Live review: Frame Works festival returns to the Northern Quarter

Since 2024, Frame Works has been taking over the Northern Quarter to open festival season with a day of bands at The Castle Hotel and Gullivers. Their first line-up featured local favourites such as Wehmut and Martial Arts, while 2025 saw performances from Bathing Suits, Cob, MLEKO and many more. This year’s line-up was no less impressive, bringing the best up-and-coming acts from every genre and style together for a celebration of the weird and wonderful sounds offered by Manchester and beyond.

Soft Skills opened the day at Gullivers, before folk collective GODOT brought their improvised performance style to The Castle Hotel. GODOT features a rotating cast of instrumentalists, but is built around songwriter Max Hutchinson, who also has a hand in organising Frame Works. Capsule followed with a taste of drone music, before Hopalong Gretzky, known to some as Oliver Duffy of YAANG, performed a stripped-back solo set at Gullivers. A dash across the road to The Castle Hotel saw Dura Mater bring their signature combination of jazz, rock and electronic influences, completed by Ben Preston’s choppy vocal style.

Back at Gullivers, The Lounge Society frontman Cam Davey displayed his expressive stage persona, performing songs that impressively go through an entire album’s worth of paces in the space of three minutes. The only song available outside of his live performances to feature on his setlist was the grungy ‘Morning Ending’, available as a demo via Bandcamp. Across seven more songs, his passion, talent and innovation became evident: ‘You’re Not Alone’, the penultimate track of his set, saw him run his guitar up and down an amp before playing it backwards, and throughout the set he was so caught up in the music that he forgot to introduce himself until just before ‘Healer’ closed the performance.

KiosK were next to appear at The Castle Hotel, providing a dose of dance-punk, dark-wave and electro-noise to a packed-out crowd. The three singles they have released thus far lean towards trip-hop, but their live performances see the duo at their most experimental. The most impressive aspect of KiosK is their lack of band members: Isabella Alcock balances vocals with synth, while Rory Malsen balances bass guitar with even more synth, and as a result it’s almost baffling that just two people can make sounds so abrasive.

Those familiar with Manchester’s music scene will undoubtedly be familiar with the name Holly Head, a band who have rightfully been unavoidable on the live circuit for the past few years. Their music has been described as agit-funk, a genre that combines danceable rhythms with the angular riffs and political consciousness of punk. This is an apt description, but witnessing a live performance from Holly Head proves that they have created a genre and a league of their own: drummer Oscar Wheatley brings percussion influenced by jungle, while frontman Joe Moss moves between mumbles and shouts, keeping the audience attentive. ‘No Gain’ was a perfect example of this, and by the end of their set closer ‘No Country is an Island’, members of the crowd could be seen leaving with bewildered faces.

slowhandclap followed at The Castle Hotel with a burst of harsh punk energy, before Oslo Twins, who are in reality a trio from Bristol, brought synth-driven dream-pop to a Gullivers crowd bathed in atmospheric red lighting. Black Fondu closed The Castle Hotel with a one-man show, which continued while Nightbus performed highlights from their debut album Passenger at Gullivers. The indie-electronic music Nightbus have been producing since their 2023 debut single ‘Way Past Three’ has clearly earned them a dedicated fanbase, as Rees was able to point out someone she’s seen “at every single gig”. When another crowd member shouted “I love you” at singer Olive Rees, she responded “I love me too, thank you”, displaying the kind of attitude which would be off-putting if she didn’t have the talent, and the popularity, to back it up.

Frame Works embodies all of the great things about Manchester’s music scene: independent venues, genre-bending diversity, and community spirit. With no clashes between The Castle Hotel and Gullivers throughout the day, the festival did entail eight hours of running back and forth across Oldham Street, but the discovery which lay within both venues made exhaustion more than worth it. Many festivals will claim to present you with the next big thing, but Frame Works is one of the rare few entitled to that claim.