Each year, BBC Radio 6 Music Festival is sure to provide an early highlight in Manchester’s musical calendar. Since 2023, our city has served as its permanent home, seeing performances from acts such as Christine and the Queens, Arlo Parks, Loyle Carner and The Smile over the years. Most recently, 2025 saw highlights in the form of Ezra Collective and Fat Dog, as well as the BBC Introducing night at YES featuring jasmine.4.t and Adult DVD. This time around, BBC Radio 6 Music Festival have abandoned their former residency at O2 Victoria Warehouse, in favour of supporting smaller venues such as YES and Band on the Wall, and it was evident from the opening night at the latter, that this choice had paid off.
SILVERWINGKILLER’s set opened with ‘S.W.K.’, a song that just about reaches ninety seconds and repeats the duo’s name as its sole lyric, thus providing the perfect intro music. ‘Nana’ saw the duo delve into techno, while ‘Happy Life’ ramped up the experimentalism. Following these two unreleased tracks, drummer James Baca left his kit behind to join the crowd for ‘Gunman Corner’. ‘PEOPLE’S SQUARE’ appeared to slow the set down momentarily, but without offering respite: the audience were faced with Yushang’s eerie vocals, before the most discordant combination of acoustic and electronic drums yet.
“Big up Manchester, big up 6 Music Festival”, Ni Yushang declared in a rare moment of pause, before the duo launched into ‘Shang Film’, ‘Lead The Way’ and ‘SHANGHAI EXPRESS’, all of which are also yet to be released. The latter was the closest SILVERWINGKILLER get to palatable, sounding closer to Björk’s hits than anything industrial. However, the duo does not exist to be palatable, instead choosing to push the boundaries of music itself, and ‘WEI’ therefore came as a return to form. The song seamlessly transitioned into ‘ROOF ON FIRE’, a track which has long been a highlight of SILVERWINGKILLER’s live performances, and is now a highlight of their debut EP TRIAD FUNDED. The infectious sample of Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three’s 1984 dance classic is enough to get the most static of audience members moving, and the same effect was demonstrated by ‘JING’AN TEMPLE’.
Credit: BBC Radio 6 Music
‘KID AFRICA’ built momentum and suspense before petering out and leading into ‘WORLDSTAR RELOADED’. The duo’s first single ‘HOLD UP (ALL FIREARMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM)’ followed, and it can only be described as explosive both live and on record. At this point, Yushang joined the crowd, instructing audience members to get down and jump back up on the song’s beat-drop. The track is framed as an “ironic gun positivity song”, and accordingly presents a full-frontal assault on the ears, harkening back to punk-inspired dance music á la The Prodigy while adding the signature SILVERWINGKILLER intensity which cannot be matched or recreated.
The most atmospheric piece yet, ‘YAKUZA MOON’, closed the set, but the decision to end on a relatively slow track for (at least, for SILVERWINGKILLER) avoided subduing what had come before. One of many impressive aspects of the duo is that both members manage to be endlessly captivating: Yushang bounds across the stage, moving between sprechgesang and sprechstimme, while Baca provides the most propellant percussion imaginable, arms flailing. The result is a wall of noise, harsh and abrasive in the best way possible, helping SILVERWINGKILLER make 45 minutes feel like less than ten. The duo raced through sixteen songs during the course of their support slot, providing short bursts of experimentalism and energy in equal measures.
After an hour-long wait that proved to be almost painful, the lights began to flicker and Mandy, Indiana took to the stage, beginning their set with the droning and driving instrumentation of ‘A Brighter Tomorrow’. Not yet introducing themselves, Mandy, Indiana seamlessly transitioned into the screeching sounds of ‘Drag [Crashed]’, with Scott Fair’s guitar mirroring the wailing of sirens. During this song’s refrain of “tu vas distraire les garçons”, or “you’ll distract the boys”, frontwoman Valentine Caulfield threw herself to the stage’s floor in an act of fury, displaying a rage which persisted throughout the set’s entirety. Much of Mandy, Indiana’s music catalogues and examines acts of misogyny and enforced inequality, with Caulfield singing almost exclusively in French. Somehow, the message behind every song transcends language barriers, remaining abundantly clear.
‘Dodecahedron’ functions as both a sonic assault and a call to arms, transforming marching instructions into a protest chant and posing the question (in French of course), “Do you want to be remembered as someone who stood watching as the world burnt?” This led Caulfield to comment “it’s a miracle we were invited actually”, before the band dipped into the industrial-techno-influenced ‘Injury Detail’ and ‘Pinking Shears’. ‘Life Hex’ followed with its onslaught of noise rock, and it was as this song played out and the clock struck ten that the crowd finally erupted, beginning with a small mosh pit and ending with Caulfield herself joining the crowd and offering embraces.
Credit: BBC Radio 6 Music
‘ist halt so’ sees Mandy, Indiana, a Manchester-based band whose lyrics are in French, use a colloquial German phrase used to justify the status quo as a title. Meaning “that’s just the way it is”, ‘ist halt so’ examines the unbothered mindset adopted by the masses which prevents political action from taking place. Musically, the song creates an atmosphere that feels inescapably claustrophobic, although its lyrics manage to make their way out of this by stating “they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds”. ‘Iron Maiden’ is nothing short of haunting, and its live performance saw Caulfield abandon her French lyrics in favour of incoherent wails and screams. The song wouldn’t sound out of place on an avant-garde horror film soundtrack: it’s truly chilling, but in a way that makes heads nod all the same.
The music of Mandy, Indiana is highly unpredictable. It’s impossible to tell which direction it will go in next, or even which direction Caulfield will go in next as she prances around the venue, spending the latter half of the set weaving between the crowd as if she were one of them herself. ‘Bottle Episode’ was perhaps the closest moment to normality during the set, but even this was abrasive enough. However, this was followed by ‘Magazine’, a song that is propulsive and may also be Mandy, Indiana at their most experimental: the song is driven forward by distortion placed upon every instrument, including Caulfield’s voice.
Caulfield made her way back to the stage by the end of the set, but not instantly onto it, pausing to perform a portion of ‘Alien 3’ at the barrier, moved between crowd and stage for the duration of the festival. “This is our last song, and therefore, I would like you to dance with me,” Caulfield encouraged before ‘Cursive’ closed the set, allowing Simon Catling and Alex Macdougall to shine on synth and drums respectively. As she departed the stage, Caulfield triumphantly proclaimed that she “didn’t swear on the radio”, an achievement aided by the absence of ‘I’ll Ask Her’, the band’s only English-language song featuring her vocals, from the show’s setlist.
Anyone who listens back to the broadcast of Mandy, Indiana’s performance on BBC Sounds will initially be greeted by presenter Matt Everitt discussing “feeling somewhat bludgeoned” after experiencing the set and its “chest-quakingly loud sub-bass”. It’s as good a description as any, as the music being played really could be felt on a visceral, bodily level. Everitt also described Mandy, Indiana as “an art project as well as a band”, a claim validated by their inherent defiance of genre as well as their truly mind-blowing musicianship. “There is hooks” in Mandy, Indiana songs, Everitt recognises, yet “some of them might be meat hooks and quite painful”.
On paper, Mandy, Indiana and SILVERWINGKILLER appear quite similar. They’re both Manchester-based, they both transcend genre, and they both operate using foreign languages. Both acts also have to be seen to be believed: there’s plenty of hype around them at the moment, but they can only be fully appreciated once witnessed in the flesh. Despite these differences, they remain truly singular artists, completely in their own lanes and refusing to play by anybody else’s rules. That, surely, is what attracts BBC Radio 6 Music to them both, and that is what will lead them both to great places. As Nick Grimshaw said on his breakfast show the morning after, “they were really quite something”.
Another thing Grimshaw said of Mandy, Indiana in particular was that they gave him “that post-gig high, closing my eyes and seeing and hearing Mandy, Indiana, plus a nice dose of tinnitus as well”. For all in attendance, this was a gig that will live in the mind, and also the ears, for a long time. BBC Radio 6 Music Festival thus saw a successful start to its 2026 edition, proving the station’s ability to discover the best new talent and bring them to the forefront. SILVERWINGKILLER and Mandy, Indiana both possess an originality and intensity that makes them captivating, and it will be a joy to watch them flourish in future.
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