Mleko at YES Basement

Two songs in, and Manchester’s MLEKO are already building a cult following.

“I tie myself to rocks and fill my pockets full of gravel”, Ed Whirledge begins on debut single ‘Gub Rock’, delivered with the deadpan expression of a shipping forecast. Beneath, guitars spindle around a brooding chord progression and threadbare drums – before crashing into the kind of apocalyptic doom-jazz that Maruja fans will rejoice in.

The follow-up ‘Tom’s Tune’, on the other hand, begins somewhere closer to pastoral neo-folk. But before long the finger-picked acoustic and pretty vocal lines are lured back into darker waters, complete with some great lyrics. “I wanna be a cowboy / I’m on that west-coast breeze / Give me that six-gun shooter / I want that quick release”, goes the climax, wearing its best sardonic grin.

The Manchester seven-piece describe their sound as ‘Gub Rock’, which, like all good invented genres, explains very little. But they seem to have made a home between beauty and abrasion, employing the old loud-quiet-loud trick to devastating effect.

The band started forming – or at least circling each other – in 2024, during a loose, exploratory ‘summer camp’ period, followed by early shows that were apparently closer to live experiments than polished performances. Around this time, they collected members like Pokémon cards. Trumpeter Charlotte Nuta saw the band at their second gig, booked them for their third, and joined for the fourth.

Newly signed to Heist or Hit, MLEKO have already begun to build momentum in the city and beyond, with early hometown shows selling out and more dates lining up. Their debut EP, The Feast Of St. Perpetua, arrives on 1 May, recorded at Low Four Studios by Samuel William Jones (Maruja, Robin Richards). We expect it’ll expand on the extremes hinted at so far, and we also expect it’ll shift all the tickets for the YES Basement show pretty quickly.