look strange playing electric guitar. On Revelations, they scrapped that entirely. It showed.

The peak of the night was Wedding Day, an unreleased song performed solo, WYSE stepping down into the crowd. The song is about grief: the specific ache of a family member who won’t be there, not because they’re gone, but because the relationship is. WYSE stood in a circle of fans who knew every word, many of them visibly moved, and the room contracted into something close to a ceremony. It was a beautifully spontaneous moment. It just happens when the right song meets the right room.

There were lighter moments too. Not That Sorry, written about a boss WYSE eventually got fired over, played with a cathartic glee that felt earned. This included a full crowd participation pan solo, where three of the crowd played along gleefully bonging pots and pans with WYSE, giving the song a funky jangle. Rhythm She Knows, written about partner Hanna when WYSE was 17, when they first met, carried something almost unbearably tender given the context.

The evening closed with Don’t Come Back for Me, about rediscovering yourself after losing the thread entirely, and it felt like the right note to end on: not a resolution, exactly, but a reclamation. Revelations is WYSE’s most unguarded record. The sessions they’ve spoken about, coming back from burnout, leaving a family that couldn’t accept them, beginning something new and terrifying, are present in every track without being announced.

“It’s not always this big amazing movie moment,” they’ve said of life in a previous interview. “Sometimes it’s just really fucking messy.” Tonight, that mess was rendered with remarkable grace, in a pub off a building site, for people who came a very long way to hear it.

Revelations is out now. WYSE plays London on 12 June.

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Words by Thomas Sidwell, more work on his author profile here

Photos by Thomas Sidwell. You can find Thomas at his Instagram here