Modern Nature at Rough Trade Liverpool

Modern Nature bring their shape-shifting blend of bucolic folk, free jazz and psych-tinged post-rock to Rough Trade Liverpool this October, in support of their forthcoming album The Heat Warps.

Since the end of his band Ultimate Painting in 2018, Blackpool-born Jack Cooper has led Modern Nature through a steady evolution – from open-ended studio collective to a tightly focused quartet. Alongside drummer Jim Wallis, bassist Jeff Tobias and now guitarist-vocalist Tara Cunningham, Cooper has steered the band from the abstract sprawl of No Fixed Point in Space towards something more structured and immediate. That shift defines the band’s current form – and the new material.

The Heat Warps hasn’t landed yet, but two early singles offer a compelling glimpse. ‘Pharaoh’ pairs motoric rhythms with interwoven dual guitars, nodding to Pharoah Sanders in its lyrical theme of resisting inherited authority. ‘Source’, written in the wake of the 2024 UK asylum-seeker riots, reflects on community, alienation and resilience. But despite its political weight, the song retains a strangely uplifting tone, reminiscent in spirit to the Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain’ or ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.

But it’s in the live setting that The Heat Warps feels poised to resonate deepest. Where earlier Modern Nature records drifted inwards – exploratory, impressionistic – this one reaches out. The new songs are built less for solitary immersion than for shared experience: music that invites you in and asks you to feel something together. It feels like a meaningful moment to catch the band – more focused, more grounded, and more attuned to the collective pulse than ever before.