Live Review: Lambrini Girls - O2 Forum Kentish Town, London 19/11/2025
With the biggest moshpit Kentish Town’s ever seen, Lambrini Girls set the Forum alight, proving why they’re one of the brightest sparks in British punk rock.
Sauntering into the hallowed Kentish Town Forum, a certain energy crackled in the air, bouncing between eager concertgoers and dissipating into the shadowy darkness of the then-empty stage. It’s a venue that’s no stranger to alternative acts, rowdy crowds and punkish political messaging, having hosted everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Billy Bragg, Prince, Bowie and Björk over the years. Just the week before Lambrini Girls graced the North London venue, Bob Vylan headlined the Forum following cancelled performances in Manchester and Leeds.The stage was set for energy, dynamism and lyrical furor once more in NW5, as Lambrini Girls embarked upon their biggest tour ever.
The audience were first treated to two rambunctious entrees courtesy of the night’s two supporting acts. Gracing the stage first was the Brighton-formed electro-punk trio CLT DRIP, morphing angular guitar riffs into harsh, grating electronica. Combined with the expressive tones of their Toronto-born vocalist Annie Dorrett, whose delivery was sometimes operatic, and other times accelerating to a frenetic pace, the band’s set came to a close with a series of spine-tingling screams that faded into the warbling droning of their guitar-turned-synth.
Next, Irish four-piece Enola Gay emerged from the gloom. With a kick drum that reverberated your gut and frontman Fionn Reilly parading across the very front of the barrier, a bouncing pit began to form. Drenched in neon green lights, energy emanated from their longhaired, topless, tattooed drummer, and this energy was readily absorbed by the crowd. A chaos of pushing, shoving and jumping sparked below as the Belfast noisemakers found their element. Continuing the trend of using guitars not as intended, after a few songs guitarist Joe McVeigh’s stratocaster became simply a vessel: crouching over his pedalboard, turning knobs he created massive sweeping phasers and swells of dissonance. Fionn’s rapid-fire Zach de la Rocha style hip-hop vocals were balanced with a certain haunting quality to his voice, and the result was an industrial, gritty sound that left the audience wanting more by the end of their half-hour set.
As nine o’clock rolled into nine thirty, the crowd were primed and ready. Singer-guitarist Phoebe Lunny and bassist Selin Macieira Boşgelmez strutted onstage, launching into the first distorted bass notes of ‘Bad Apple’, whilst drummer Misha Phillips heralded the song’s introduction with a high-octane drum part that wouldn’t have been out of place in jungle or DnB. The first track of many from Lambrini Girls’ critically acclaimed debut album Who Let The Dogs Out, which peaked at number 16 in the UK albums charts in January, Phoebe wasted no time in parting the crowd in two like a punk rock Moses. As chaos erupted in the avenue, the whole room joined in with the police-critical anthem, shouting “Officer, what seems to be the problem? Or can we only know post-mortem”. Written in the wake of Sarah Everard’s kidnapping, rape and murder at the hands of a metropolitan police officer in 2021, the track holds nothing back with its damning verdict: “Not just bad apples, it’s the whole rotten tree”.
Onstage the trio were electric, coming together in a meaningful reunion to thrash their instruments from one blitzkrieg song into another. Selin stepped back from touring in September to prioritise their mental health, an all-too-necessary reminder that constant touring places heavy, often unsustainable burdens on the humans behind the music we love, particularly for artists living with long-term disabilities or health conditions. Back together again, they next launched into the furious ‘Company Culture’ after regaling the crowd and reminding all of the laws of the moshpit: “What do you do when someone falls over? Pick them back up!”. Garbed in a crimson trench coat, white shirt and tie, Phoebe drew on the corporate theme of the song, whilst Selin glided across stage in an ethereal white silk dress with matching heels. Below, sweaty figures looped and bounded, singing and chanting along with arms aloft and heads banging. Across their upcoming 21-show winter tour, there’ll be no shortage of similarly rowdy crowds, whether English, Scottish, Dutch, German, Swiss or French.
Before playing the Christian nationalist-baiting ‘God’s Country’, Lambrini Girls stated their political motivations, exclaiming “We sing songs about our shitty government who want to make the rich richer and the poor poorer”. Across their winter tour, the band has partnered with the charity Stand Up To Racism, whose powerful work reflected the convictions of Lambrini Girls’ lyrics that blared across the Forum that night.
“Racist uncles want their country back / Flag-shaggers, Maggie Thatcher”
“All hail God’s Country / Sorry bestie but it’s giving austerity”
“Keep calm and carry on whilst the state is corrupt”
Later in the night came the blistering ‘You’re Not From Around Here’, a standout track narrating the effects of austerity and gentrification on marginalised communities. Joined by the crowd for its hammering chorus, the song masterfully inverts the stock phrase of anti-immigrant rhetoric back upon the wealthy capitalists and land redevelopers who profit at the vulnerable’s expense, all over jagged electric guitar, distorted bass and colossal drums. Across the entire night, it must be said that Misha was nothing short of immense, whilst Selin safeguarded Lambrini Girls’ heartbeat with each fuzzy, crackling bass riff.
There’s a certain power to being a political band - it’s like balancing on a knife edge, and the spectacle of it all gripped the eager audience throughout. Phoebe directed this power at will, shaping the crowd into various formations: the aforementioned left and right crowds with its unruly central channel frequently reformed, but there was also larger circular moshpits, and even once a tornado-like maelstrom of swirling figures dancing concentrically, with a few lone megafans standing tall in the eye of the storm. This crowd participation peaked with Lambrini Girls’ performance of the unreleased ‘Craig David’, featuring chants of “When I say Craig, you say David!” that interchanged with “When I say Lambrini, you say girls!” and “When I say fuck, you say Fascism!”. Directing a path through the crowd and up the stairs to the balcony, Phoebe called for “the biggest moshpit Kentish Town’s ever seen” like some kind of ravepunk overseer looking down from above, and of course the crowd obeyed.
It’s a common misnomer that the aggressive shoutings of punk music reflect exclusively angry discontent. Reality is often a coin of two sides, and that night amongst Phoebe, Selin and Misha’s harsh delivery the resounding emotion was hope: hope for a better future, and hope built from the assurance that our voices were stronger together than as individuals. “All we have are eachother” Phoebe quips at one point, and from within that sweaty crowd we could be truly free. Lambrini Girls have been consistently vocal advocates for trans rights and Palestinian liberation, and across their set chants of “free, free Palestine” intermingled with advocacy for our trans siblings. In a powerful monologue, drummer Misha Phillips affirmed “trans kids deserve better” on the eve of the international Transgender Day of Remembrance.
A good friend - himself a big Lambrini Girls fan - had told me to expect hilarity from the Brighton duo’s live show. In a punk gig where tracks traversed a range of knotty themes, including sexual assault and abuse in the music industry on ‘Boys In The Band’, and the impact of with neurodivergence on ‘Special Different’, Lambrini Girls also created hilarious moments of ridicule and humour, from entering the crowd to pick out a few “queer legends” to shout out ahead of ‘Help Me I’m Gay’, to pouring Lambrini straight from the bottle into the mouths of those at the barriers. “So you wanna do something really stupid?” teases Phoebe, before constructing her very own human pyramid from within the crowd, taking a dive and surfing back to the stage to play ‘Mr Lovebomb’, a song about toxic relationships framed by the dry humour of the song’s title. Their expert ability to deconstruct dense themes into piercing, humorous tracks was at its peak as ‘Filthy Rich Nepo Babies’ derided gross inequality, and later ‘No Homo’ explored a witty exchange of cloaked gayness in the lyrics “I like your face but not in a gay way… No Homo!”, paired with a Joe Strummer-style classic punk guitar riff.
The night’s end came in the synth-blaring ‘Cuntology 101’, which champions a reorientation of norms using scattergun profanity that would make even the most liberal American squirm.
“Setting boundaries is cunty; respecting others is cunty too”
“C! U! N! T! I’m gonna do what’s best for me, that’s cunty!”
“Doing a poo at your friend's house? Cunty!”
The only track from that night completely devoid of a guitar part, a pulsing electronic buzz accompanied the Lambrini Girls’ last dance. Throwing the bounding pit into a final state of rapture, suddenly the track came to an abrupt end, and Phoebe contemplated “nah, I wanna do the [Peaches] remix”. Reloading the tune, granulated saw waves whirred and onto the stage wandered Peaches herself, garbed in a matching silver chrome blazer and trousers. Blitzing through the gloriously inflammatory song, the queer feminist icon joined Phoebe and Selin stomping around stage at will, microphones swinging around like lassos, and the crowd lapped up every last line of the dance track, chanting along “C! U! N! T!”.
Subsequently leaving the stage, chants of “One more song” had merely begun when back came Misha, Phoebe and Selin to the sound of John Cena’s legendary theme song ‘The Time Is Now’. Their final final song was ‘Big Dick Energy’, another masterful fusion of punk fury, hilarious lyrics (“I’m one of the nice guys so why won’t you have sex with me”) and underlying social commentary, here reflecting on women’s safety (“I’m clutching into my keys as soon as it hits 10:30”). For one last crowdwork masterpiece, Phoebe commands all that are able to crouch down ahead of the final chorus. Literally bringing the crowd to a kneel, when we all rise together it was in triumph, the end of an evening we’ll all remember for a long time.
Words by Taran Will
Photography by Stefania Mohottigt
